codeql

How exposed is your code? Find out in minutes—for free (opens in new tab)

GitHub’s Code Security Risk Assessment offers organizations a free, one-click way to uncover vulnerabilities that manual reviews and limited scanning tools may miss. Using CodeQL, it scans up to 20 active repositories and provides a prioritized view of risks by severity, language, repository, and vulnerability type. The assessment also connects findings to GitHub Code Security and Copilot Autofix, helping teams move from discovery to remediation. ## What the Assessment Reveals - Scans up to 20 of an organization’s most active repositories. - Reports vulnerabilities by severity: - Critical - High - Medium - Low - Breaks findings down by programming language. - Identifies the specific security rules and vulnerability classes detected. - Highlights the repositories with the greatest number of vulnerabilities. - Shows which findings are eligible for Copilot Autofix. - Uses CodeQL, GitHub’s static analysis engine. The assessment is free for organization administrators and security managers using GitHub Enterprise Cloud or GitHub Team. Scanning does not consume the organization’s GitHub Actions minutes quota. ## Combining Code and Secret Exposure The Code Security Risk Assessment complements GitHub’s existing Secret Risk Assessment. - Both assessments can be launched from one entry point. - A tabbed interface separates secret exposure findings from code vulnerabilities. - The combined view helps organizations understand their overall security posture. - Secret Protection focuses on preventing credential leaks. - Code Security identifies and helps remediate vulnerabilities in source code. GitHub cites 2025 usage figures for Secret Protection, including nearly 2 billion scanned pushes and 19 million blocked secret exposures. ## From Detection to Remediation Finding vulnerabilities is only the first step; reducing risk requires fixing them. - GitHub reports that Copilot Autofix resolved 460,258 security alerts in 2025. - Half of vulnerability alerts were fixed directly in pull requests. - Mean remediation time was 0.66 hours with Copilot Autofix, compared with 1.29 hours for manual fixes. - Assessment results show how many discovered vulnerabilities could potentially be fixed automatically. - Organizations can enable GitHub Code Security directly from the results page. The assessment is intended for organizations with no current scanning, teams evaluating existing tools, or security leaders seeking broader visibility across repositories. Running it provides a quick, no-cost baseline for prioritizing security work.

Securing the open source supply chain across GitHub (opens in new tab)

Attackers increasingly target GitHub Actions workflows to steal secrets, publish malicious packages, and spread into additional projects. GitHub recommends reducing credential exposure, hardening workflows, and using automated tools such as CodeQL and Dependabot. It is also expanding trusted publishing, malware detection, and GitHub Actions security improvements in response to campaigns such as Shai-Hulud. ## How attacks begin - Many supply-chain attacks start by exploiting insecure GitHub Actions workflows. - Stolen API keys and other secrets can let attackers publish packages from their own machines. - Malicious packages can then compromise downstream projects and propagate the attack. ## Securing GitHub Actions today - Enable CodeQL’s GitHub Actions queries, which are free for public repositories, to identify workflow security weaknesses. - Avoid triggering workflows with `pull_request_target`. - Pin third-party Actions to full-length commit SHAs. - Updates should be made by maintainers or Dependabot. - Treat pull requests that change pinned Actions with suspicion. - Protect workflows against script injection when using pull-request or other user-submitted content. - Monitor GitHub’s Advisory Database and use Dependabot malware alerts to detect compromised or vulnerable dependencies. ## Replacing secrets with trusted publishing - GitHub recommends using short-lived OpenID Connect tokens containing a workflow’s workload identity instead of storing long-lived secrets. - Cloud providers, package registries, and hosted services can use these tokens to authorize workflow activity. - Through collaboration with OpenSSF, trusted publishing is supported by npm, PyPI, NuGet, RubyGems, Crates, and other registries. - Trusted publishing both removes credentials from build pipelines and provides a signal when a package unexpectedly switches away from it. ## Detecting malicious packages - npm publishes more than 30,000 packages daily and scans every package version for malware. - Hundreds of newly published packages contain malicious code each day. - Human review confirms detections before action is taken, helping avoid disrupting legitimate maintainers. - Even a 1% false-positive rate would affect hundreds of valid package releases daily at npm’s scale. ## GitHub’s upcoming security work - Attacks such as Shai-Hulud accelerated npm’s security roadmap. - GitHub is expanding trusted publishing, malware detection and removal, and collaboration with maintainers. - The company is also revisiting and accelerating its GitHub Actions security roadmap. - New protections may require workflow changes or create compatibility concerns, so GitHub aims to make the transition gradual and solicits community feedback. Projects should audit their Actions workflows immediately, eliminate long-lived publishing credentials where possible, pin dependencies, and enable CodeQL and Dependabot. Adopting trusted publishing provides both stronger protection and useful evidence for identifying suspicious package releases.

GitHub expands application security coverage with AI‑powered detections (opens in new tab)

GitHub is expanding application security coverage with AI-powered detections that complement CodeQL’s traditional static analysis. The approach targets languages and frameworks that are difficult to support through semantic analysis alone, including Bash, Dockerfiles, Terraform, and PHP. Planned for public preview in early Q2, the system brings detection, automated remediation, and enforcement directly into pull requests. ## Hybrid Static Analysis and AI Detection - CodeQL remains the primary tool for deep analysis of supported languages. - AI-powered detections extend coverage to scripts, infrastructure definitions, and less-supported ecosystems. - The system can identify vulnerabilities and suggest fixes within the pull request workflow. - Internal testing analyzed more than 170,000 findings in 30 days, receiving positive feedback from over 80% of developers. - Early supported areas include: - Shell/Bash - Dockerfiles - Terraform/HCL - PHP - The capability is part of GitHub’s broader agentic detection platform, which also supports code quality and code review. ## Security Findings in Pull Requests - GitHub automatically analyzes changes when a pull request is opened. - It selects CodeQL or AI-powered detection based on the code being reviewed. - Findings appear alongside existing code-scanning results, without requiring developers to switch tools. - Example risks include: - Unsafe string-built SQL queries or commands - Weak cryptographic algorithms - Infrastructure configurations exposing sensitive resources - Detecting issues during review allows teams to address vulnerabilities before code is merged or deployed. ## Copilot Autofix for Remediation - GitHub connects detection with Copilot Autofix, which proposes fixes developers can review, test, and apply. - Autofix resolved more than 460,000 security alerts in 2025. - Alerts were resolved in an average of 0.66 hours with Autofix, compared with 1.29 hours without it. - This reduces the gap between discovering a vulnerability and correcting it. ## Security Enforcement at Merge - GitHub positions pull requests as the point where security policies can be enforced. - Detection, remediation, and governance operate within the same workflow. - Teams can reduce risk without adding separate post-deployment review steps. - GitHub plans to demonstrate the technology at RSAC, highlighting hybrid detection and developer-native remediation. GitHub’s recommendation is effectively to combine CodeQL’s precision with AI-based coverage for modern, diverse repositories, while using Copilot Autofix and merge policies to turn findings into timely, enforceable fixes.

How to scan for vulnerabilities with GitHub Security Lab’s open source AI-powered framework (opens in new tab)

GitHub Security Lab’s open-source Taskflow Agent uses AI-driven, multi-step auditing workflows to find high-impact vulnerabilities in web applications and open-source projects. The authors report more than 80 vulnerabilities, including authorization bypasses and private-data disclosures, with about 20 already disclosed. They argue that carefully designed taskflows and prompts can give LLMs enough freedom to discover vulnerabilities while reducing hallucinations and false positives. ## Running the Audits - The taskflows are available in the [`seclab-taskflows`](https://github.com/GitHubSecurityLab/seclab-taskflows) repository. - To run an audit: 1. Start a Codespace for the repository. 2. Wait for initialization. 3. Run `./scripts/audit/run_audit.sh myorg/myrepo`. - Audits may take one or two hours on a medium-sized repository. - Results are stored in SQLite and can be inspected in the `audit_results` table. - Rows marked with a check in `has_vulnerability` indicate potential findings. - A GitHub Copilot license and premium model requests are required. - The same repository should be audited multiple times because LLM results are nondeterministic; using different models may reveal different vulnerabilities. - Private repositories require changes to the Codespace configuration to grant access. ## How Taskflows Work - Taskflows are YAML files defining ordered tasks and dependencies for an LLM. - The `seclab-taskflow-agent` runs tasks sequentially and passes their results between stages. - Repository audits begin by dividing the codebase into functional components. - For each component, context is gathered, including: - Untrusted-input entry points - Intended privilege levels - Component purposes and behavior - This context is stored in a database for later auditing tasks. - Separate tasks can: - Suggest generic security issues - Carefully verify each suggested issue - Focus on specific vulnerability classes - Tasks can be reused across many components asynchronously through templated prompts and component-specific substitutions. ## Why Use Multiple Tasks - A single large prompt is less reliable because LLMs may omit steps in complex, multi-stage investigations. - Taskflows help control, debug, and structure the process even when models provide large context windows. - Breaking work into stages allows each result to be reviewed and reused as context for subsequent analysis. - Repeated task execution across components makes the approach scalable for large repositories. ## General Security Auditing - The team initially used the framework to triage CodeQL alerts, where strict instructions and predefined criteria helped limit false positives. - General auditing is more difficult because the LLM must search broadly for vulnerabilities rather than evaluate known alerts. - Greater freedom increases the risk of hallucinations and unexploitable findings. - The authors’ approach uses taskflow design and prompt engineering to preserve a high true-positive rate while allowing the model to investigate diverse security issues. ## Reported Vulnerabilities - The taskflows have found more than 80 vulnerabilities in open-source projects. - Many reported issues are high-impact, including: - Authorization bypasses - Information disclosure - Logging in as another user - Accessing private user data - Examples include exposing personally identifiable information in ecommerce shopping carts and authenticating to a chat application with arbitrary passwords. - The authors manually verify findings before reporting them and maintain an advisories page as disclosures become public. The practical recommendation is to run the open-source taskflows on your own projects, repeat audits with different models, and manually validate every result. The framework is intended to improve through shared taskflows, prompts, and findings across the security community.