Keeping your account and data secure

You can securely access your account's resources by authenticating to GitHub, using different credentials depending on where you authenticate.

Secure your GitHub account with a strong and unique password using a password manager.

GitHub credentials include not only your password, but also the access tokens, SSH keys, and application API tokens you use to communicate with GitHub. Should you have the need, you can reset all of these access credentials yourself.

You should create a personal access token to use in place of a password with the command line or with the API.

To keep your credentials secure, you should regularly audit your SSH keys, deploy keys, and review authorized applications that access your GitHub account.

You should review deploy keys to ensure that there aren't any unauthorized (or possibly compromised) keys. You can also approve existing deploy keys that are valid.

You can connect your GitHub identity to third-party applications using OAuth. When authorizing an OAuth App, you should ensure you trust the application, review who it's developed by, and review the kinds of information the application wants to access.

You can review your authorized integrations to audit the access that each integration has to your account and data.

You can connect your GitHub identity to third-party applications using OAuth. When authorizing one of these applications, you should ensure you trust the application, review who it's developed by, and review the kinds of information the application wants to access.

You should review your authorized applications to verify that no new applications with expansive permissions are authorized, such as those that have access to your private repositories.

You can review the security log for your user account to better understand actions you've performed and actions others have performed that involve you.

If you commit sensitive data, such as a password or SSH key into a Git repository, you can remove it from the history. To entirely remove unwanted files from a repository's history you can use either the git filter-branch command or the BFG Repo-Cleaner open source tool.

If you upload an image to GitHub, the URL of the image will be modified so your information is not trackable.

GitHub serves applications from multiple IP address ranges, which are available using the API.

Public key fingerprints can be used to validate a connection to a remote server.

GitHub asks you for your password before you can modify your email address, authorize third-party applications, or add new public keys, or initiate other sudo-protected actions.

You may be alerted to a security incident in the media, such as the discovery of the Heartbleed bug, or your computer could be stolen while you're signed in to GitHub. In such cases, changing your password prevents any unintended future access to your account and projects.