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Secret scanning changes to how you opt in to notifications

We announced two weeks ago that we are changing how you receive notifications for secret scanning alerts. From today, those changes are in effect.

What action should I take?

If you are a repository administrator, organization owner, security manager, or user with read access to secret scanning alerts:

  • Watch your repositories of interest by choosing "All activity" or "Security alerts." This helps you choose what events GitHub will notify you about.
  • In your user notification settings, you must choose "Email" in the "Watching" section. This tells GitHub how to notify you. Secret scanning only supports email notifications at this time.

If you're a commit author:

As long as you are not ignoring the repository in your watch settings, commit authors always receive notifications for new secrets that are leaked. This means you receive a notification for any secret committed after an initial historical scan has run on the repository.

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Code scanning shows more accurate and relevant alerts on pull requests

Code scanning is now using a new way of analysing and displaying alerts on pull requests. The change ensures code scanning only shows accurate and relevant alerts for the pull request.

Previously, code scanning presented all alerts unique to the pull request branch, even if they were unrelated to the code changes the pull request introduced. Now, the tool reports only alerts inside the lines of code that the pull request has changed, which makes it easier to fix these contextualised alerts in a timely manner.

code scanning on the slide-out enablement panel on the security coverage page

The complete list of code scanning alerts on the pull request branch can be seen on the Security tab of the repository.

code scanning on the slide-out enablement panel on the security coverage page

In addition, code scanning will no longer show fixed alerts on pull requests. Instead, you can check whether an alert has been fixed by your pull request on the Security tab of the repository by using search filters: pr:111 tool:CodeQL. If you fix an alert in the initial commit in the pull request, it will not be present on the PR branch.

This has shipped to GitHub.com and will be available in GitHub Enterprise Server 3.10.

Learn more about viewing an alert on your pull request.

Learn more about GitHub Advanced Security.

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SSH Certificate requirement update

The "Require SSH certificates" policy now allows GitHub apps to call Git APIs using a user-to-server token, bringing them up to parity with OAuth app support.

The SSH certificate requirement mandates that users in your organization call Git APIs using an SSH certificate issued by your organization, in place of their own SSH key or a PAT.
To support automation, it has an exception in place for OAuth apps and GitHub app server-to-server tokens, which allows applications you've approved to call Git APIs for your organization.
With this change, we are extending that exception to GitHub app user-to-server tokens, for when a user has signed into a GitHub app that's installed in your organization.

Screenshot of the SSH Certificate requirement checkbox

This change also applies when the enterprise-level setting requires SSH certificates across all organizations in the enterprise.

To learn more, see "Managing your organization's SSH certificate authorities" or "Managing SSH certificate authorities for your enterprise".

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