polkit is a system service installed by default on many Linux distributions. It’s used by systemd, so any Linux distribution that uses systemd also uses polkit. As a member of GitHub Security Lab, my job is to help improve the security of open source software by finding and reporting vulnerabilities. A few weeks ago, I found a privilege escalation vulnerability in polkit.

GitHub secret scanning has been securing our users’ code by scanning for and revoking secrets since 2015. Recently, we’ve focused on scanning for package registry credentials as well—a significant and important expansion on our original

GitHub has been at the forefront of security key adoption for many years. We were an early adopter of Universal 2nd Factor (“U2F”) and were also one of the first sites to transition to Webauthn.

Dependabot Preview has helped more than 30,000 organizations keep their packages updated with more than seven million pull requests merged since it launched. As a result of that success, the Dependabot team joined GitHub in

April 30, 2021 update: Thank you to everyone who’s weighed in on the discussion so far. I’ve commented in the pull request to clarify a few points based on initial feedback. Keep the comments coming.

GitHub Actions provide a powerful, extensible way to automate software development workflows. When access to outside resources is required, GitHub provides the ability to store encrypted secrets used by GitHub Actions to authenticate against these

We’re excited to share a deep dive into how our new authentication token formats are built and how these improvements are keeping your tokens more secure. As we continue to focus on the security of

GitHub Advanced Security helps you create secure applications with a community-driven, developer-first approach. Today, we are excited to announce two updates: Beta of the new security overview for organizations and teams, which provides a high-level

When it comes to security research, the path from bug to vulnerability to exploit can be a long one. Security researchers often end their research journey at the “Proof of Concept” (PoC) stage. A PoC

Earlier this month, we challenged you to a Call to Hacktion—a CTF (Capture the Flag) competition to put your GitHub Workflow security skills to the test. Participants were invited to find a vulnerability in a