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LiteLLM says unrevoked master key led to PyPI supply-chain hijack
The Hacker News reports LiteLLM said a May 2026 Agent Platform master key leak, left unrevoked, let an attacker steal GitHub tokens and publish malicious LiteLLM 1.107.0 on Oct. 21.
- New headline Was: “Leaked LiteLLM Master Key Let Attackers Steal GitHub Tokens and Hijack Release Pipeline”
- Our desk filed its story
LiteLLM said Friday that a master key for its Agent Platform, accidentally committed to a public GitHub repository on May 27, 2026, was never revoked and was later used to steal GitHub tokens and publish a malicious version of the open-source Python LLM gateway, The Hacker News reported1.
Oliver Jensen and Mateo Wang of LiteLLM said a configuration file in LiteLLM-Labs/lite-harness contained the key to a deployment used to orchestrate agents, according to that account1. The commit was identified and force-pushed over, and the exposed keys were flagged for revocation, they said, but the master key was not revoked1.
The company said an unknown attacker, using IP address 69.48.229.143, used the still-valid key on Oct. 10, 2026, to reach the Agent Platform and extract a GitHub CLI OAuth token configured so self-hosted cloud agents could open pull requests1. LiteLLM said the token was not scoped down and belonged to the GitHub organization owner's account, giving owner-level access across the organization's repositories1.
Between 10:11 and 10:12 p.m. UTC on Oct. 10, the attacker committed to throwaway branches on BerriAI/litellm and BerriAI/litellm-auto to run workflows that harvested GitHub CLI OAuth tokens for two engineers with maintainer privileges, sending them to an attacker-controlled webhook.site endpoint, then deleted the runs minutes later, LiteLLM said1.
On Oct. 21 between 10:08 and 11:08 a.m. UTC, the attacker overrode branch protection and pointed the release pipeline at lookalike repository Berri-AI/litellm instead of BerriAI/litellm, the company said1. Version 1.107.0 was published to PyPI at 11:39-11:40 a.m. UTC, then Docker Hub and GHCR images, after which production and staging run records were deleted1.
LiteLLM said releases normally need an authorized engineer and approval from a special account locked to a physical office device1. That restriction had been relaxed to let any two engineers trigger and approve a release, and the attacker used the stolen tokens for both steps, the company said1. Maintainers said the attacker could have loosened the rule using the organization-owner token and likely did not, to avoid notice1.
Upwind researcher Lidor Machluf reported the supply-chain attack at 12:06 p.m. UTC Oct. 21; PyPI quarantined 1.107.0 at 1:23 p.m. UTC, and Docker Hub tags v1.107.0, latest, main-latest and main-stable were removed or repointed to clean images at 2:20 p.m. UTC, according to the timeline The Hacker News carried1.
Socket researcher Karlo Zanki said two malicious commits added.github/workflows/cache.yml on short-lived ci-tmp branches that were deleted within minutes1. A later Oct. 12 run collected additional secrets including Anthropic, OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Tavily and GitGuardian keys, Playwright storage state, and PostgreSQL and Redis credentials, Socket said1. Jensen said earlier internal assumptions about how GitHub CLI tokens were stolen were incomplete1.
Microsoft Security Research, as cited by The Hacker News, said files in 1.107.0 could run when Python starts even if LiteLLM was never imported, harvesting credentials and installing a Unix backdoor, with stolen data posted to litellm.dev/healthcheck1. LiteLLM said it is working to revoke tokens on internal systems and vendor platforms1.
