GitHub Advanced Security step configuration

The GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) step in Harness STO enables you to scan your code repositories from the following GHAS products:

• CodeQL (SAST): Identify code vulnerabilities with CodeQL. Run scans in Orchestration, pull alerts via Extraction, or ingest results through Ingestion.
• Dependabot (SCA): Detect vulnerable open-source dependencies. Use Orchestration for live scans or Extraction and Ingestion to feed existing issues into STO.
• Secret Scanning: Find exposed secrets like API keys or tokens. STO supports Extraction and Ingestion of GitHub alerts.

info

• You can utilize custom STO scan images and pipelines to run scans as a non-root user. For more details, refer Configure your pipeline to use STO images from private registry.
• STO supports three different approaches for loading self-signed certificates. For more information, refer Run STO scans with custom SSL certificates.

The following topics contain useful information for setting up scanner integrations in STO:

• What's supported in STO
• Security Testing Orchestration FAQs
• Optimize STO pipelines

GitHub Advanced Security step settings

The recommended workflow is to add a GitHub Advanced Security step to a Security or Build stage and then configure it as described below.

Scan

Scan Mode

• Orchestration: The step executes a the scan, normalizes the results, and deduplicates them. This mode is supported for CodeQL and Dependabot scan modes.
• Extraction: The step pulls existing scan results from the GitHub API for CodeQL, Dependabot, or Secret Scanning.
• Ingestion: The step ingests a SARIF file containing results from a GHAS scan that you ran previously.

Scan Configuration

The predefined configuration to use for the scan. All scan steps have at least one configuration.

• CodeQL: Use for Static Application Security Testing (SAST).
• Dependabot: Use for Dependency scanning.
• Secret: Use to detect exposed secrets in your codebase.

Target

Type

• Repository Scan a codebase repo.

  In most cases, you specify the codebase using a code repo connector that connects to the Git account or repository where your code is stored. For information, go to Configure codebase.

Name

The identifier for the target, such as codebaseAlpha or jsmith/myalphaservice. Descriptive target names make it much easier to navigate your scan data in the STO UI.

It is good practice to specify a baseline for every target.

Variant

The identifier for the specific variant to scan. This is usually the branch name, image tag, or product version. Harness maintains a historical trend for each variant.

Workspace

The workspace path on the pod running the scan step. The workspace path is /harness by default.

You can override this if you want to scan only a subset of the workspace. For example, suppose the pipeline publishes artifacts to a subfolder /tmp/artifacts and you want to scan these artifacts only. In this case, you can specify the workspace path as /harness/tmp/artifacts.

Additionally, you can specify individual files to scan as well. For instance, if you only want to scan a specific file like /tmp/iac/infra.tf, you can specify the workspace path as /harness/tmp/iac/infra.tf

Ingestion File

The path to your scan results when running an Ingestion scan, for example /shared/scan_results/myscan.latest.sarif.

• The data file must be in a supported format for the scanner.

• The data file must be accessible to the scan step. It's good practice to save your results files to a shared path in your stage. In the visual editor, go to the stage where you're running the scan. Then go to Overview > Shared Paths. You can also add the path to the YAML stage definition like this:

      - stage:
        spec:
          sharedPaths:
            - /shared/scan_results

Authentication

Access Token

The access token to log in to the scanner. This is usually a password or an API key.

You should create a Harness text secret with your encrypted token and reference the secret using the format <+secrets.getValue("my-access-token")>. For more information, go to Add and Reference Text Secrets.

Use a GitHub fine-grained Personal Access Token with the following repository permissions, based on your scan mode.
Make sure Repository access is set to All repositories or Only selected repositories.

Scan Mode	Permission	Level
Orchestration (CodeQL, Dependabot)	Code scanning alerts	Read & Write
	Dependabot alerts	Read & Write
	Secret scanning alerts	Read & Write
Extraction (All Scan Configurations)	Code scanning alerts	Read-only
	Dependabot alerts	Read-only
	Secret scanning alerts	Read-only

Log Level

The minimum severity of the messages you want to include in your scan logs. You can specify one of the following:

• DEBUG
• INFO
• WARNING
• ERROR

Fail on Severity

Every STO scan step has a Fail on Severity setting. If the scan finds any vulnerability with the specified severity level or higher, the pipeline fails automatically. You can specify one of the following:

• CRITICAL
• HIGH
• MEDIUM
• LOW
• INFO
• NONE — Do not fail on severity

The YAML definition looks like this: fail_on_severity : critical # | high | medium | low | info | none

Additional Configuration

The fields under Additional Configuration vary based on the type of infrastructure. Depending on the infrastructure type selected, some fields may or may not appear in your settings. Below are the details for each field

• Override Security Test Image
  • Container Registry
  • Image Tag
• Privileged
• Image Pull Policy
• Run as User
• Set Container Resources
• Timeout

Advanced settings

In the Advanced settings, you can use the following options:

• Conditional Execution
• Failure Strategy
• Looping Strategy
• Policy Enforcement

Proxy settings

This step supports Harness Secure Connect if you're using Harness Cloud infrastructure. During the Secure Connect setup, the HTTPS_PROXY and HTTP_PROXY variables are automatically configured to route traffic through the secure tunnel. If there are specific addresses that you want to bypass the Secure Connect proxy, you can define those in the NO_PROXY variable. This can be configured in the Settings of your step.

If you need to configure a different proxy (not using Secure Connect), you can manually set the HTTPS_PROXY, HTTP_PROXY, and NO_PROXY variables in the Settings of your step.

Definitions of Proxy variables:

• HTTPS_PROXY: Specify the proxy server for HTTPS requests, example https://sc.internal.harness.io:30000
• HTTP_PROXY: Specify the proxy server for HTTP requests, example http://sc.internal.harness.io:30000
• NO_PROXY: Specify the domains as comma-separated values that should bypass the proxy. This allows you to exclude certain traffic from being routed through the proxy.