GH_HAS_ROLE

Summary

Forestall ACL Alias	GH_HAS_ROLE
Edge Type	Relationship
Affected Object Types	GitHub Organization Roles
Exploitation Certainty	N/A (structural)
GitHub Role / Permission	Direct organization-role assignment

Description

GH_HAS_ROLE is a structural relationship recording that a user or team has been directly assigned a GitHub organization role (GHOrgRole). Organization roles — both GitHub's predefined roles and an org's custom roles — are named bundles of fine-grained permissions.

This edge is the structural access layer for organization roles, mirroring GCP's GCP_HAS_ROLE: it connects the principal to the role node, while the role node connects to the organization via GH_PARENT. Together they answer "which principals hold which roles, and what does each role grant?".

The security-relevant capabilities a role confers are derived into attack-path edges (for example GH_MANAGE_ROLES when the role grants "manage custom organization roles"). GH_HAS_ROLE itself is the underlying assignment, not a traversable attack path.

Identification

GitHub Web Interface

1. Open the organization → Settings → Organization roles → Role assignments.

2. Each assignment shows the principal (user or team) and the role they hold.

GitHub CLI

List the users and teams assigned to a role:

gh api "orgs/{org}/organization-roles/{role_id}/users" --paginate --jq '.[].login'
gh api "orgs/{org}/organization-roles/{role_id}/teams" --paginate --jq '.[].slug'

Exploitation

Not applicable — this is a structural relationship. The capabilities a role grants are exploited through the derived attack-path edges built on top of it (e.g. GH_MANAGE_ROLES).

Mitigation

1. Assign roles sparingly and review them. Audit role assignments regularly, especially for roles that carry organization-administration permissions.

2. Prefer least-privilege roles. Assign the narrowest role that satisfies the need; avoid broad predefined roles (e.g. all-repository admin) where a scoped role suffices.

3. Manage assignments through an approved process rather than ad-hoc grants.

Detection

Event	Description
organization_role.user_add	A role was assigned to a user
organization_role.team_add	A role was assigned to a team
organization_role.user_remove / organization_role.team_remove	A role assignment was removed

Alert on assignments of privileged roles, especially outside an approved change process.

References

• https://docs.github.com/en/rest/orgs/organization-roles

• https://docs.github.com/en/organizations/managing-peoples-access-to-your-organization-with-roles/about-custom-organization-roles