GitHub is a cornerstone of modern software development, but decentralized administration outside of the purview of security teams, extensive third-party integrations, and complex permission structures create security challenges. Without effective security controls, these factors can increase the risk of data exposure, account takeovers, and supply chain attacks. Valence provides security teams with the continuous monitoring and control they need to find and fix misconfigurations, manage identities, and regulate third-party integrations—reducing security risks while enabling developer productivity.
Key GitHub Security Challenges
Misconfigured Repository Access
GitHub operates like a social network, allowing employees to use personal repositories alongside corporate ones, which can lead to confusion and human errors. Without strict governance, repositories may be mistakenly made public or shared with unauthorized external collaborators, exposing sensitive code and intellectual property. Managing GitHub permissions and access is multi-faceted—organizations can invite external users in various ways, such as adding them to teams with specific permissions or inviting them as guests with access to select repositories. Ensuring that repository settings are properly configured across all user types is critical for securing GitHub environments.
Decentralized Administration and Shadow IAM
GitHub is often managed by R&D teams rather than security teams, leading to a lack of unified oversight. Non-security SaaS admins tend to prioritize productivity over security, making it difficult to track overprivileged users and unmanaged identities. Shadow IAM—GitHub local accounts that bypass SSO—creates a blind spot, allowing former employees or external contractors to retain access even after being deprovisioned by corporate identity providers. This identity sprawl can be exploited by attackers to gain unauthorized access.
Overprivileged SaaS-to-SaaS Integrations
GitHub supports multiple authentication methods and integrations, including GitHub Apps, SSH keys, personal access tokens (PATs), fine-grained PATs, deploy keys, and webhooks. These connections—which can include highly-privileged GenAI tools—can be granted excessive permissions, remain active long after they’re needed, and serve as potential entry points for supply chain attacks. Attackers love to target these non-human identities as they do not require certain well-known security measures that apply to human identities. Additionally, unused tokens pose security risks if left unchecked. Security teams need full visibility into integrations and tokens, along with the option of automated policies to revoke unnecessary or risky connections.
Recent GitHub Breaches and The Growing Threat of Supply Chain Attacks
Several high-profile breaches have highlighted GitHub’s security risks. The Heroku and Travis CI breach, as well as the CircleCI attack, have demonstrated the dangers of compromised OAuth tokens. In the CircleCI breach, the inciting incident was a compromised GitHub token, an increasingly popular attack vector. Hackers stole tokens from CircleCI production systems and leveraged these non-human identities to gain unauthorized access to the GitHub tenants of CircleCI’s customers. This unauthorized access allowed the attackers to steal customer data, including environment variables, tokens, and API keys.
These incidents underscore the need for organizations to proactively monitor and secure their GitHub environments. Valence provides security teams with the necessary inventory and continuous monitoring capabilities to detect and mitigate threats before they escalate.
How Valence Secures GitHub
SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM)
Valence continuously monitors GitHub configurations to detect security risks, including repository misconfigurations and excessive permissions. Security teams gain complete visibility into organization-wide settings, ensuring that GitHub environments and the source code hosted within them are not inadvertently exposed to unauthorized users. Valence enables:
- Continuous auditing all GitHub repositories for public exposure, external collaborators, and excessive permissions
- Monitoring for configuration drift, alerting security teams when settings have changed over time away from intended policies
- Enforcing safe defaults for new repositories and users to prevent misconfigurations
Identity Security & Shadow IAM Management
Valence helps security teams regain control over GitHub identities by identifying all admin accounts, accounts that bypass corporate SSO and enforcing least privilege access. Security teams can:
- Detect and manage GitHub accounts that bypass corporate SSO/IdP
- Identify inactive accounts and enforce deprovisioning to prevent access retention by former employees and contractors
- Track and remediate excessive permissions to enforce the principle of least privilege
- Monitor and revoke unused or overprivileged authentication tokens
GitHub Risk Remediation
Valence streamlines GitHub security risk remediation through a range of options. Security teams can:
- Utilize guided remediation steps within GitHub, or leverage one-click fixes directly from the Valence platform
- Integrate with ticketing and security tools like Jira, ServiceNow, and other tools for efficient remediation workflows
- Automate security policies to remove of dormant, overprivileged, or risky SaaS-to-SaaS integrations, such as GitHub Apps, PATs, deploy keys, and webhooks
- Foster collaboration between security teams and GitHub admins to gain contextual security insights within developer workflows
