In June 2023, software engineers from Anaconda have reported a security issue in the uninstallers that are included in the Windows versions of the miniforge and mambaforge installers, one of the main ways to bootstrap conda-forge based conda and mamba distributions.
In early January 2023, CircleCI informed us that they had a large
security breach
where a third party had gained access to all the environment secrets
stored in the service. For conda-forge, these secrets are the API
token used to upload built packages to our staging area on
anaconda.org and the unique token we generate for each feedstock. The
feedstock tokens are used as part of our artifact staging process to
ensure that only the maintainers of a given feedstock can upload
packages built by that feedstock. Later in January, we were informed by
CircleCI that their security breach started on December 19, 2022, with
the bulk of the secrets being exfiltrated in plain text from their
servers a few days later. A malicious third-party with access to these
secrets could potentially upload compromised versions of any package on
conda-forge in a so-called "supply chain" attack.
On September 9, 2021 one of our core devs discovered that artifacts building on Travis CI were being uploaded to our conda channel from PRs running on forked repositories. A quick investigation revealed that Travis CI was passing encrypted secrets to PR builds on forks. Further examination of our logs and artifacts indicated that this had been happening since about September 3, 2021. This security bug was subsequently confirmed by Travis CI. See this CVE for more details on this incident. As far as we know, there were no actual exploits against conda-forge which used this vulnerability.