Advisories should not reference themselves

[Marcono1234]

Currently, advisories often reference themselves (references array in JSON):

• database advisory references itself, e.g. GHSA-r23g-3qw4-gfh2
• database advisory references repository advisory (with same GHSA ID), e.g. GHSA-xr7p-8q82-878q
  Or are the actually cases where database advisory and repository advisory (both with the same GHSA ID) can differ in content? That would be quite confusing then.

These references are redundant and can be rather confusing because you expect references to provide additional information (and you might not immediately notice that the GHSA IDs are the same).
It is also not consistent, some advisories reference themselves while others don't.

[KateCatlin]

Hi @Marcono1234,

Thanks so much for reaching out about this. It seems you found a relic of a quirk of our system from several years ago. We no longer add links in references to the same advisory.

That said, we do add links to the repository-level advisory, e.g. GHSA-xr7p-8q82-878q. They can actually differ in content. The GitHub Security Lab Curation team reviews each and every advisory that makes it into the "reviewed" category on our system, and they'll sometimes add additional details or fix the spelling of a package name, etc. We don't want to force those changes on anyone's repository, so we let them update as they see fit.

I'm going to spin up an internal issue for us to programmatically remove any self-referencing links from the database as a result of this conversation, and we'll update you when that's done!

Cheers,

Kate