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GitLab 14.8 adds security approval policies, extends SSH support

Update to the GitLab devops platform introduces chainable security approval policies as the replacement for the deprecated Vulnerability-Check feature.

Newly arrived GitLab 14.8 updates the software delivery platform with hardware-backed authentication and security approval policies.

Announced February 22, GitLab 14.8 has new SSH key types supporting OpenSSH 8.2, with backing for FIDO/U2F hardware authenticators with ecdsa-sk and ed25519-sk key types. With this support, users can leverage hardware-backed SSH authentication.

GitLab also now supports flexible security approvals as the replacement for the deprecated Vulnerability-Check feature. These approvals are similar to Vulnerability-Check in that both can contain approvals for merge requests containing security vulnerabilities. 

But they introduce a number of new capabilities. Users can choose who can edit approval rules. Multiple rules can be created and chained together, allowing for filtering on severity thresholds for each scanner type. A single set of security policies can be applied to multiple development projects. And a two-step approval process can be enforced for desired changes to approval rules.

Security approval policies can be used alongside the existing Vulnerability-Check feature, but users are encouraged to migrate to the new policies.

The GitLab devops platform provides for software version control, CI/CD, security, test automation, priority management, and code review, as well as license compliance. Developers can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

In addition, auto-completion of CI/CD keywords has been added to the pipeline editor, to increase efficiency when writing and debugging pipelines.

Furthermore, audit events are provided on the group audit events page for user impersonation starting and stopping. This previously was available on a page unavailable to GitLab SaaS customers. Now, both self-managed and SaaS users can view these events, which indicate when an administrator impersonated another user.

Delving deeper, group owners can delete groups at the parent group level while GitLab Runner 14.8, a lightweight agent for running build jobs and sending results back to the GitLab instance, was released. The Apple M1 chip is supported. Also, GitLab 14.7, featuring streaming audit events and group access tokens, was released on January 22.