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Setting up a profile for GitHub Security Advisories

Prerequisites​

  • The minder CLI application
  • A Minder account with at least editor permission
  • An enrolled provider (e.g., GitHub) and registered repositories

Create a rule type for alerting​

The alert feature is available for all rule types that have the alert section defined in their <alert-type>.yaml file. Alerts are a core feature of Minder providing you with notifications about the status of your registered repositories using GitHub Security Advisories. These Security Advisories automatically open and close based on the evaluation of the rules defined in your profiles.

When a rule fails, Minder opens an alert to bring your attention to the non-compliance issue. Conversely, when the rule evaluation passes, Minder will automatically close any previously opened alerts related to that rule.

In this example, we will use a rule type that checks if a repository has a LICENSE file present. If there's no file present, Minder will create an alert notifying the owner of the repository. The rule type is called license.yaml and is one of the reference rule types provided by the Minder team. Details, such as the severity of the alert are defined in the alert section of the rule type definition.

Fetch all the reference rules by cloning the minder-rules-and-profiles repository.

git clone https://github.com/mindersec/minder-rules-and-profiles.git

In that directory, you can find all the reference rules and profiles.

cd minder-rules-and-profiles

Create the license rule type in Minder:

minder ruletype create -f rule-types/github/license.yaml

Create a profile​

Next, create a profile that applies the rule to all registered repositories.

Create a new file called profile.yaml using the following profile definition and enable alerting by setting alert to on (default). The other available values are off and dry_run.

---
version: v1
type: profile
name: license-profile
context:
  provider: github
alert: 'on'
repository:
  - type: license
    def:
      license_filename: LICENSE
      license_type: ''

Create the profile in Minder:

minder profile create -f profile.yaml

Once the profile is created, Minder will monitor all of your registered repositories for the presence of the LICENSE file.

If a repository does not have a LICENSE file available, Minder will create an alert of type Security Advisory providing additional details such as the profile and rule that triggered the alert and guidelines on how to resolve the issue.

Once a LICENSE file is added to the repository, Minder will automatically close the alert.

Alerts are complementary to the remediation feature. If you have both alert and remediation enabled for a profile, Minder will attempt to remediate it first. If the remediation fails, Minder will create an alert. If the remediation succeeds, Minder will close any previously opened alerts related to that rule.

Limitations​

  • Currently, the only supported alert type is GitHub Security Advisory. More alert types will be added in the future.
  • Alerts are only available for rules that have the alert section defined in their <alert-type>.yaml file.