The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) on Wednesday announced the availability of a new GitHub app that can be used to automatically and continuously enforce security best practices for GitHub projects.
The new application, named Allstar, was developed by Google and released through OpenSSF, of which the tech giant is a founding member. Allstar is a companion to Security Scorecards, an automated risk assessment tool for repositories and their dependencies that was also contributed by Google.
Allstart continuously checks GitHub API states and file contents against defined security policies. If they don’t match, the application applies user-defined enforcement actions.
“Security Scorecards checks a number of important heuristics (currently 18), such as whether the project uses branch protection, cryptographically signs release artifacts, or requires code review. From these scores, users can understand specific areas to improve in order to strengthen the security posture of their project,” explained Google’s Mike Maraya and Jeff Mendoza.
They added, “From here, Allstar takes the next step and allows maintainers to opt into automated enforcement of specific checks. If your repository fails a particular check that you enable, Allstar intervenes to make the necessary changes to remediate the issue, avoiding the extra effort of regular manual fixes.”
Currently, Allstar’s security policy enforcements include branch protection, checking for the presence of a security policy file (security.md) for vulnerability disclosure, ensuring that users with administrator privileges belong to the owning organization, and detecting binary artifacts in a repository.
Enforcement actions that can currently be defined by users include opening a GitHub issue, reverting modified policy settings, and logging a failure without taking additional action.
More policies and enforcement actions will be rolled out in the future.
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