GitHub Vulnerability Management: A Complete Guide

GitHub vulnerability management is discovering, triaging, and remediating security vulnerabilities in GitHub repositories, dependencies, and workflows.

GitHub is a cloud-based platform that software developers use to store and track their code and collaborate with others. It offers built-in security features, such as Dependabot, Secret Scanning, and Code Scanning, to protect your development pipelines. This helps you catch vulnerabilities early, fix them, and maintain user trust across every release.

In this article, we will discuss GitHub vulnerability management, built-in security features, how GitHub detects and reports vulnerabilities, how to manage and remediate risks in GitHub, GitHub Advanced Security, how to integrate third-party tools with GitHub, and best practices.

What is GitHub Vulnerability Management?

GitHub vulnerability management is a program that GitHub’s security team has built to identify and assess vulnerabilities in your systems and code and assist in remediation to safeguard the projects and data of 100+ million developers from cyber threats. The vulnerability management process in GitHub includes 5 important steps:

• Discovery: The security team uses advanced tools and processes to find vulnerabilities in your codebases, development workflows, configurations, etc., hosted on GitHub. The vulnerability detected becomes an “issue” and is recorded on the GitHub board.

• Triaging: This involves assessing the vulnerability to find its severity, creating a technical report, and engaging the code owner.

• Patch estimation: Here, the code owner comes up with a patch and estimates completion timelines based on the issue’s severity level.

• Remediation: Now, the code owner applies the patch while GitHub’s security team verifies it.

• Disclosure: Once the patch is accepted, the security team discloses the vulnerability to customers and users.

For the security team at GitHub, vulnerability management extends beyond simple patch management; it is an intelligent and agile process to examine possible threat exposures, predict exploitability, and understand the impact on your business. This also helps security leaders make informed decisions faster on mitigating threats.

Why is Vulnerability Management Important in GitHub Repositories?

GitHub has an extensive infrastructure of code repositories from millions of developers stored in multiple data centers and cloud providers globally. Along with this large volume of data to manage, GitHub also needs to evaluate the risk profiles of individual assets continuously and secure them.

Although GitHub has a diverse team of skilled security experts, managing the massive infrastructure comes with challenges, such as operational overheads and inconsistent user experience. To secure code repositories effectively, vulnerability management on GitHub has become necessary. It brings the following advantages:

• Automation: One of the primary goals for vulnerability management GitHub is agility. It aims to speed up the time it takes to understand a vulnerability, how likely it can be exploited, and what sort of impact it can have on your business. This helps you prepare patches on time before an attacker exploits the vulnerability. GitHub uses automated tools, such as SAST, DAST, vulnerability scanners, etc., to automate repeated steps to reduce operational overhead, delays, and human errors.

• Reducing exposure: By monitoring your code repositories continuously and performing vulnerability assessments, you can find security weaknesses in your codebases. This means you get the opportunity to collaborate and come up with the fix. This helps you secure your code and systems at every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) from cyber attackers and reduce exposure risk.

• Maintaining compliance: Security frameworks and standards require you to adhere to their requirements to protect customer data from threats. With GitHub vulnerability management, you can follow secure development practices and find and remediate vulnerabilities proactively. This reduces the likelihood of data breaches, threats, costly penalties, and fines, and improves compliance.

• Better user experience: GitHub’s security team uses GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) to improve code quality. It runs internal security programs, for instance, the Bug Bounty program, to hunt threats and expedite remediation. The platform also helps you take better remediation actions by providing better context on vulnerabilities and prioritizing them based on severity and business impact. As a result, you can secure your codebase and systems and provide a better customer experience.

Built-in GitHub Security Features for Vulnerability Detection

GitHub is a developer-first platform that focuses on security alongside scalability. It offers some amazing built-in security features to help you catch vulnerabilities in your codebase, workflow, and systems quickly. This way, you can resolve these weaknesses and secure your development workflow before moving to production. Here are some security features of GitHub for vulnerability detection:

• Code scanning: This feature lets you analyze a piece of code in a GitHub repository to detect errors and security vulnerabilities, triage them, and prioritize remediation efforts. It also ensures that new fixes do not create new vulnerabilities. The tool lets you schedule code scans for a particular time or day or trigger code scans when a particular event occurs. Once it detects a considerable vulnerability, GitHub will display the error in the form of an alert in the same repository.

• Dependabot: It is a powerful native security feature in GitHub that monitors your code dependencies for vulnerabilities and alerts you immediately when it finds one. It also updates your dependencies automatically and helps you mitigate vulnerabilities before an attacker exploits them.

• Bug Bounty program: GitHub’s Bug Bounty program rewards security researchers who hunt down security vulnerabilities in code repositories. The rewards vary from $617 to $30,000+ based on the severity of a vulnerability.

• Secret Scanning: This tool allows security teams to detect exposed secrets or credentials, such as API keys, passwords, private keys, etc. It automatically executes and alerts you on detecting secrets in public repositories. This way, you can secure secrets on time before a breach can happen.

• GitHub Advanced Security:  On private repositories, you can use GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) to scan your code commits and pushes to find security flaws. This helps you improve code quality and protect them from misuse.

• Vulnerability board: GitHub provides a security dashboard to help you visualize and track vulnerabilities across your codebases. You can view how many of them are opened per repo, the age of unpatched issues, compliance information about each repo, and the history of alerts. The board helps security leaders make informed remediation decisions and improve security posture.

• Security Advisory database: GitHub has a real-time database that you can refer to to keep up with new threats and vulnerabilities and neutralize them. It includes three categories: malware advisories, GitHub-reviewed advisories, and unreviewed advisories. It shows CVEs, the names of affected repositories, CVSS levels, and more.

How Does GitHub Detect and Report Vulnerabilities?

GitHub is a powerful security platform for managing vulnerabilities throughout the software development lifecycle. Your IT team can use its security features to scan your code repositories for vulnerabilities, risky dependencies, and exposed secrets. It also helps you fix issues and track security health over time. Let us break down GitHub’s vulnerability management process into four phases:

Finding Vulnerabilities

The first step in GitHub vulnerability management is detecting vulnerabilities in code repositories. You must find security risks in GitHub repositories before cybercriminals exploit them and launch attacks. This stage allows you to get complete visibility into security vulnerabilities and prioritize remediation actions.

To find vulnerabilities, GitHub’s security team uses automated SAST or DAST, manual testing, internal reports, customer reports, penetration testing, and Bug Bounty programs. GitHub’s team also scans your code, secrets, and dependencies continuously using some native tools:

• Dependabot: It checks your project’s dependency graph against GitHub’s Advisory Database. It flags vulnerable packages and suggests secure versions.

• Code scanning: GitHub uses third-party scanners or CodeQL to inspect your code to track insecure or suspicious coding patterns, such as SQL injections and unsafe function usage.

• Secret scanning: GitHub scans for accidentally exposed data, such as AWS keys, database passwords, etc. For public repositories, this feature is enabled by default, but for private repositories, you need to buy a plan.

When GitHub’s security teams find a vulnerability, they create an “issue” in the tracking board with the following properties:

• Clarifying title
• Short description of the issue
• Source of vulnerability, including penetration testing, Bug Bounty program, vulnerability scanning, internal responsible disclosure, customer notification, and CI/CD pipeline security checks
• Link to technical report or source of the vulnerability

Once the security team picks up the vulnerability, they move it to the triaging phase.

Triaging Vulnerabilities

The security team assesses the vulnerability thoroughly to validate whether the vulnerability is considerable or not. In this stage, they perform the following actions:

• Finding out how likely the vulnerability can be exploited
• Determining the impact of the vulnerability on your systems
• Assigning a severity score based on CVSS or impact
• Writing a technical report
• Communicating with the code owner

GitHub’s security team reviews the initial report of the issues and creates a technical write-up mentioning the type and cause of the issue within 3 days of receiving the initial report. When creating a technical report, security engineers first find out what attacks are possible by testing more scenarios. For example, they try to exploit a vulnerability with various access levels and deployment models to figure out which vulnerabilities pose a more serious risk.

If a serious vulnerability is found, the security team creates a technical write-up and tags the code owner so they can work on the patch. GitHub’s security team notifies the code owners in two ways:

• Add a comment to the technical report by tagging the team.
• Write a message in a Slack channel as a heads-up.

They also mention the SLA for the patch development based on the severity of the vulnerability and provide remediation suggestions.

Patch Estimation

Once the technical write-up reaches the code owner’s end, their engineering team starts working on the patch to resolve the vulnerability within the given SLA.

After the patch is ready, the code owner suggests it to GitHub and provides a complete estimation of the effort and timeline to complete the process within the SLA. The estimation also includes regression tests to confirm that the patch can resolve the issue and won’t introduce new security vulnerabilities.

Depending on the severity level of a vulnerability, code owners need to reply with an estimate:

• In 1 day, for critical risks
• In 3 days, for high risks
• In 10 days, for medium and low risks

This step helps security teams create a final report for tracking and communication. GitHub reports vulnerabilities via the following ways:

• Security alerts dashboard: This is useful for viewing all current and past vulnerabilities, their remediation status, and resolution trends.

• Security advisory database: It allows security teams to disclose vulnerabilities privately, assign CVEs, and publish detailed advisories once there is a fix.

• Audit Logs and REST APIs: They are required to enable advanced reporting and tracking of compliance-related Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

• Code scanning alerts: They send notifications on security issues detected by CodeQL to report inline on pull requests. They include the vulnerable line of code, a severity score, and recommendations to fix the issue.

Managing and Remediating Vulnerabilities in GitHub Workflows

To maintain the security and integrity of your software development lifecycle, it is essential to manage and remediate vulnerabilities in GitHub workflows. It involves fixing insecure workflow patterns, such as overly broad permissions and untrusted triggers, through secure configurations.

Let us understand how vulnerability management and remediation happen in GitHub.

Remediating Vulnerabilities

Remediating vulnerabilities is an essential step in a vulnerability management lifecycle to eliminate security weaknesses from GitHub repositories. After GitHub’s security team detects and triages vulnerabilities and sends the report to the code owner, the latter starts working on the fix. During patch development, GitHub’s security team will be available to offer necessary consultations to the engineers working on the fix.

The remediation timeline varies according to the severity levels:

• 3 days for critical
• 10 days for high
• 40 days for medium
• 100 days for low

Once the fix is ready, the code owner will propose the fix as a “patch” to GitHub’s security team. The security team then becomes the reviewer to verify the patch. They re-test the proof of concept on the security patches and confirm that the patch has resolved the issue and did not add a new vulnerability. If not, they will suggest updates. After the confirmation, engineers can merge the code.

Disclosing the Issue to Users and Customers

GitHub’s security team maintains transparency with users and customers by disclosing found vulnerabilities and patches. They disclose them through:

• GitHub Security Advisory in the repository with the issue
• Security Notifications mailing list
• CHANGELOG updates

GitHub publishes security advisories in the repository with the vulnerability, generally via Sourcegraph. The disclosure involves a description of the vulnerability, how you addressed it, affected versions, severity score, patched versions, etc.

If the code owner cannot meet the SLA or find the patch, it escalates to an exception that needs further discussion. Exceptions need approval from different management levels based on the severity.

GitHub Advanced Security: Features and Benefits

GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) is a premium capability that allows you to integrate security at each stage of your software development lifecycle. This native GitHub functionality integrates well with your developer workflow and lets you find and fix security issues before attackers exploit them.

GHAS helps you maintain and enhance code quality and comes with many features. Basic features, such as Dependabot alerts, dependency graphs, and secret and code scanning, are available in all plans. For advanced features, you need to buy at least one of these products: GitHub Secrets Protection or GitHub Code Security.

Features and benefits in GitHub Code Security:

• Code scanning: To find coding errors and security flaws in your code using a third-party scanner or CodeQL, GitHub’s semantic code analysis engine.

• CodeQL CLI: This command-line tool lets you analyze code, generate the results for code scans, and build and test custom queries.

• Dependency review: Before merging a specific pull request, you can review to find if there are any vulnerable versions and what impact the changes will bring to your dependencies.

• Copilot Autofix: It generates automatic fixes for vulnerabilities found via code scanning.

• Custom rules: You can customize auto-triage rules in Dependabot alerts. Automate which alert to trigger, snooze, or ignore.

• Security overview: View how cyber risks are distributed across your infrastructure to be able to make better security decisions.

Features and benefits in GitHub Secret Protection:

• Secret scanning: The tool detects secrets, such as passwords, stored in a repository and sends alerts.

• Copilot secret scanning: Use AI to reveal exposed secrets in a repository.

• Push protection: Block code commits that contain secrets to prevent leaks and breaches.

• Custom patterns: Monitor patterns and prevent secret leaks specific to an organization.

• Approval control: Get better governance and control with a stronger approval process, outlining who can execute sensitive actions. It includes delegated alert dismissals and delegated bypass for push protection.

• Security overview: Understand risks across your repositories and infrastructure with a detailed security overview.

Integrating Third-Party Tools with GitHub

Integrating third-party tools with GitHub workflows improves automation, security, and observability across your CI/CD pipeline. You can integrate these tools by using GitHub actions, claiming external APIs, and via secrets and tokens.

Below, we discuss some easy-to-understand steps of how to integrate third-party tools with GitHub.

• Choose the right tool: First, identify your project needs, such as improving security, automating testing, managing deployments, and monitoring performance. Once you have a clear idea, you can select a trusted third-party tool that aligns with your goal. Make sure the tool you choose has integration support for GitHub.

• Set up access credentials: Most third-party tools require secure access after integration, such as a token or an API key, to connect with the GitHub account. These credentials help the tool scan code, deploy builds, or send notifications. You can follow the tool’s instructions to generate and store these credentials securely.

• Connect the tool to your GitHub repository: Once you have the credentials, go to your GitHub repository settings or the third-party tool’s dashboard to link the two systems. Some third-party tools offer one-click integration, while others require you to authorize access to specific repositories manually. This starts communication between GitHub and the external service.

• Use GitHub secrets to store sensitive data: Go to your repository settings and add the API keys and other sensitive credentials under “Secrets”. These secrets can be accessed securely by GitHub Actions workflows when they run, securing your integration and helping you comply with security best practices.

• Define when and how the tool should run: You can decide when and how the third-party tool should behave in your GitHub workflow. Most tools give you flexible options to define when they take action so they fit naturally into the development and deployment cycles.

• Monitor, review, and optimize: After the integration is complete, monitor and review the results. Check the GitHub Actions tab or the third-party tool’s dashboard to make sure everything is working fine. View logs, scan results, alerts, and performance metrics to adjust your integration whenever you need to maintain a smooth workflow.

SentinelOne is an advanced cybersecurity platform that integrates with GitHub to help detect and remediate vulnerabilities, malware, and other malicious activities in the software development lifecycle. It offers real-time visibility into the repositories and CI/CD workflows so that your security team can monitor and track code changes, find misconfigurations, and automate threat response without disrupting development speed.

Best Practices for GitHub Vulnerability Management

GitHub is a reliable platform for storing, collaborating, and managing code. But it’s also highly targeted by cyberattackers. This is why you need to secure your codebases from vulnerabilities. Poor vulnerability management in GitHub can expose your organization to supply chain attacks, regulatory risks, and data breaches.

Whether you are managing open-source projects or enterprise-level repositories, these best practices help you implement strong GitHub vulnerability management in your organization.

• Turn on GitHub’s native tools, such as Dependabot alerts and updates, code scanning, and secret scanning,  to detect known vulnerabilities, leaked secrets, and security issues in code.
• Update third-party packages and libraries using Dependabot pull requests and GitHub’s dependency graph to reduce exposure to known vulnerabilities.
• Establish status checks, pull request reviews, and prevent force pushes or direct commits to main branches to maintain auditable code changes.
• Enable your team to automate all repeatable steps, avoid human delays, and reduce operational overhead and context switching.
• Use tools, such as git-secrets and pre-commit hooks, to prevent sensitive information from getting pushed to GitHub repositories.
• Track public repos and their forks to verify that the vulnerable code isn’t replicated or left exposed in open-source projects.
• Assign minimum required permissions to users and teams by enforcing the least privileged access controls.
• Connect GitHub to your vulnerability scanner and SIEM tool to simplify vulnerability detection, triage, and remediation.
• Promote a security-first culture in your organization with proper training on secure coding practices in GitHub, native security tools, and real-world vulnerability case studies.
• Review repository configurations, dependency risks, audit logs, and access controls regularly to detect misconfigurations or suspicious activity.

How SentinelOne Complements GitHub Vulnerability Management?

SentinelOne offers Singularity Vulnerability Management, an advanced platform to manage vulnerabilities in your GitHub repositories and CI/CD pipelines. The tool will help you monitor and secure your code, whether it’s in the development stage or has gone live. This lets you secure your workloads, endpoints, containers, and systems from active exploits.

SentinelOne maps vulnerabilities found in GitHub to real-time risks in production environments, prioritizes issues based on business impact and exploitability, and offers automated responses to remediate attacks. This helps you scale your innovation efforts while maintaining your security posture.

SentinelOne can detect up to 750+ different types of secrets; it can prevent cloud credentials leakages and feature Snyk integration. You can secure public and private GitHub, GitLab, and even bitBucket repos. SentinelOne can find dormant or inactive accounts and highlight them for audits. It can prevent unauthorized account takeovers, hijacking, and eliminate malicious processes running in networks. You can secure your single, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments with SentinelOne and remediate critical vulnerabilities with its 1-click remediation.

Get a demo to explore SentinelOne’s Singularity Vulnerability Management.

Conclusion

GitHub vulnerability management is a reliable way of scanning and triaging vulnerabilities and remediating them based on risk levels. GitHub’s security team finds the issues in your code repositories and notifies you so you can patch them before threat actors can find or exploit them. This secures your code and systems from cyber threats and maintains user trust.

GitHub allows you to integrate with third-party security tools to find and fix security vulnerabilities in your CI/CD pipelines. This helps you automate and speed up security workflows and reduce the likelihood of exploitation.

If you are looking for a reliable third-party solution for GitHub vulnerability management, SentinelOne is an excellent solution.