GitHub Administration cheat sheet

Deployment type changes operating responsibilities.

Tokens remain limited by both owner authority and token permissions.

CODEOWNERS alone does not enforce required approval.

Logs, alerts and backups have actual scope and limits.

Workflow state and application outcome are different evidence.

Events, permissions and trust claims constrain credential exposure.

Runner groups alone do not isolate malicious code.

Redaction, caches and artifacts are not universal confidentiality guarantees.

Identification, authentication, authorisation and accounting are four distinct steps.

MFA needs two different factor categories, not two instances of one.

RBAC suits stable job roles; ABAC suits context-dependent, fine-grained rules.

Kerberos uses a KDC with TGT and service tickets for SSO.

Symmetric ciphers handle bulk data; asymmetric ciphers solve key distribution and signatures.

Signing uses a specified signature scheme with the signer’s private key; verification and custody are essential to origin evidence.

ECB leaks patterns; use authenticated modes such as GCM or encrypt-then-MAC.

Asset inventory and configuration baselines underpin every operational control.

Changes need an appropriate authorization path, recovery planning and relevant evidence.

Emergency changes still require retrospective documentation within a defined window.

Monitor log sources for silence, not just for events.

Distinguish historical Revision 2 phases from current NIST incident-response guidance integrated with broader risk management.

Containment precedes eradication in almost every scenario.

Capture volatile evidence (memory, connections) before disk and before power-off.

Distinguish tolerated data loss from tolerated interruption.

A recovery point and restore time must both meet the stated targets.

A same-failure-domain snapshot alone does not cover loss of that domain.

Verify complete restore procedures and actual dependency behavior.