Creating a custom security configuration for your enterprise

About custom security configurations

We recommend securing your enterprise with the GitHub-recommended security configuration, then evaluating the security findings on your repositories before configuring custom security configurations. For more information, see Applying the GitHub-recommended security configuration to your enterprise.

With custom security configurations, you can create collections of enablement settings for GitHub's security products to meet the specific security needs of your enterprise. For example, you can create a different custom security configuration for each organization or group of organizations to reflect their unique security requirements and compliance obligations.

Creating a custom security configuration

1. In the top-right corner of GitHub, click your profile photo.

2. Depending on your environment, click Your enterprise, or click Your enterprises then click the enterprise you want to view.

3. On the left side of the page, in the enterprise account sidebar, click Settings.

4. In the left sidebar, click Code security.

5. In the "Configurations" section, click New configuration.

6. To help identify your custom security configuration and clarify its purpose on the "Configurations" page, name your configuration and create a description.

7. In the "GitHub Advanced Security features" row, choose whether to include or exclude GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) features. If you plan to apply a custom security configuration with GHAS features to private repositories, you must have available GHAS licenses for each active unique committer to those repositories, or the features will not be enabled. See About billing for GitHub Advanced Security.

8. In the "Dependency graph and Dependabot" section of the security settings table, choose whether you want to enable, disable, or keep the existing settings for the following security features:

   • Dependency graph. To learn about dependency graph, see About the dependency graph.

   • Automatic dependency submission. To learn about automatic dependency submission, see Configuring automatic dependency submission for your repository.

   • Dependabot alerts. To learn about Dependabot alerts, see About Dependabot alerts.

   • Security updates. To learn about security updates, see About Dependabot security updates.

   Note

   You cannot manually change the enablement settings for vulnerable function calls. If GitHub Advanced Security features and Dependabot alerts are enabled, vulnerable function calls is also enabled. Otherwise, it is disabled.

9. In the "Code scanning" section of the security settings table, choose whether you want to enable, disable, or keep the existing settings for code scanning default setup. To learn about default setup, see Configuring default setup for code scanning.

10. In the "Secret scanning" section of the security settings table, choose whether you want to enable, disable, or keep the existing settings for the following security features:

    • Alerts. To learn about secret scanning, see About secret scanning.
    • Non-provider patterns. To learn more about scanning for non-provider patterns, see Supported secret scanning patterns and Viewing and filtering alerts from secret scanning.
    • Push protection. To learn about push protection, see About push protection.

11. In the "Private vulnerability reporting" section of the security settings table, choose whether you want to enable, disable, or keep the existing settings for private vulnerability reporting. To learn about private vulnerability reporting, see Configuring private vulnerability reporting for a repository.

12. Optionally, in the "Policy" section, you can choose to automatically apply the security configuration to newly created repositories depending on their visibility. Select the None dropdown menu, then click Public, Private and internal, or All repositories.

13. Optionally, in the "Policy" section, you can enforce the configuration and block repository owners from changing features that are enabled or disabled by the configuration (features that are not set aren't enforced). Next to "Enforce configuration", select Enforce from the dropdown menu.

    Note

    If a user in your enterprise attempts to change the enablement status of a feature in an enforced configuration using the REST API, the API call will appear to succeed, but no enablement statuses will change.

    Some situations can break the enforcement of security configurations for a repository. For example, the enablement of code scanning will not apply to a repository if:

    • GitHub Actions is initially enabled on the repository, but is then disabled in the repository.
    • GitHub Actions required by code scanning configurations are not available in the repository.
    • The definition for which languages should not be analyzed using code scanning default setup is changed.

14. To finish creating your custom security configuration, click Save configuration.

Next steps

To optionally configure additional secret scanning settings for the enterprise, see Configuring additional secret scanning settings for your enterprise.

To apply your custom security configuration to repositories in your organization, see Applying a custom security configuration.

To learn how to edit your custom security configuration, see "Editing a custom security configuration."