Yes, the attack assumes a content injection bug in GitHub.com. The attack is not using our own gravatar URL generation against us; it is the attacker crafting an arbitrary URL and using that URL inside of an arbitrary image tag. The reason for the attacker being "forced" to use a gravatar URL is that it was one of the very few third-party hosts we previously allowed by our CSP policy. So, the attack demonstrates how this previously allowed host could be used to exfiltrate sensitive content if/when an attacker found a way to inject arbitrary HTML into a page on GitHub.com.

They weren't getting the latter, they specifically went in there looking to mitigate what a theoretical content injection attack could do.

> In a relatively unique project, we asked Cure53 to assess what an attacker could do, assuming a content injection bug in GitHub.com