supply-chain

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We’re excited to announce that persistent commit signature verification is now generally available! This powerful feature ensures that commit signatures are verified once at the time of the push and remain permanently verified within their respective repository’s network.

With persistent commit signature verification, commit signatures retain their verified status even if signing keys are rotated, revoked, or contributors leave the organization. You can view verification timestamps by hovering over the Verified badge on GitHub or by accessing the verified_at field through the REST API.

A badge tooltip displaying the date when the signature was first verified.

This feature brings long-term reliability to your commit history, offering a consistent solution for managing commit signatures over time. New commits have had persistent records since the public preview launch. Existing commits progressively gain persistent records during their next verification, such as when viewing the Verified badge on GitHub or retrieving the commit via the REST API.

Learn more about commit signature verification and join the conversation in the GitHub Community.

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Artifact Attestations now supports attesting multiple subjects simultaneously. When the attest-build-provenance or attest-sbom actions create multiple attestations, a single attestation is created with references to each of the supplied subjects, rather than generating separate attestations for each artifact. This reduces the number of attestations that you need to create and manage. We published these changes as new versions of the respective actions. Please update your workflows to reference the new versions in order to leverage the new functionality.

Learn more about using Artifact Attestations to establish provenance for builds

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We’re excited to introduce persistent commit signature verification, a powerful new feature designed to elevate the security and reliability of your repository’s commit history.

Starting today, GitHub verifies commit signatures when they are first pushed, and once a commit’s signature is verified, it remains verified within its repository’s network. This supports organizations in maintaining a secure and accurate record of contributions without constantly rechecking the validity of every signature. You can view these persistent verifications directly on GitHub, where a quick hover over the Verified badge displays the timestamp of the original verification.

Efficient, Secure, and Transparent Verification

Previously, commit signatures were verified on demand, via a process that was not performant and had risks of previously verified signatures becoming “unverified” due to various reasons like service outages or key rotations.

Persistent commit signature verification solves these issues by validating signatures at the time of the commit and storing the verification details permanently. This also brings consistency to the commit history as git commits are immutable and they do not natively support key rotation.

Managing commit signatures can be a challenge, but persistent records ensures that verified commits remain verified over time, even if signing keys are rotated, revoked, or contributors leave the organization.

How to tell if the verification has a persistent record?

When a commit’s signature is verified upon being pushed to GitHub, the verification record is stored alongside the commit. This record is immutable, ensuring that the verified status is maintained permanently.

You can view the verification timestamp by hovering over the Verified badge on GitHub or via the GitHub REST API which now includes a verified_at field.

Learn more about commit signature verification on GitHub.

Designed for Real-World Key Rotation and Contributor Management

For organizations managing signature verification – whether GPG, SSH, or X.509 keys using S/MIME – persistent commit signature verification provides a robust way to ensure signature integrity across the board. Now, any commit with a verified status can retain that status, even when the signing key is rotated or removed.

Persistent commit signature verification is applied to new commits only. For commits pushed prior to this update, persistent records will be created upon the next verification, which happens when viewing a signed commit on GitHub anywhere the verified badge is displayed, or retrieving a signed commit via the REST API. This ensures that your repository remains secure while providing flexibility in managing your verification practices.

This approach lays the groundwork for future improvements aimed at enhancing repository integrity and authenticity of contributions within GitHub.

Key Management Caveat: Revocation and Expiration

Persistent commit signature verification ensures that verified commits retain their status indefinitely, it’s important to note this records the state of the signature at the time of the commit. If a signing key is later revoked, expired, or otherwise changed, GitHub will not re-verify previously signed commits or retroactively modify the verification status.

For organizations using S/MIME keys, this does introduce a minor change: revoked S/MIME keys will not verify new commits or those without an existing persistent record. Since git commits are immutable, persistent commit signature verification aligns with this concept by maintaining the original verification status without change. Organizations may need to manage key states directly to align with their security policies, especially in cases involving frequent key rotation or revocation.

This approach ensures that once a commit is verified, it remains trusted based on the record at the time, bringing consistency and long-term reliability to your commit history.

Moving Towards a Future with Secure and Authentic Contributions

With this launch, we’re addressing a key issue: commit verification that isn’t fragile or temporary. Teams can now implement signing key policies, without worrying about losing the verified status of past work.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to enhance commit verification. If you have feedback or suggestions, please let us know through our GitHub Discussions forum.

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GitHub security advisories now support the new CVSS 4.0 schema. CVSS, or the Common Vulnerability Scoring System, is an industry standard maintained by FIRST. The CVSS 4.0 standard adds new metrics for a more thorough assessment of the risk of a particular vulnerability.

When creating a repository security advisory, you can now calculate either a CVSS 4.0 or 3.1 base score and view this data on the published global advisory, related Dependabot alerts, and through the API.

Learn more about CVSS scores and GitHub security advisories and the GitHub Advisory Database.

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To create a comprehensive model of the dependencies in a Maven project, it is essential to understand the the transitive dependencies that are resolved at build-time. This feature automatically performs build-time resolution of Maven dependencies and submits them to the dependency graph. This improves visibility into your project’s composition by including both the direct and transitive dependencies in your repository’s dependency graph and Dependabot alerts.

When you enable this feature, GitHub will monitor changes to the pom.xml file in the root of all branches of the repository, discover the dependencies referenced in this file, and automatically submit details about them to the dependency graph. This feature requires GitHub Actions, and it is compatible with both GitHub-hosted or self-hosted runners.

See the documentation to learn more about how to enable automatic dependency submission to help you secure your software supply chain.

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To make it easier to submit security advisories, GitHub now validates package names.

When submitting a new GHSA (GitHub Security Advisory) in a repository, the user is prompted to enter the ecosystem (e.g. npm, maven) and package name (e.g. webpack, lodash). Now, when they enter the name, there will be a validation message at the bottom of the form to confirm whether or not the package name they entered has been found in the ecosystem they specified.

To learn more about submitting advisories to our Advisory Database, check out our documentation here.

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GitHub users can create software bill of material (SBOM) files for their repositories to help them understand its dependencies. SBOMs are a machine-readable inventory of a project’s dependencies and associated information. With this release, we have added copyright attribution data for dependencies in the SBOM.

Learn more about SBOM files and how GitHub helps you secure your software supply chain.

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Until this release, when a manifest file included a version range of a package (e.g. version < 3), when GitHub generated an SBOM for that package, it would not include a package URL (purl). We have improved SBOM generation so that now, when a manifest file references a package in a range, we will include the purl, but not the version field, which is an optional element in the specification. This will result in more complete data than we'd previously generated in the SBOM, helping users more clearly identify the packages being used in their repository.

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Dependabot will now fail gracefully with informative error messages when an unsupported NuGet project type is encountered. If you were using an unsupported project type previously, Dependabot might have failed silently without producing updates. Dependabot is able to process updates to NuGet project files in the .csproj, .vbproj, and .fsproj formats.

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If you’re using starter workflows to prepare the build and release steps for your Java projects that use Gradle, these projects will now have more comprehensive dependency graph information in GitHub. The Gradle starter workflows have been updated to automatically submit transitive dependencies to GitHub, improving the quality of dependency graph data and Dependabot updates for these apps.

Learn more about the action these starter workflows use by checking out the Build with Gradle action on the GitHub Marketplace. Thank you Gradle for making these updates!

Join the discussion within GitHub Community.

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Dependency graph now supports submissions through the dependency submission API (beta). This enables you to add dependencies, such as those resolved when software is compiled or built, to the dependency graph. Submitted dependencies will appear in a repository’s dependency graph and any associated vulnerabilities will trigger Dependabot alerts.

Releasing alongside the dependency submission API are the:

Learn more about the dependency submission API.

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