What's changed: New GH-500 Chapter 4 (approaches & setup = CodeQL [native dataflow SAST], third-party & SARIF ingestion, Actions default/external CI enablement, workflow templates, matrix builds, scan frequency; analysis & optimization = dataflow source→sink review, severity/category (CWE), alert lifecycle and autofix [validate], advanced config/query suites, scan-failure [build/language/resource] and performance troubleshooting)
4.2Analyzing, Triaging, and Optimizing Results
Understand reviewing scan results (including dataflow insights), the alert lifecycle and autofix/remediation workflows, dismissing alerts and managing severity/category, and advanced configuration plus troubleshooting scan failures/performance.
Alerts from scanning are triaged (classified/prioritized) and remediated. Code Scanning alerts, via dataflow analysis, show the path of "a dangerous value entering at a source and being exploitable at a sink," making the cause and blast radius easier to understand.
4.2.1Reviewing results and dataflow
Opening an alert shows the dataflow path (a source like user input → a sink of a dangerous operation). This reveals "why it’s vulnerable" and "where to cut it off to fix it," informing where to add input validation/sanitization. Each alert carries a severity and category (rule/CWE) used for prioritization.
4.2.2Alert lifecycle and autofix
Code Scanning alerts also follow open → resolved by a fix → (dismissed with reason if false positive/accepted). Autofix (Copilot Autofix) auto-suggests a fix for a detected vulnerability that developers review and adopt—but even autofix is validated before merge (don’t take it at face value). Once the code is fixed and re-scanned on the default branch, the alert is auto-resolved; if the same vulnerability reappears, it reopens.
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