Enable GitHub feature to report vulnerabilities privately

[krassowski]

Problem: security@ipython.org email is a slow and annoying (see below) method of dealing with vulnerability reports

The current method:

• pros:
  • it is centralized so someone ultimately will look at it
• cons:
  • the report will not make it to maintainers for as long as three weeks (recently)
  • it requires active monitoring of the inbox by security team
  • it requires the security team to be security managers across multiple orgs
  • it requires someone to copy-paste the details into a GitHub form, but then the original report often does not contain important information, which is more likely to be filled in when the GitHub vulnerability form is used directly
  • (minor) it is using an ipython.org mail which is confusing

Proposed solution: encourage orgs to enable private security reporting which is supported by GitHub since November 2022 (https://github.blog/changelog/2022-11-09-privately-report-vulnerabilities-to-repository-maintainers/), which is documented in https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/security-advisories/guidance-on-reporting-and-writing-information-about-vulnerabilities/privately-reporting-a-security-vulnerability This cuts out middle man, stops friction between jupyter security and maintainers, solves the problem (yes, maybe naive but I believe this should be seriously explored)

I had previously attended two Jupyter Security team meetings where this topic was discussed. Unfortunately the notes in the repo were not updated recently.

[Carreau]

I agree, though this feature is relatively recent hence why it was not considered before. And one of the issue is if the report is opened on the wrong org, it can't be transfered.

[minrk]

👍 from me.

Sure, transferring reports is a bit of a pain (I recently moved some), but not too bad and not really worse than transferring from the email reporting. Notifications to the right people are also a lot better handled on the GitHub advisories.

[Carreau]

I think we should try to have a list of orgs/repos and/or a script to check on which ones this is enabled.

I had to also recently enable it on jupyterlab