user-management

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Bring Your Own Identity Provider to Enterprise Managed Users

GitHub Enterprise Cloud’s open support for the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) specification is now generally available for Enterprise Managed Users (EMUs). This allows administrators to mix and match their preferred choices of SAML and SCIM identity systems, providing the flexibility required to meet access management needs.

This release also includes significant improvements for security and auditing:
– A new reduced personal access token (PAT) scope, scim:enterprise, now lets you grant a least privilege, enterprise-level permission set just for read and write access to GitHub’s EMU SCIM API. Use of the admin:enterprise PAT scope is no longer required or recommended.
– New audit log entries exist for SCIM events to enable debugging of any provisioning failures with SCIM APIs.

Learn more about lifecycle management of Enterprise Managed Users with the SCIM API.

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Lower permissions for GitHub Enterprise Cloud Team Sync for Microsoft Entra ID

You can now use GitHub Enterprise Cloud Team Sync for Microsoft Entra ID with a new lower permission, GroupMember.Read.All, to sync group state into GitHub.

The new permission provides the least privileged permissions needed in order to access data and function correctly. New installations will request the new permission while existing installations will continue to work without interruption.

Administrators who wish to reduce the permissions of their existing installation can reinstall the application, or use the App Role Assignments API to modify the permissions of their existing service.

Learn more about team synchronization.

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Add repository permissions to custom organization roles

You can now add repository permissions to custom organization roles, granting a specific level of access to all the repositories in your organization.

This builds on the release of organization-wide permission grants in GitHub’s pre-defined organization roles. These updates enable admins to easily scale access management across large teams and organizations.

Creating a custom organization role using the new repository permissions. The role is based on the Write base role, and adds 3 permissions - delete issues, request solo merge, and update repo properties

Using repository permissions in organization roles

Organization roles do not have to contain organization permissions (i.e. read_org_audit_log) in order to include a repository role and permissions (i.e. close_issue). This lets you create your own versions of the pre-defined organization base roles like Write or Triage, assigning those roles to everyone in your organization to ensure a set standard of access that matches your requirements.

A popular use case is to create elevated roles for your on-call rotation. For instance, a role based on Write with the “Jump the merge queue” and “Request a solo merge” repository permissions added so that your on-call team can get that fixed quickly. Using the APIs you can automate assignment of this role to your current on-call, granting them those elevated permissions as a break-glass or shift-based privilege.

Managing repository access

Both the UI for organization role creation and the REST API have been updated to support repository permissions.

In addition, we’ve updated the repository access management page to distinguish between access granted by the repository owner to a user or team versus organization-wide grants made by the organization owner. This helps explain how a user got access to a specific repository.

The new repository collaborators view, showing the organization based access.

For more information, see GitHub’s documentation as well as the REST API methods for automating role creation and assignment.

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Secret scanning supports user namespace repositories for Enterprise Managed Users

Enterprise Managed Users can now enable secret scanning on their user namespace repositories. Owners of user repositories will receive secret scanning alerts when a supported secret is detected in their repository. User namespace repositories can also enable push protection.

In the enterprise level list of secret scanning alerts, enterprise owners can view all secrets detected in user namespace repositories. Enterprise owners can temporarily access user namespace repositories to view the secret details.

User namespace repositories are included in the security risk and coverage pages.

Secret scanning will also be supported on Enterprise Server personal repositories starting on GHES 3.13.

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EMU SCIM audit log, metadata, and sync status enhancements are generally available

In early November we announced a set of changes to improve troubleshooting SCIM activity at scale for enterprise managed users. Today, we are making each of those changes generally available. No updates were required during the public beta period. The following restates the beta changes that are now GA.

Enterprise audit log fields:

  • New field external_group.update_display_name: Our logs will now capture and report any changes made to an external group's display name.
  • New field external_group.add_member: When a team member is added to an external group, this action will be audit logged.
  • New field external_group.remove_member: When a team member is removed from an external group, this action will be audit logged.
  • Enhancements to external_group.update and external_identity.update to ensure consistency whenever an external group or identity is updated.

The SSO page for each user also now includes SCIM metadata for that user in addition to existing SAML metadata. Check out what's new by filling in this url https://github.com/enterprises/your-enterprise/people/username/sso with your enterprise and a valid username.

Team membership synchronization status checks GitHub's understanding of identity groups against the current members of linked teams. This allows us to flag mismatches for administrators related to license allocation or other concerns.

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Learn more about external group audit log fields and troubleshooting EMU team memberships.

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Custom Organization Roles are now GA

Organization owners can now create and assign custom organization roles, which grant members and teams specific sets of privileges within the organization. Like custom repository roles, organization roles are made up of one or more fine-grained permissions, such as “read audit logs” or “manage repository rulesets”, and apply to the organization itself rather than the repository. This feature is available in all Enterprise Cloud organizations and will come to GitHub Enterprise Server by version 3.13.

A screenshot of the role creation page, with a new role called "Auditor" that grants access to just the audit log permission.

Today, organization custom roles supports 10 permissions:

Roles can be assigned by an organization owner only, to prevent accidental escalation of privileges, and can be assigned to users and teams. Multiple organization roles can be assigned directly to a user or team. Users and teams inherit roles from the teams they are a part of.

A screenshot showing a user that's assigned to two different roles.

More organization permissions will be built over time, similar to how repository permissions were added as well. If you have a specific permission you’d like to see added please get in touch with your account team or let us know in the discussion below. Everything you can see in the organization settings menu is an option, and we’ll be working with teams across GitHub to get those permissions created.

To learn more about custom organization roles, see “About custom organization roles“, and for the REST APIs to manage and assign these roles programmatically see “Organization roles“. For feedback and suggestions for organization permissions, please join the discussion within GitHub Community.

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[Public Beta] Administrative enhancements to Enterprise Managed Users SCIM

GitHub Enterprise Cloud customers with Enterprise Managed Users (EMU) now have access to additional administrative capabilities for SCIM information. Troubleshooting user management at scale can take time and effort. To make this easier on administrators, we have added several new audit log fields, external identity metadata, and a new team membership synchronization status. The audit log field updates include the following:

  • New field external_group.update_display_name: Our logs will now capture and report any changes made to an external group’s display name.
  • New field external_group.add_member: When a team member is added to an external group, this action will be audit logged.
  • New field external_group.remove_member: When a team member is removed from an external group, this action will be audit logged.
  • Enhancements to external_group.update and external_identity.update to ensure consistency whenever an external group or identity is updated.

The SSO page for each user also now includes SCIM metadata for that user in addition to existing SAML metadata. Check out what’s new by filling in this url https://github.com/enterprises/your-enterprise/people/username/sso with your enterprise and a valid username.

Team membership synchronization status checks GitHub’s understanding of identity groups against the current members of linked teams. This allows us to flag mismatches for administrators related to license allocation or other concerns.

image

Learn more about external group audit log fields and troubleshooting EMU team memberships.

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Enterprise managed users support for Ping Federate is now generally available

Now generally available, GitHub Enterprise Cloud customers with enterprise managed users (EMU) can integrate with Ping Federate as a formally supported SSO and SCIM identity provider. To get started, download the Ping Federate "GitHub EMU Connector 1.0" from the add-ons tab on the download page, under the "SaaS Connectors" heading. Add the connector to your Ping Federate installation and consult the Ping Federate documentation in addition to GitHub's SAML SSO and SCIM documentation for configuration.

The Ping Identity logo

The "GitHub EMU Connector" is maintained and supported by our partner, Ping Identity. Ping additionally maintains their own release notes for this connector.

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Enterprise managed users connector support for Ping Federate is now in public beta

GitHub Enterprise Cloud customers with enterprise managed users (EMU) can now integrate with Ping Federate as a formally supported SSO and SCIM identity provider in public beta. To get started, download the Ping Federate "GitHub EMU Connector 1.0" from the add-ons tab on the download page, under the "SaaS Connectors" heading. Add the connector to your Ping Federate installation and consult the Ping Federate documentation in addition to GitHub's SAML SSO and SCIM documentation for configuration.

PIC-Square-Logo-Primary

The "GitHub EMU Connector" is maintained and supported by our partner, Ping Identity. Ping additionally maintains their own release notes for this connector.

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Limit scope of npm tokens with the new granular access tokens

You can now create access tokens with limited scope using the new granular access tokens functionality in npm. With granular access tokens, you can:

  • Restrict which packages and/or scopes a token has access to
  • Grant tokens access to specific organizations for user management
  • Set a token expiration date
  • Limit token access based on IP address ranges
  • Select between read and/or write access

Tokens with least privileges protects your npm packages from accidental or malicious misuse of your token. These tokens also allow you to manage your npm org and teams from a CI/CD pipeline. Granular access tokens are specifically built for automation and do not require 2FA. We recommend using granular access tokens with least privileges while you automate publishing and org management activities.

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Azure AD OIDC and Conditional Access support for GHEC EMUs

Enterprises that use Enterprise Managed Users (EMUs) to authenticate their accounts via Azure Active Directory can now use Azure AD location-based Conditional Access policies to protect the use of PATs and SSH keys. This requires the use of a new OpenID Connect-based application rather than a SAML integration. To learn more, read about enforcing Azure AD Conditional Access for PATs and SSH keys.

Note: this feature is currently in public beta for new and existing Azure AD EMU enterprises.

For more information:

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Enterprise admin only policy for outside collaborators

Enterprise owners can now prevent organization owners from inviting outside collaborators to repositories in their enterprise. The "Repository outside collaborators" policy includes an additional option, "Enterprise admins only", which restricts the ability to invite outside collaborators only to users with admin permissions to the enterprise. For more info, see "Enforcing a policy for inviting outside collaborators to repositories".

Shows the new option "Enterprise admins only" in the "Repository outside collaborators" policy

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