Security

1. You are here:
2. Handbook
3. Engineering
4. Security

On this page

• Security Vision
• Engaging the Security On-Call
• External Contact Information
• Security Department
  • Security Automation
  • Application Security
  • Security Operations
  • Abuse Operations
  • Compliance
  • Threat Intelligence
  • Strategic Security
  • Security Research
• Security Team Collaborators
  • Secure Team
  • External Security Firms
• Resources
  • GitLab.com Groups and Projects
  • Slack Channels
  • Other Frequently Used GitLab.com Projects
  • Other Resources for GitLab Team Members
• Security Releases
• Issue Triage
  • Creating New Security Issues
  • Severity and Priority Labels on ~security Issues
  • Due date on ~security Issues
    • ~"feature proposals"
    • ~"security request"
    • Transferring from Security to Engineering
• Access Management Process
• Internal Application Security Reviews
  • Process
• Fighting Spam
• DMCA Requests
  • For DMCA requests the Abuse Team will follow the below process
• Vulnerability Reports and HackerOne
  • HackerOne Process
    • If a Report is Unclear
    • If a Report Violates the Rules
    • If the Report is Invalid
  • When a Patch is Ready
    • CVE IDs
  • On Release Day
  • Swag for Reports
• External Code Contributions
• Security Questionnaires for Customers
  • Process
• Vulnerability Scanning
• Package Signing

Security Vision

We enhance the security posture of our company, products, and client-facing services. The security team works cross-functionally inside and outside GitLab to meet these goals. The security team does not work directly on security-centric features of our platform—these are handled by the development teams. The specialty areas of our team reflect the major areas of information security.

Engaging the Security On-Call

If you identified an urgent security issue, if something feels wrong, or you need immediate assistance from the Security Team, you have two options available:

• Slack: use the /security Hi security team, I have a concern! Please see the following URL ... command.
• Email: send an email with a brief description of the issue to page-security@gitlab.com.

Both mechanisms will trigger the very same process, and as a result, the Security responder on-call will engage in the relevant issue within the appropriate SLA. If the SLA is breached, the Security manager on-call will be paged.

Note: The Security Team will never be upset if you page us for something that turns out to be nothing, but we will be sad if you don't page us and it turns out to be something. IF UNSURE - PAGE US.

External Contact Information

The security team can be contacted at security@gitlab.com. External researchers or other interested parties should refer to our Responsible Disclosure Policy for more information about reporting vulnerabilities. The security@gitlab.com email address also forwards to a ZenDesk queue that is monitored by the security team.

For security team members, the private PGP key is available in the Security 1Password vault. Refer to PGP process for usage.

Security Department

Security Automation

Security Automation specialists help us scale by creating tools that perform common tasks automatically. Examples include building automated security issue triage and management, proactive vulnerability scanning, and defining security metrics for executive review. Initiatives for this specialty also include:

• Assist other security specialty teams in their automation efforts
• Assess security tools and integrate tools as needed
• Define and own metrics and KPIs to determine the effectiveness of security programs
• Define, implement, and monitor security measures to protect GitLab.com and company assets

Application Security

Application Security specialists work closely with development, product security PMs, and third-party groups (including paid bug bounty programs) to ensure pre and post deployment assessments are completed. Initiatives for this specialty also include:

• Pre and post deployment security assessments/tests
• Capture of flaws in software environment configuration
• Malicious code detection
• Patch/upgrade
• IP filtering
• Lock down executables
• Monitoring of programs at runtime to enforce the software use policy
• Developing and implementing a Secure Software Development Lifecycle (S-SDLC)
• Training and coaching developers on current security best practices

Security Operations

Security Operations specialists respond to incidents. This is often a fast-paced and stressful environment, where responding quickly and maintaining ones composure is critical. Initiatives for this specialty also include:

• Focus on detection and incident response, as well as implement preventative mechanisms
• Coordinate company-wide responses to security incidents
• Incorporate current security trends, advisories, publications, and academic research
• Engineer CND technologies to monitor and analyze e.g.
• IDSes
• Data collection tools
• Conduct vulnerability management
  • Identify and mitigate complex security vulnerabilities before an attacker exploits them
  • Determine level of effort required to compromise sensitive data
  • Triage and manage vulnerabilities identified through scanning

Abuse Operations

Abuse Operations specialists investigate malicious use of our systems. Initiatives for this specialty include:

• Three main types of abuse
  • Continuous Integration
  • Copyright violations
  • Port scanning
• Also investigate reports such as spam email, DoS, etc.
• Take action on abusive/non-responsive customers
• Verify proper classification of incoming abuse reports
• Execute messaging to customers on best practices
• Escalate to other stakeholders while continuing to monitor
• Monitor logs and queues for trends
• Research and prevent trending abuse methodologies

Compliance

Compliance specialists enables Sales by achieving standards as required by our customers and help to verify that the outcomes the security team is trying to achieve are actually being met. This includes SaaS, on-prem, and open source instances. Initiatives for this specialty also include:

• Develop roadmap based on customer needs e.g.
  • GDPR
  • SOC 2
  • FIPS 140-2
• Align other security specialist activities with the compliance roadmap
• Develop relationships with key government personnel and policy makers
• Assist work of internal and external auditors or advisors as needed

Threat Intelligence

Threat intelligence specialists research and provide information about specific threats to help us protect from the types of attacks that could cause the most damage. Initiatives for this specialty also include:

• Collect and analyze threat intelligence reports covering new threats, vulnerabilities, products, and research
• Author threat intelligence reports, driven by our security operations team's own incidents, analysis, and adversary engagements
• Evolve monitoring operations by extracting data from threat intelligence and create new content, signatures, and understanding of adversary TTPs
• Analyze event feeds and collected malware over long term to trend and correlate

Strategic Security

Strategic security specialists focus on holistic changes to policy, architecture, and processes to reduce entire categories of future security issues. Initiatives for this specialty also include:

• Cluster related historical security issues and examine them as a larger set
• Identify and generate trends associated with each set
• Propose actionable changes to GitLab architecture, processes, and infrastructure to mitigate future issues within each set
• Generate metrics which measure the effectiveness of each mitigation implemented

Security Research

Security research specialists conduct internal testing against GitLab assets, and against FOSS that is critical to GitLab products and operations. Initiatives for this specialty also include:

• Conduct vulnerability research against all GitLab and GitLab.com assets
• Research FOSS tools that are integrated with GitLab
• Develop proof-of-concept code to be included in security findings
• Report findings to tool developers and track mitigation process
• Follow responsible disclosure policies for community disclosure
• Author blog posts on vulnerabilities discovered

Security Team Collaborators

Secure Team

The Security team will collaborate with development and product management for security-related features in GitLab. The Secure team must not be mistaken with the Security Team.

• Develop real-world security use cases
• Ideation of compelling security features and products
• Test and provide product feedback

External Security Firms

We work closely with bounty programs, as well as security assessment and penetration testing firms to ensure external review of our security posture.

• One security assessment firm is rotated periodically to gain new perspectives
• One security assessment firm is engaged every quarter to build expertise in GitLab
• We maintain public and private bug bounty programs via HackerOne
  • Private program paid bounties will increase over time and at some point we want to do public bounties

Resources

GitLab.com Groups and Projects

• @gitlab-com/gl-security is the primary group for @'mentioning the Security Department.
• public (!) Security Engineering for Security Department initiatives, ~meta and backend tasks, and catch all for anything not covered by other projects.
• public (!) Security Compliance for
• Security Operations (private) for
• runbooks (private) - NOTE: The production runbooks should be the first location considered for any process or documentation. gl-security/runbooks should only be used for documenting specifics that would increase risk and/or have customer impact if publicly disclosed. anything security on-call or other operational activities.
• Incident-Tools (private) for working scripts and other code during or while remediating an incident. If the tool is applicable outside of the GitLab.com environment, consider if it's possible to release when the ~security issue becomes non-confidential.
• security-tools (mostly private) contains some operational tools used by the security team. Contents and/or configurations require that most of these projects remain private.

Slack Channels

• #security; Can be used for reporting when unsure of where to go, also used for general questions and discussion that often comes from the great questions people ask.
• #incident-management and other producton team channels
• #security-alert-* and #abuse* - Multiple channels for different notifications handled by the Security Department.
• Use the @sec-ops-team mention in any Slack channel to tag the members of the Security Operations team.
• Use the @sec-compliance-team mention in any Slack channel to tag the members of the Security Compliance team.

Other Frequently Used GitLab.com Projects

Security crosses many teams in the company, so you will find ~security labelled issues across all GitLab projects, especially:

• gitlab-ce
• gitlab-ee
• infrastructure
• production

When opening issues, please follow the Creating New Security Issues process for using labels and the confidential flag.

Other Resources for GitLab Team Members

• Security Best Practices, using 1Password and similar tools, are documented on their own security best practices page.
• GitLab.com and GitLab Hosted data breach notification policy.
• GitLab Internal Acceptable Use Policy.
• For GitLab.com, we have developed a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Security Guidelines Policy document, which outlines recommended best practices, and is enforced through our security automation initiatives.

Security Releases

The definitions, processes and checklists for security releases are described in the release/docs project.

The policies for backporting changes follow Security Releases for Gitlab EE.

For critical security releases, refer to Critical Security Releases in the handbook for a high level description of communication, and the critical release checklist in release/docs.

Issue Triage

The Security team needs to be able to communicate the priorities of security related issues to the Product, Development, and Infrastructure teams. Here's how the team can set priorities internally for subsequent communication (inspired in part by how the support team does this).

Creating New Security Issues

New security issue should follow these guidelines when being created on GitLab.com:

• Create new issues as confidential if unsure whether issue a potential vulnerability or not. It is easier to make an issue that should have been public open than to remediate an issue that should have been confidential. Consider adding the /confidential quick action to a project issue template.
• Always label as ~security at a minimum.
• Add any additional labels you know apply. Additional labels will be applied by the security team and other engineering personnel, but it will help with the triage process:
  • ~bug or ~feature proposal if appropriate
  • Team or devops lifecycle labels
  • ~customer if issue is a result of a customer report
• Issues that contain customer specific data, such as private repository contents, should be assigned ~keep confidential. If possible avoid this by linking resources only available to GitLab employess, for example, the originating Zendesk ticket. Label the link with (GitLab internal) for clarity.

If necesary, a sanitized issue may need to be created with more general discussion and examples appropriate for public disclosure prior to release.

For more immediate attention, mention @gitlab-com/gl-security with a request in the issue and use @sec-team in Slack.

Severity and Priority Labels on ~security Issues

The presence of ~security modifies the standard severity labels(~S1, ~S2, ~S3, ~S4) by additionally taking into account likelihood as described below, as well as any other mitigating or exacerbating factors. The priority of addressing ~security issues is also driven by impact, so in most cases, the priority label assigned by the security team will match the severity label. Exceptions must be noted in issue description or comments.

The intent of tying ~S/~P labels to remediation times is to measure and improve GitLab's response time to security issues to consistently meet or exceed industry standard timelines for responsible disclosure.

Severity	Priority	Time to remediate
~S1	~P1	As soon as possible
~S2	~P2	Within 60 days
~S3	~P3	Within 90 days

Due date on ~security Issues

For ~S2 and ~S3 ~security issues, the security engineer assigns the Due date, which is the target date of when fixes should be ready for release. This due date should account for the Time to remediate times above, as well as monthly security releases on the 28th of each month. For example, suppose today is October 1st, and a new S2 ~security issue is opened. It must be addressed in a security release within 60 days, which is November 30th. So therefore, it must catch the November 28th security release. Furthermore, the Security Release Process deadlines say that it should the code fix should be ready by November 23rd. So the due date in this example should be November 23rd.

Note that some ~security issues may not need to be part of a code release, such as an infrastructure change. In that case, the due date will not need to account for monthly security release dates.

On occasion, the due date of such an issue may need to be changed if the security team needs to move up or delay a monthly security release date to accomodate for urgent problems that arise.

~S1 ~security issues do not have a due date since they should be fixed as soon as possible, and a security release made available as soon as possible to accomodate it.

~"feature proposals"

Security issues which would be triaged as ~S4, are most likely ~feature proposals that should be triaged and prioritized by a product manager. This includes suggestions without a well-defined path for implementation or requiring complex changes to the application or architecture to address. ~S4/~P4 may be used for ~feature proposals as assigned by a product manager and do not need assignment to a release.

~"security request"

The security team may also apply ~security request to issue as an indication that the feature is being requested by the security team to meet additional customer requirements, compliance or operational needs in support of GitLab.com.

Transferring from Security to Engineering

The security engineer will add team labels (~Create, ~Deploy, etc.) and any additional labels as appropriate to the issue. The product manager and engineering team lead should be @ mentioned and followed up with as necessary as noted below for different severity levels.

The product manager will assign a Milestone to communicate when work will be assigned to engineers. The Due date and labels should not be changed if not met to provide accurate metrics on ~security issues.

Note that issues are not scheduled for a particular release unless the team leads add them to a release milestone and they are assigned to a developer.

Issues with an S1 or S2 rating should be immediately brought to the attention of the relevant engineering team leads and product managers by tagging them in the issue and/or escalating via chat and email if they are unresponsive.

Issues with an S1 rating have priority over all other issues and should be considered for a critical security release.

Issues with an S2 rating should be scheduled for the next scheduled security release, which may be days or weeks ahead depending on severity and other issues that are waiting for patches. An S2 rating is not a guarantee that a patch will be ready prior to the next security release, but that should be the goal.

Issues with an S3 rating have a lower sense of urgency and are assigned a target of the next minor version. If a low-risk or low-impact vulnerability is reported that would normally be rated S3 but the reporter has provided a 30 day time window (or less) for disclosure the issue may be escalated to ensure that it is patched before disclosure.

Access Management Process

Centralized access management is key to ensuring that the correct GitLabbers have access to the correct data and systems and at the correct level. GitLab access controls are guided by the principle of least privilege and need-to-know. These controls apply to information and information processing systems at the application and operating system layers, including networks and network services.

The access request project is used to request and track the following access-related activities:

1. New Access Requests
2. Access Removal Requests
3. Access Reviews

Usage guidelines for each of the access templates is outlined in the project's README file

Access Control Procedures

All requests for new system access require a New Access Requests.

All access requests must be approved by the team member's manager.

Requests for access to Infrastructure assets (servers and databases) require a second layer of approval from Infrastructure Management.

If admin-level access is being requested, the request must be approved by the Gitlab Security Team in addition to team member's manager and Infrastructure Management if applicable.

In the case of a separation from the company, all access will be deprovisioned within 3 business days from the date on which the offboarding request is submitted unless otherwise specified.

Individual access removal requests will be processed within the SLA requested. If no SLA is noted, access will be deprovisioned within 3 business days of the submission of the issue.

If access removal needs to occur immediately, please follow the panic email procedures, which will alert the Security Team on-call.

Access reviews will be formally documented using the Access Reviews template.

As part of an access review, existing access may be modified or revoked. New access (not modification of existing access) requires the submission of a New Access Request.

Baseline Role-Based Entitlements Access Runbooks & Issue Templates

For certain roles, baseline entitlement access runbooks & templates that outline the baseline access configurations for the role have been established.

The Baseline Role-based Entitlements directory contains all the approved role-based entitlement runbooks.

The runbook is used to document the configuration and approvals for the baseline entitlements. Any changes to these approved configurations require the approval of Engineering and Security Management.

Runbooks & Baseline Access Request Templates have been established for the following roles:

• Site Reliability Engineer - SRE
• Security Engineer, Operations - SecOps

When submitting a new access-request issue for either of these roles, please chose the template corresponding with the role of the person for which you are submitting the access request.

GitLab's access controls include the following control activities:

1. user registration and de-registration
2. user access provisioning
3. removal of adjustment of user access rights
4. management of privileged access rights
5. management and use of secret authentication information
6. review and recertification of user access rights
7. secure log-on procedures
8. management of passwords and tokens
9. access to privileged utility programs
10. access to program source code

Internal Application Security Reviews

For systems built (or significantly modified) by functional groups that house customer and other sensitive data, the Security Team should perform applicable application security reviews to ensure the systems are hardened.

Process

The current process for requesting an internal application security review is:

1. Requestor creates an issue in the security tracker and adds the app sec review label.
2. Requestor submits a triage questionnaire form for the app.
3. Security team reviews the triage form and determines its next steps (design, testing, no test, etc.).
4. If sent to design phase, requestor submits design questionnaire. An optional call can be arranged to discuss the architecture further. At the end of this phase, the security team will scope it for X amount of days of testing. It will now be sent to the testing phase.
5. The requestor submits a testing questionnaire with the test environment information. The scheduled testing window will also be determined.
6. The security team performs the assessment during the testing window and documents any findings in the app's associated component in GitLab. Once testing is finished, it will be sent to the remediation phase.
7. All findings will be remediated by the appropriate teams and validated by the security engineer who tested it.
8. Once all findings have been closed, the review can be considered complete.

As part of the app sec review process, a security issue is created to track the progress of the review. In those issues, labels and milestones can be added. It's important to note here that application security reviews are not a one-and-done, but can be ongoing as the application under review evolves.

Fighting Spam

The security team plays a large role in defining procedures for defending against and dealing with spam. Common targets for spam are public snippets, projects, issues, merge requests, and comments. Advanced techniques for dealing with these types of spam are detailed in the Spam Fighting runbook.

For any actions taken on an account:

• Verify that the report has been fully resolved.
• Using Admin notes, add clear and concise notes to the account relating to any changes made to the Account, Groups, Projects etc.
• If the account is no longer considered abusive or in violation of our Terms of Use, remove any block or restrictions implemented on the account as a result of the Abuse.

The purpose of adding Admin Notes allow us to better assist the Support Team and Production if there are any questions around changes made to an account by the Security Team.

DMCA Requests

The Security Team plays a big role in defining the procedures and reviewing Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests. All DMCA requests need to be vetted by Legal first before any further steps are taken to proceed with the take down of reported content. Reported content that has been sucessfully vetted by Legal must be referred to the Abuse Team before any action is taken.

For DMCA requests the Abuse Team will follow the below process

• Confirm that the content is still live.
• Temporarlily remove the content to allow the parties to commence litigation.
• Return the content to the original state if no litigation was commenced.

Abuse works in conjuction with Support and Legal referencing the DMCA Removal Workflow

Vulnerability Reports and HackerOne

GitLab receives vulnerability reports by various pathways, including:

• HackerOne bug bounty program
• security@gitlab.com
• Reports or questions come in from customers through Zendesk.
• Issues opened on the public issue trackers. The security team can not review all new issues and relies on everyone in the company to identify and label issues as ~security and @-mention @gitlab-com/gl-security on issues.

For any reported vulnerability:

• Open a confidential issue in the appropriate issue tracker as soon as a report is verified. If the vulnerability was reported via a public issue, make the issue confidential. If triage is delayed due to team availability, the delay should be communicated.
• An initial determination should be made as to severity and impact. Never dismiss a security report outright. Instead, follow up with the reporter, asking clarifying questions.
• For next steps, see the process as it is detailed below for HackerOne reports, and adhere to the guidelines there for vulnerabilities reported in other ways as well in terms of frequency of communication and so forth.
• Remember to prepare patches, blog posts, email templates, etc. on dev or in other non-public ways even if there is a reason to believe that the vulnerability is already out in the public domain (e.g. the original report was made in a public issue that was later made confidential).

HackerOne Process

GitLab utilizes HackerOne for its bug bounty program. Security researchers can report vulnerabilities in GitLab applications or the GitLab infrastructure via the HackerOne website. Team members authorized to respond to HackerOne reports use procedures outlined here.

• If team availability has increased response times beyond 48 hours, a security team member should Add comment using the Week to respond template.
• When beginning work on a report, the security team member should assign the report to the themselves.
• Conduct initial communication with the reporter and investigation, using the following guidelines as necessary:
  • Request clarification
  • Attempt to verify the report and triage the vulnerability.
• Potential, non-bounty outcomes:
  • Report is out-of-scope. If actionable, issues may still be created, but further process may not be followed see violating the rules.
  • Report is a ~feature proposal as defined above and would not need to be made confidential or scheduled for remediation. An issue can be created, or requested that the reporter creates one if desired, but the report can be closed as "Informational".
  • Report is invalid. For example, we've gotten a number of reports for inline HTML in markdown that do not exceed the capabilities of markdown itself.
• If the report is valid, in-scope, and requires action or further investigation by the responsible engineering team:
  • Complete all steps of Creating a new security issue as above.
    • HackerOne provides an "export" option that simplifies copying data from the HackerOne issue to GitLab. Export the data in markdown format and paste it into the new issue.
    • Always add the ~HackerOne label to these issues, for later reporting and tracking.
    • @ mention engineering managers of appropriate teams, based on the current organization chart.
    • As applicable, notify relevant team members via the issue, chat, and email, depending on the chosen security level.
  • Change the state of the report to "Triaged" in HackerOne and include a link to the issue as the reference.
    • Fill in the comment using the Traiged-Escalated to engineering Common response as a template.
    • In the comment, include link to the confidential issue
• Continue to update the report in HackerOne when the issue is scheduled for a security release.
• Discussion and remediation of vulnerabilities can sometimes take longer than we would prefer. Even so, frequent communication with reporters is far better than leaving reporters in the dark, even if our progress is slow. Therefore:
  • For vulnerabilities where patches are actively being worked on, reporters should be updated at least weekly.
  • In the case where fixes are not as clear or discussion is still on-going as to whether a patch will be created at all, reporters should be notified of updates at least monthly.
  • In any case, no report should go "stale" where updates are not provided within the last month.

If a Report is Unclear

If a report is unclear, or the reviewer has any questions about the validity of the finding or how it can be exploited, now is the time to ask. Move the report to the "Needs More Info" state until the researcher has provided all the information necessary to determine the validity and impact of the finding. Use your best judgement to determine whether it makes sense to open a confidential issue anyway, noting in it that you are seeking more information from the reporter. When in doubt, err on the side of opening the issue.

One the report has been clarified, follow the "regular flow" described above.

If a Report Violates the Rules

If a report violates the rules of GitLab's bug bounty program use good judgement in deciding how to proceed. For instance, if a researcher has tested a vulnerability against GitLab production systems (a violation), but the vulnerability has not placed GitLab user data at risk, notify them that they have violated the terms of the bounty program but you are still taking the report seriously and will treat it normally. If the researcher has acted in a dangerous or malicious way, inform them that they have violated the terms of the bug bounty program and will not receive credit. Then continue with the "regular flow" as you normally would.

If the Report is Invalid

If the report is invalid (in your determination) or does not pose a security risk to GitLab or GitLab users it can be closed without opening an issue on GitLab.com. When this happens inform the researcher why it is not a vulnerability and close the issue as "Informational". HackerOne offers the option to close an issue as "Not Applicable" or "Spam". Both of these categories result in damage to the researcher's reputation and should only be used in obvious cases of abuse.

When a Patch is Ready

When a patch has been developed, tested, approved, merged into the security branch, and a new security release is being prepared it is time to inform the researcher via HackerOne. Post a comment on the HackerOne issue to all parties informing them that a patch is ready and will be included with the next security release. Provide release dates, if available, but try not to promise a release on a specific date if you are unsure.

This is also a good time to ask if they would like public credit in our release blog post and on our vulnerability acknowledgements page for the finding. We will link their name or alias to their HackerOne profile, Twitter handle, Facebook profile, company website, or URL of their choosing. Also ask if they would like the HackerOne report to be made public upon release. It is always preferable to publicly disclose reports unless the researcher has an objection.

CVE IDs

We use CVE IDs to uniquely identify and publicly define vulnerabilities in our products. Since we publicly disclose all security vulnerabilities 30 days after a patch is released, CVE IDs must be obtained for each vulnerability to be fixed. The earlier obtained the better, and it should be requested either during or immediately after a fix is prepared.

We currently request CVEs either through the HackerOne team or directly through MITRE's webform. Keep in mind that some of our security releases contain security related enhancements which may not have an associated CWE or vulnerability. These particular issues are not required to obtain a CVE since there's no associated vulnerability.

On Release Day

On the day of the security release several things happen in order:

• The new GitLab packages are published.
• All security patches are pushed to the public repository.
• The public is notified via the GitLab blog release post, security alerts email, and Twitter.
• The vulnerability acknowledgements page is updated with appropriate credits to the reporting researchers.

Once all of these things have happened notify the HackerOne researcher that the vulnerability and patch are now public. The GitLab issue should be closed and the HackerOne report should be closed as "Resolved". Public disclosure should be requested if they have not objected to doing so. Any sensitive information contained in the HackerOne report should be sanitized before disclosure.

Swag for Reports

GitLab awards swag codes for free GitLab swag to any reports that result in a security patch. Limit: 1 per reporter. When a report is closed, ask the reporter if they would like a swag code for free GitLab clothing or accessories. Swag codes are available by request from the marketing team.

External Code Contributions

We have a process in place to conduct security reviews for externally contributed code, especially if the code functionality includes any of the following:

• Processing credentials/tokens
• Storing credentials/tokens
• Logic for privilege escalation
• Authorization logic
• User/account access controls
• Authentication mechanisms

The Security Team works with our Community Outreach Team to ensure that security reviews are conducted where relevant. For more information about contributing, please reference the Contribute to GitLab page.

Security Questionnaires for Customers

Some customers, to keep up with regulations that impact their business, need to understand the security implications of installing any software - including software like GitLab.

Process

The current process for responding to customer requests is:

1. Refer a customer to our public statements on security here: /security/
2. If a customer still has questions that need to be discussed, you can engage a Solutions Architect in that discussion.
3. If the customer still needs a specific questionnaire filled out, create a confidential issue with the label Security and SA Backlog for the completion of that document
4. The SA team will take the first pass at the questionnaire using /security/ and this folder as a reference.
5. Once the SA team has completed what they can, the questionnaire will go to the security team for additional answers.
6. Once the questionnaire is complete, it will need to be approved by the Director of Security for release to the customer.
7. File the completed questionnaire in the example folder for future reference.

Vulnerability Scanning

GitLab maintains a custom vulnerability scanner that is used to regularly scan all GitLab assets for common vulnerabilities as well as previously patched GitLab vulnerabilities and to ensure that no GitLab security-sensitive services are accidentally exposed.

Details on this scanner and how it is configured are available to all team members in a Google Doc entitled "Vulnerability Scanner Config".

Package Signing

The packages we ship are signed with GPG keys, as described in the omnibus documentation. The process around how to make and store the key pair in a secure manner is described in the runbooks. Those runbooks also point out that the management of the keys is handled by the Security team and not the Build team. For more details that are specific to key locations and access at GitLab, find the internal google doc titled "Package Signing Keys at GitLab" on Google Drive.