Egress Policy Bypass via DNS over TCP in Harden-Runner (Community Tier)

Harden-Runner is a CI/CD security agent that works like an EDR for GitHub Actions runners. In versions 2.15.1 and below, the Harden-Runner that allows bypass of the egress-policy: block network restriction using DNS queries over TCP. Egress policies are enforced on GitHub runners by filtering outbound connections at the network layer. When egress-policy: block is enabled with a restrictive allowed-endpoints list (e.g., only github.com:443), all non-compliant traffic should be denied. However, DNS queries over TCP, commonly used for large responses or fallback from UDP, are not adequately restricted. Tools like dig can explicitly initiate TCP-based DNS queries (+tcp flag) without being blocked. This vulnerability requires the attacker to already have code execution capabilities within the GitHub Actions workflow. The issue has been fixed in version 2.16.0.