On the alerting side, we have a couple of things coming. Neither are magic bullets, but both will help.

- Better handling of vulnerabilities in dev dependencies. Some vulnerabilities matter if they're in a dev dependency - anything that exfiltrates your local filesystem, for example. Other's don't - DoS vulnerabilities, for example. At the moment, GitHub doesn't even tell you whether the dependency a vulnerability affects is a runtime or development dependency. We can and will get better there.

- Analysis of whether the vulnerable code in a dependency is called. You almost certainly want to react faster to vulnerabilities in your code that your application is actually exposed to than to ones that it may be exposed to in future. (You probably want to respond to the unreachable ones, too, especially if you can get an auto-generated PR to do so, but there's much less urgency.) We have this in private beta for Python right now, and expect to have it in public beta in the next few months.

Beyond alerting, the other big thing is that GitHub's incentives for this database and the experiences it triggers are fundamentally different from other vendors. We aren't selling its contents, so don't have an incentive to inflate it. Open source maintainers are at the heart of our platform, and we really don't want low quality advisories go out about their software. And developers are our core customers, and we want to deliver experiences they love above all else. That difference in incentives will likely manifest in lots of little differences, but at a high level, we're aligned on wanting to reduce the alert fatigue.

Sorry we dropped the ball on this for the last couple of years. You're going to see steady improvements from here on.

That said, this offering is amazing, and IMHO a huge value add of using Github, so even if you left it exactly how it is it's still appreciated. I especially appreciate that you support many different languages (on that, would love to see Erlang and Elixir added). An app server that runs an older PHP service got exploited and was mining crypto currency. The investigation went way, way faster because I happened to notice the security warning on Github. I was able to get it patched pretty quickly thanks to that. Even though updating deps is one of the first things I do, I may never have actually figured out where the vulnerability was without github, so thank you so much!

https://github.com/dependabot/elixir-security-advisories

For example, if there is a reported problem in production, with lock files I can check out the same commit and be able reproduce (if the provided steps are correct).

Without lock files one or more dependency versions might be higher on my machine than production and then I don’t know if failure to reproduce is because of the steps I’m trying or because the problem doesn’t exist in the updated dependencies.

And then because not all package maintainers are good about following semantic versioning, the build on the CI server can sometimes break itself due to dependency updates which aren’t backwards compatible.

Version range dependencies seem like a nice solution, but in practice I’ve found them to be a nightmare.

https://www.tromzo.com/ - early but very strong vision

https://www.dazz.io/ - dumb name but decent vision

The more you do something the easier it is to do. There is nothing wrong with it no longer feeling like an alert. Patching security vulnerabilities is just a normal part of software development and the easier and more comfortable people are with it the better.

That is almost the definition of alert fatigue. The problem is tools presenting minor issues as major ones because they might be a major issue in certain circumstances. Then supposedly major alerts start to feel normal, and when there is an actually major alert nobody has a sense of urgency about it.

I've never used GitHubs version of this, but I've used others and as someone who only develops internal tools I wish there was an setting for "I mostly trust my authenticated users." Which I think would downgrade "possible DOS from a specially crafted regex from an authenticated user."

Major alerts should feel normal. I should have said that you shouldn't feel alarmed instead of suggesting that it shouldn't be treated as an event. Maybe that doesn't quite capture what I mean, but you should get the picture. You should be prepared to handle them. Unfortunately, security defects are to be expected and it shouldn't be a surprise that they might exist in your system.

>and when there is an actually major alert nobody has a sense of urgency about it.

Why? You should be urgent with all security issues. You shouldn't have people putting off security updates because they are minor.