Developer fixes three real security flaws while building AI-powered GitHub code-review bot

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A developer building a GitHub App called GitHub Autopilot — designed to review pull requests, scan for leaked secrets, and apply autofixes — discovered three significant security vulnerabilities during an internal audit. The first flaw was a fail-open authentication bug in the MCP server integration, where an auth-service timeout would silently grant access instead of denying it; this was corrected by enforcing a fail-closed default. The second issue involved trusting the client-supplied Content-Length header for payload size validation rather than measuring the actual bytes received, allowing oversized requests to bypass limits. A third vulnerability in the IP-based rate limiter caused unbounded memory growth by storing counters for every unique IP without expiry, posing a resource exhaustion risk. Addressing these issues also pushed the project's test coverage from 62% to 76% and converted 27 previously silent failures into logged, observable events.

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