TL;DR, What is OpenSSF Allstar?
OpenSSF Allstar is a GitHub App that continuously enforces security best practices across your repositories. If you manage many GitHub projects, manually enforcing consistent policies like branch protection is difficult and often leads to configuration drift and security gaps. Allstar automates GitHub repository security by continuously monitoring for policy violations and taking corrective action. The app's continuous enforcement ensures your security controls remain active, preventing accidental misconfigurations and helping you maintain a strong security posture at scale. Developed by the Open Source Security Foundation (OSSF), Allstar helps reduce the workload for security and development teams by automating critical policy checks.
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At-A-Glance
GitHub: https://github.com/ossf/allstar
License: Apache-2.0
Primary Language: Go
Stars: 1.4k ⭐
Last Relevance: July 2024
Topics/Tags: security, policy-enforcement, github-app, ossf
Common use cases
1. Enterprise security governance: You can use Allstar to enforce a consistent security baseline across hundreds of repositories. The app automates compliance with internal standards for branch protection and code review, reducing the manual work for central security teams maintaining organization-wide GitHub repository security.
2. Open-source project hardening: Maintainers of open-source projects use Allstar to enforce security best practices automatically. Using Allstar builds trust with the community by showing a proactive commitment to supply chain security and transparent policy enforcement.
3. Continuous compliance and auditing: For teams preparing for audits like SOC 2, Allstar provides an automated way to enforce and document security controls. Allstar's continuous monitoring and issue tracking create a continuous record of compliance, which simplifies evidence gathering and shows consistent policy application over time.
4. Phased security policy rollout: When introducing new, stricter security policies across an organization, Allstar helps you roll out changes slowly. Teams can begin in a “log-only” or “issue-creation” mode to introduce the new requirements before switching to fully automated enforcement, which minimizes disruption to development teams.
5. Improving OSSF Security Scorecard ratings: A key use case is to directly address findings from the OSSF Security Scorecard. Projects can configure Allstar policies to automatically fix the specific gaps found by a Scorecard analysis, offering a direct path to improving their public security posture.
How does OpenSSF Allstar work?
Allstar operates as a distributed GitHub App that continuously monitors and enforces security best practices. The app integrates with your repositories through GitHub webhooks and regular polling, starting a security compliance pipeline whenever events like code pushes or setting changes occur.
Policy Engine: At Allstar's core, the policy engine evaluates repository and organization settings against a set of security policies you configure in YAML. These policies cover areas like branch protection, binary artifact detection, and collaborator management.
GitHub API Client: The GitHub API client communicates with GitHub's REST and GraphQL APIs to get the data needed for evaluation, including repository settings, metadata, and file contents.
Enforcement Engine: When the policy engine detects a violation, the enforcement engine takes action. You can configure the engine to log the issue, create a GitHub issue to notify developers, or perform auto-remediation by directly changing the non-compliant repository setting.
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Core Capabilities:
1. Continuous Policy Monitoring: Allstar provides real-time and periodic scanning of GitHub organizations to ensure continuous security enforcement. Using webhooks, Allstar instantly detects deviations from defined security policies, such as changes to repository settings. Constant oversight from Allstar prevents security drift and ensures that established standards for GitHub repository security are maintained without manual work, providing immediate feedback on compliance status.
2. Automated Enforcement and Remediation: The tool offers a flexible, graduated response to policy violations. You can configure actions ranging from passive logging and issue creation to fully automated remediation. This setup allows for GitHub branch protection automation and other setting corrections, enabling teams to start with notifications and progressively adopt a more hands-on enforcement model as they build confidence in the system's behavior.
3. Modular and Configurable Security Policies: Allstar implements security controls as separate, modular policies that you can individually enable and configure. This modular design allows organizations to adopt security measures one by one, tailoring the enforcement strategy to their specific risk profile and avoiding an all-or-nothing approach that could disrupt development workflows.
4. Hierarchical Policy-as-Code Configuration: Allstar uses a “policy as code for GitHub” approach with YAML configuration files managed in a central repository. The tool allows you to set organization-wide defaults while still permitting repository-level overrides. This hierarchical system provides a balance between centralized governance, ensuring a consistent security baseline, and the flexibility needed for individual teams or projects to adapt policies to their unique requirements.
5. OSSF Security Scorecard Integration: Allstar functions as an enforcement layer for the OSSF Security Scorecard by actively implementing the best practices that Scorecard measures. While Scorecard provides a useful assessment of a project's security posture, Allstar automates the process of achieving and maintaining a high score. The combination of the two tools creates a closed-loop system for improving and enforcing open-source security hygiene across projects.
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Limitations
1. GitHub Platform Lock-in: The tool is designed exclusively for the GitHub ecosystem. Organizations using other version control platforms like GitLab, Bitbucket, or self-hosted Git solutions cannot use its continuous security enforcement capabilities.
2. Potential Configuration Complexity: The hierarchical YAML-based configuration, while flexible, can become complex to manage in large organizations with numerous exceptions and overrides, potentially creating a steep learning curve for new administrators.
3. Requires High-Level Permissions: To perform automated remediation, the tool requires administrative privileges on repositories or the organization. Granting such extensive permissions to an automated system can introduce a new risk vector if not managed carefully.
4. Focused Scope on Repository Settings: Allstar primarily enforces policies related to repository configuration and metadata (e.g., branch protection, security files). Allstar is not a code scanning tool and does not detect vulnerabilities within the application code itself.
5. Risk of Disruptive Automation: If not configured with care, the auto-remediation feature can be disruptive. The feature may revert legitimate, temporary changes made by developers for debugging or emergency fixes, leading to workflow friction and frustration.
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Getting Started:
Step 1: Install the Allstar GitHub app.
Go to https://github.com/apps/allstar-app and click Configure. Select your target organization, then select the repositories you want to allow the tool to access.
Step 2: Create the .allstar config repository. Fork the sample repo at https://github.com/jeffmendoza/dot-allstar-quickstart by clicking “Use this template.” Name the new repository “.allstar” and click “Create repository from template.”
Step 3: Allstar is now active. Allstar's default security policies are enabled and will start monitoring your repositories for best practice adherence. Policy violations will generate a GitHub issue automatically.
Step 4: To customize configurations, edit files in your organization's .allstar repository as needed.
FAQ:
Alternatives
| Feature | OpenSSF Allstar | GitHub Native Security | GitArmor | Policy-as-code for GHAS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary Use Case | Continuous enforcement of security policies for GitHub repositories and organizations | A suite of security features integrated into the GitHub platform | A GitHub Action to enforce security policies as code | A GitHub Action for enforcing policies within GitHub Advanced Security |
| Policy Enforcement | Automated and continuous, with the ability to create issues or remediate | Varies by feature; some are automated, others require manual intervention | Enforced via GitHub Actions workflows | Enforced via GitHub Actions workflows |
| Integration | Integrates with GitHub as a GitHub App | Natively integrated into the GitHub platform | Integrates as a GitHub Action | Integrates as a GitHub Action |
| Cost | Free and open source | Some features are free for public repositories; others require a paid license | Free and open source | Requires a GitHub Advanced Security license |