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Bugs and new features aside, a project's longevity hinges not only on its usefulness but also on the trust it earns from its users. Strong security measures are important to keep this trust alive. Here are some important actions you can take to significantly improve your project’s security.
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Bugs and new features aside, a project’s longevity hinges not only on its usefulness but also on the trust it earns from its users. Strong security measures are important to keep this trust alive. Here are some important actions you can take to significantly improve your project’s security.
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To gain insights into the experiences of maintainers and their strategies for finding balance, we ran a workshop with 40 members of the <ahref="http://maintainers.github.com/">Maintainer Community</a>, allowing us to learn from their firsthand experiences with burnout in open source and the practices that have helped them maintain balance in their work. This is where the concept of personal ecology comes into play.
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## Ensure all privileged contributors have enabled Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
@@ -46,15 +46,15 @@ To prevent such incidents, “secret scanning” solutions exist to help you det
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### Dependencies in your project can have vulnerabilities that compromise the security of your project. Manually keeping dependencies up to date can be a time-consuming task.
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Picture this: a project built on the sturdy foundation of a widely-used library. The library later finds a big security problem, but the people who built the application using it don't know about it. Sensitive user data is left exposed when an attacker takes advantage of this weakness, swooping in to grab it. This is not a theoretical case. This is exactly what happened to Equifax in 2017: They failed to update their Apache Struts dependency after the notification that a severe vulnerability was detected. It was exploited, and the infamous Equifax breach affected 144 million users’ data.
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Picture this: a project built on the sturdy foundation of a widely-used library. The library later finds a big security problem, but the people who built the application using it don’t know about it. Sensitive user data is left exposed when an attacker takes advantage of this weakness, swooping in to grab it. This is not a theoretical case. This is exactly what happened to Equifax in 2017: They failed to update their Apache Struts dependency after the notification that a severe vulnerability was detected. It was exploited, and the infamous Equifax breach affected 144 million users’ data.
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To prevent such scenarios, Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools such as Dependabot and Renovate automatically check your dependencies for known vulnerabilities published in public databases such as the NVD or the GitHub Advisory Database, and then creates pull requests to update them to safe versions. Staying up-to-date with the latest safe dependency versions safeguards your project from potential risks.
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## Avoid unwanted changes with protected branches
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### Unrestricted access to your main branches can lead to accidental or malicious changes that may introduce vulnerabilities or disrupt the stability of your project.
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A new contributor gets write access to the main branch and accidentally pushes changes that have not been tested. A dire security flaw is then uncovered, courtesy of the latest changes. To prevent such issues, branch protection rules ensure that changes cannot be pushed or merged into important branches without first undergoing reviews and passing specified status checks. You're safer and better off with this extra measure in place, guaranteeing top-notch quality every time.
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A new contributor gets write access to the main branch and accidentally pushes changes that have not been tested. A dire security flaw is then uncovered, courtesy of the latest changes. To prevent such issues, branch protection rules ensure that changes cannot be pushed or merged into important branches without first undergoing reviews and passing specified status checks. You’re safer and better off with this extra measure in place, guaranteeing top-notch quality every time.
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## Set up an intake mechanism for vulnerability reporting
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### Security Policy
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To avoid this, publish a security policy. A security policy, defined in a `SECURITY.md` file, details the steps for reporting security concerns, creating a transparent process for coordinated disclosure, and establishing the project team's responsibilities for addressing reported issues. This security policy can be as simple as “Please don’t publish details in a public issue or PR, send us a private email at security@example.com”, but can also contain other details such as when they should expect to receive an answer from you. Anything that can help the effectiveness and the efficiency of the disclosure process.
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To avoid this, publish a security policy. A security policy, defined in a `SECURITY.md` file, details the steps for reporting security concerns, creating a transparent process for coordinated disclosure, and establishing the project team’s responsibilities for addressing reported issues. This security policy can be as simple as “Please don’t publish details in a public issue or PR, send us a private email at security@example.com”, but can also contain other details such as when they should expect to receive an answer from you. Anything that can help the effectiveness and the efficiency of the disclosure process.
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### Private Vulnerability Reporting
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On some platforms, you can streamline and strengthen your vulnerability management process, from intake to broadcast, with private issues. On GitLab, this can be done with private issues. On GitHub, this is called private vulnerability reporting (PVR). PVR enables maintainers to receive and address vulnerability reports, all within the GitHub platform. GitHub will automatically create a private fork to write the fixes, and a draft security advisory. All of this remains confidential until you decide to disclose the issues and release the fixes. To close the loop, security advisories will be published, and will inform and protect all your users through their SCA tool.
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