GHSA-8wc6-vgrq-x6cf

When Renovate spawns child processes, their access to environment variables is filtered to an allowlist, to prevent unauthorized access to privileged credentials that the Renovate process has access to. Since [42.68.1](https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/releases/tag/42.68.1) (2025-12-30), this filtering had been **inadvertently removed**, and so any child processes spawned from these versions will have had access to any environment variables that Renovate has access to. This could lead to [insider attackers](https://docs.renovatebot.com/security-and-permissions/#execution-of-code-insider-attack) and [outside attackers](https://docs.renovatebot.com/security-and-permissions/#execution-of-code-outsider-attack) being able to exflitrate secrets from the Renovate deployment. It is recommended to rotate (+ revoke) any credentials that Renovate has access to, in case any spawned child processes have attempted to exfiltrate any secrets. ## Impact Child processes spawned by Renovate (i.e. `npm install`, anything defined in [`postUpgradeTasks`](https://docs.renovatebot.com/configuration-options/#postupgradetasks) or [`postUpdateOptions`](https://docs.renovatebot.com/configuration-options/#postupdateoptions)) will have full access to the environment variables that the Renovate process has. This could lead to [insider attackers](https://docs.renovatebot.com/security-and-permissions/#execution-of-code-insider-attack) and [outside attackers](https://docs.renovatebot.com/security-and-permissions/#execution-of-code-outsider-attack) being able to exflitrate secrets from the Renovate deployment. ## Patches This is patched in [42.96.3](https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/releases/tag/42.96.3) and [43.4.4](https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/releases/tag/43.4.4). ## Workarounds There are no workarounds, other than upgrading your Renovate version. ## Why did this happen? As part of work towards https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/security/advisories/GHSA-pfq