GitHub introduced two new secret scanning push protection features that will enable individual developers to protect all their pushes and organizations to gain insights and trends across their repositories.
Since its initial release for free public repositories earlier this year, over one-third of public repositories are leveraging secret scanning push protection to send alerts if you attempt to commit code that contains secrets. By fixing potential leaks before they occur, teams can reduce the risk of a security incident and save countless hours of remediation time and productivity loss.
Previously, push protection enablement was only possible at the repository level, leaving reliant on administrators to update the repository settings. Also, organizations were unable to quantify the total impact of push protection at a macro level. Until now.
“GitHub is enhancing push protection’s reach and data insights with two new features in public beta–push protection for users and push protection metrics for organizations. Now, one can ensure pushes are protected across the entire GitHub platform within personal account settings. And organization owners have access to insights and trends around preventing secret leaks.” said Zain Mallik, Senior Product Marketing Manager, GitHub and Courtney Caessens, Senior Product Marketing Manager, GitHub.
Push protection for users
Push protection for users allows one to take control of their code security by enabling push protection within their individual settings. No longer one has to worry whether the repository administrator has push protection enabled or not, but rather have the peace of mind that every line of code you commit is push protected. This is starting as an opt-in feature during beta, but soon it will be enabled by default for all GitHub Free users.
Push protection metrics
In addition to empowering the developers, GitHub is introducing push protection metrics for organizations. This feature allows organizations to measure the impact of push protection across their repositories through valuable data insights and trends, such as problematic secret types or repositories.
Organizations now have visibility into the number of total secrets intercepted by push protection, as well as the number of successful blocked secrets and the number of bypassed secrets. Push protection will also show what secrets are most commonly blocked and what repositories have the most push protection alerts. Finally, they’ll receive bypass insights–the most common reasons why bypasses occur as well as the most frequent secret types and repositories associated with bypassed push protection alerts.
How to get started
You can access these new features with a few clicks.
Push protection for users. Head to your personal GitHub settings by clicking on your avatar and then “Settings.” From there scroll down to “Security” and click to “Code security & analysis.” Under the “User” section, click “Enable” next to “Push protecting for yourself” to ensure that every line of code you commit will be safeguarded by push protection.
Push protection metrics. Organization owners and security managers can access push protection metrics within security overview. Within your organization view click on the “Security” tab. From there on the left hand side you can click “Secret scanning” under “Metrics.” Here, you can dive into the data around push protection and optimize your strategy around preventing secret leaks.
