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.