If you use devcontainer.json files to define your development containers, you will now be able to use Dependabot version updates to keep your Features up-to-date. Once configured in dependabot.yml, Dependabot will open pull requests on a specified schedule to update the listed Features to latest. This ensures Features are pinned to the latest major version in the associated devcontainer.json file. If a dev container has a lockfile, that file will also be updated. Dependabot security updates for dev containers are not supported at this time.
CodeQL 2.16.1: Swift 5.9.2 Support, New Queries, and Scanned-File Count Changes
CodeQL 2.16.1 is now available to users of GitHub code scanning on github.com, and all new functionality will also be included in GHES 3.13. Users of GHES 3.12 or older can upgrade their CodeQL version.
Important changes in this release include:
Swift 5.9.2 is now supported.
We added a new query for Swift, swift/weak-password-hashing, to detect the use of inappropriate hashing algorithms for password hashing and a new query for Java, java/exec-tainted-environment, to detect the injection of environment variables names or values from remote input.
We improved the tracking of flows from handler methods of a PageModel class to the corresponding Razor Page (.cshtml) file, which may result in additional alerts from some queries.
JavaScript now supports doT templates and Go added support for AWS Lambda functions and fasthttp framework.
In the previous version, 2.16.0, we announced that we will update the way we measure the number of scanned files in the Code Scanning UI. This change is now live for JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Ruby, Swift, and C#.
For a full list of changes, please refer to the complete changelog for version 2.16.1.
CodeQL 2.16.0 is now available to users of GitHub code scanning on github.com, and all new functionality will also be included in GHES 3.13. Users of GHES 3.12 or older can upgrade their CodeQL version.
Important changes in this release include:
In July 2023, we disabled automatic dependency installation for new CodeQL code scanning setups when analyzing Python code. With the release of CodeQL 2.16.0, we have disabled dependency installation for all existing configurations as well. This change should lead to a decrease in analysis time for projects that were installing dependencies during analysis, without any significant impact on results. A fallback environment variable flag is available to ease the transition, but will be removed in CodeQL 2.17.0. No action is required for Default setup users. Advanced setup users that had previously set the setup-python-dependencies option in their CodeQL code scanning workflows are encouraged to remove it, as it no longer has any effect.
We fixed a bug that could cause CodeQL to consume more memory than configured when using the --ram flag. If you have used this flag to manually override the memory allocation limit for CodeQL, you may be able to increase it slightly to more closely match the system’s available memory. No action is required for users of the CodeQL Action (on github.com or in GHES) who are not using this flag, as memory limits are calculated automatically.
We added 2 new C/C++ queries that detect pointer lifetime issues, and identify instances where the return value of scanf is not checked correctly. We added a new Java query that detects uses of weakly random values, which an attacker may be able to predict. Furthermore, we improved the precision and fixed potential false-positives for several other queries.
The measure of scanning Go files in the code scanning UI now includes partially extracted files, as this more accurately reflects the source of extracted information even when parts of a file could not be analyzed. We will gradually roll this change out for all supported languages in the near future.
We fixed a bug that led to errors in build commands for Swift analyses on macOS that included the codesign tool.
For a full list of changes, please refer to the complete changelog for version 2.16.0 and 2.15.5.