Hi,
GitLab recently introduced a maximum lifetime for *all* access tokens. The change is discussed in a [blog post][1] from last October. Most importantly:
We first noticed this issue in [January][2] and have looked at mitigations, but ultimately, there's no good workaround short of "service accounts" which is some Open Core thing they are pushing onto us. There's some work upstream to make it easier to rotate tokens (which make the entire security measure moot in the first place, fun).
So anyways. Your things might break now. And when you recreate the tokens, they will still have an upper time limit (one year, IIRC), so you will need to fix this again and again.
I'm sorry. Further discussion in [2]. For now our approach is wait and see what gitlab.com is going to do, because this is breaking a *lot* of things in a lot of places, and I can't imagine they will just let the thing burn for that long. The actual recommended workaround from upstream now is to have a *pair* of tokens that renew each other but we have found that to be really impractical.
So for now, we're just trying to document the tokens we have and how to refresh them, as an immediate mitigation. I encourage you to pay attention to the "your token has expired" notification as well.
Good luck!
[1]: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2023/10/25/access-token-lifetime-limits/ [2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41510
At least one person asked "wait, does this affect me? what is this?", so let me clarify a bit.
If you don't know what a personal access token is, you are likely not affected and can disregard this.
If you're not sure, and everything is still working, you're likely not affected. A precaution might be to look at your projects continuous integration (CI) pipelines to see if they are still green, consider running scheduled pipelines manually to see if they break.
If you don't know what CI is, you're likely not affected.
If you want to audit your projects thoroughly, you can use an audit script I wrote:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/gitlab-tools/-/blob/33a00c1f37e3988ba6...
it will show you projects with private tokens (before they are expired AKA destroyed) and secret project variables that *might* be backed by tokens.
Example run for TPA:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41510#note_2997204
A.
Hi again,
So remember last May, we all had to jump to fix access tokens in GitLab because they suddenly started expiring?
No? Well, ignore this message this message then, whoohoo, lucky you.
Yes? Or you've forgotten about this and are thinking "oh shoot, is this still a thing OMG WILL EVERYTHING BREAK?"
Well, I got you covered. We just upgraded to the shiny new GitLab 17.4 and it has an option to disable maximum expiry dates for access tokens.
So I disabled enforced expiry dates on gitlab.torproject.org.
Note that you will most likely *still* have tokens expiring, and will very likely require my script below to figure out how to deal with this.
The next catastrophe for this is scheduled in May 2025, because that's when the tokens we fixed in May 2024 will expire.
But hopefully now you have a way to fix this issue forever.
See also:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41510
Have a good weekend!
a.
On 2024-05-29 12:09:02, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
tor-project@lists.torproject.org
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Antoine Beaupré