GitHub Brings Suite of Supply Chain Security Features to Go

GitHub has released a number of supply chain security updates for Go programming language modules.

In a blog post published on July 22, GitHub staff product manager William Bartholomew stated that Go — also known as Golang is now firmly ingrained in the top 15 programming languages on the platform and that as the most famous host for Go modules, GitHub intends to assist the community in discovering, reporting, and preventing security vulnerabilities. 

Go modules were launched in 2019 to help with dependency management. As per the Go Developer Survey 2020, Go is now utilized in the workplace in some form by 76 percent of respondents. 

Furthermore, Go modules are becoming more popular, with 96 percent of those polled indicating they use them for package management, up 7% from 2019, and 87 percent saying they use exclusively Go modules for this reason. 

According to the results of the survey, the usage of other package management solutions is declining. As per GitHub, four major aspects of supply chain security enhancement are now available for Go modules. 

The first is GitHub’s Advisory Database, an open-source repository of vulnerability information that presently has over 150 Go advisories at the time of publication. Developers can also use the database to get CVE IDs for newly identified security flaws. 

“This number is growing every day as we curate existing vulnerabilities and triage newly discovered ones,” Bartholomew added. 

GitHub has also released its dependency graph, which can be used to track and evaluate project dependencies using go.mod, as well as warn users when risky dependencies are discovered. In this version, GitHub has also introduced Dependabot, which will notify developers when new security flaws in Go modules are identified.

To fix vulnerable Go modules, automatic pull requests can be enabled, and notification settings have been enhanced for fine-tuning. According to Bartholomew, repositories are enabled to automatically create pull requests for security updates, dependencies patch up to 40% faster than those that do not.