Ability to make GitHub pull requests private when they disclose a vulnerability to the public

[sarahboyce]

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As a project owner/maintainer, I would like the ability to make a GitHub pull request private when the pull request exposes a vulnerability.

Problem: Some users disregard the vulnerability reporting process and disclose vulnerabilities publicly

In order to help us contain a public exposure, we would like to be able to make these PRs private/hidden.
These should then only be viewable to project owners/maintainers and the PR author.
Other users should see a message that the project owners have hidden this PR and no other details. The API should have a similar "insufficient permissions" if querying the hidden PR.

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Description updated to remove "issues" as "issues" can be deleted.

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[ekohl]

Problem: Some users disregard the vulnerability reporting process and disclose vulnerabilities publicly

Would it make sense to have some workflow to convert a PR to a disclosure? There are probably many gotchas, like the fact that the user's fork already contains a commit to fix it. Arguably, people who disregard the defined process are unlikely to write it all down in a proper commit message so that likely obfuscates it a bit. Still not really desirable.

[adiroiban]

The thing is that ... there might be "infosec" company/team that will monitor any high profile repos and will automatically cache / keep a copy of any issue

Even if we removed that PR afterwards , the information is still somewhere ....

but yes... will no longer be avaialble for "lazy" infosec teams

[RealOrangeOne]

There's also a non-infosec side here - it's also an avenue for abusive communication.

If someone raises abusive issues, or comments, they can be easily deleted by maintainers. However, if said abuse is in a PR, there's no getting rid of it (without GitHub's involvement anyway) - it's stuck there. All a maintainer can do is close it and hope no one else looks at it.

[n0rbed]

I'd love to see this implemented. Maybe someone wants to anonymously report a bug (anonynmous at least to the public).

[AllanOricil]

This would be awesome. I read in a reddit post that people report vulnerabilities e-mailing maintainers and creating private forks. I have never tried it so I can't confirm if that is true. However, I believe that private PRs would be more useful because maintainers can later choose to make the whole review and conversations public. And these conversations/reviews could help people to understand the reasoning for the changes that fixed a vulnerability.

[paulinevos]

Weighing in on this, I think it might be worth having an optional setting to:

1. Make PRs by users outside of the organization hidden by default until approved by maintainers
2. Force forks to be private

My reasoning: there's been a huge increase lately in people letting agents loose on code bases to automatically find vulnerabilities and creating a PR for them. Which means that these disclosures are usually not intentional and made by users who might not even be familiar with the concept of disclosures. This could open projects up to large amounts of accidental automated disclosures.

If maintainers can only set an existing PR (from a public fork) to hidden, there's two issues:

• the time in between publishing the PR and hiding it. It may have been viewed, cached, whatever. It's been exposed that entire time
• the fork, and therefore the commit, is public.

Creating a setting that requires approval before publishing a PR and forcing forks to be private would circumvent both these issues.

One might argue that that's just the nature of open-source, and that someone could always push the source code from a private fork to a new, public repo if they had bad intentions. But the assumption is that most of these disclosures are unintentional, not by bad actors. So I think it would be good to at least cover those accidental cases that seem to be a lot more rampant since the whole Mythos hype moment.