About this guide
This guide describes the highest impact changes you can make to increase account security. Each section outlines a change you can make to your processes to improve the security. The highest impact changes are listed first.
What's the risk?
Account security is fundamental to the security of your supply chain. If an attacker can take over your account on GitHub, they can then make malicious changes to your code or build process. So your first goal should be to make it difficult for someone to take over your account and the accounts of other members of your organization.
Configure two-factor authentication
注意
自 2023 年 3 月起，GitHub 要求所有在 GitHub.com 上贡献代码的用户启用一种或多种形式的双因素身份验证 (2FA)。 如果你属于符合条件的组，当选择该组进行注册时，将收到一封通知电子邮件，该电子邮件标志着 45 天的 2FA 注册期开始，并且你会看到要求在 GitHub.com 上注册 2FA 的横幅。 如果没有收到通知，则表示你属于需要启用 2FA 的组，但我们强烈建议启用 2FA。
有关 2FA 注册推出的详细信息，请参阅此博客文章。
The best way to improve the security of your personal account is to configure two-factor authentication (2FA). Passwords by themselves can be compromised by being guessable, by being reused on another site that's been compromised, or by social engineering, like phishing. 2FA makes it much more difficult for your accounts to be compromised, even if an attacker has your password.
As a best practice, to ensure both security and reliable access to your account, you should always have at least two second-factor credentials registered on your account. Extra credentials ensures that even if you lose access to one credential, you won't be locked out of your account.
Additionally, you should prefer passkeys and security keys over authenticator apps (called TOTP apps) and avoid use of SMS whenever possible. Both SMS-based 2FA and TOTP apps are vulnerable to phishing, and do not provide the same level of protection as passkeys and security keys. SMS is no longer recommended under the NIST 800-63B digital identity guidelines.
If you're an organization owner, then you can require that all members of the organization enable 2FA.
To learn more about enabling 2FA on your own account, see 配置双重身份验证. To learn more about requiring 2FA in your organization, see 在你的组织中要求进行双因素身份验证.
Configure your personal account
GitHub supports several options for 2FA, and while any of them is better than nothing, the most secure option is a WebAuthn credential. WebAuthn requires an authenticator such as a FIDO2 hardware security key, a platform authenticator like Windows Hello, an Apple or Google phone, or a password manager. It's possible, although difficult, to phish other forms of 2FA (for example, someone asking you to read them your 6 digit one-time password). However WebAuthn is much more resistant to phishing, because domain scoping is built into the protocol, which prevents credentials from a website impersonating the login page from being used on GitHub.
When you set up 2FA, you should always download the recovery codes and set up more than one 2FA credential. This ensures that access to your account doesn't depend on a single device. For more information, see 配置双重身份验证 and 配置双重身份验证恢复方法.
Configure your organization account
If you're an organization owner, you can see which users don't have 2FA enabled, help them get set up, and then require 2FA for your organization. To guide you through that process, see:
Connect to GitHub using SSH keys
There are other ways to interact with GitHub beyond signing into the website. Many people authorize the code they push to GitHub with an SSH private key. For more information, see 关于 SSH.
Just like your account password, if an attacker were able to get your SSH private key, they could impersonate you and push malicious code to any repository you have write access for. If you store your SSH private key on a disk drive, it's a good idea to protect it with a passphrase. For more information, see 使用 SSH 密钥密码.
Another option is to generate SSH keys on a hardware security key. You could use the same key you're using for 2FA. Hardware security keys are very difficult to compromise remotely, because the private SSH key remains on the hardware, and is not directly accessible from software. For more information, see 生成新的 SSH 密钥并将其添加到 ssh-agent.