Skip to content

Pin GitHub Actions to full-length commit SHAs - #66

Closed
Dan Fiedler (danfiedler-msft) wants to merge 1 commit into
microsoft:mainfrom
danfiedler-msft:danfiedler/pin-actions
Closed

Dan Fiedler (danfiedler-msft) wants to merge 1 commit into
microsoft:mainfrom
danfiedler-msft:danfiedler/pin-actions

Conversation

@danfiedler-msft

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Contributor

Summary

This PR pins GitHub Actions to full-length commit SHAs for improved security and reproducibility and adds a 7 day cooldown to Dependabot configuration for GitHub Actions. This work is described in more detail at https://aka.ms/action-pinning.

Why?

Pinning actions to commit SHAs prevents supply-chain attacks where a tag could be moved to point to malicious code. This is a recommended security best practice per the GitHub Actions security hardening guide.

This change mitigates the risk of tag retargeting to malicious code as seen in incidents like the tj-actions/changed-files action compromise or codfish/semantic-release-action compromise and improves the integrity and reproducibility of the CI/CD pipeline.

What changed?

Action pinning: Third-party action references in .github/workflows/ that used mutable tag-based references (e.g., actions/checkout@v4) have been updated to full-length commit SHAs with a version comment (e.g., actions/checkout@<sha> # v4) using the pinact tool. References that were already pinned to a SHA, or that used immutable release tags, were left unchanged.

Dependabot configuration: .github/dependabot.yml has been updated to ensure a github-actions package-ecosystem section is present with a cooldown configuration (default-days: 7). If the file did not exist, it was created. If a github-actions section already existed, only the cooldown block was added or its default-days value was increased to 7 if it was lower. The 7-day cooldown provides a window for the community to detect and report compromised releases before they are automatically proposed as updates, reducing exposure to supply-chain attacks via newly published malicious versions.

Is this safe to merge?

Yes. The pinned SHAs correspond to the same commits that the existing tags pointed to. No behavioral changes in action execution are introduced. You can verify the pinned SHA value using the GitHub REST API (e.g., the commit hash for actions/checkout@v7 can be found in the sha property in the JSON response for GET https://api.github.com/repos/actions/checkout/commits/v7).

Additional Information

For more information, please see https://aka.ms/action-pinning

@wmmc88

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Collaborator

superseded by #68

Melvin Wang (wmmc88) added a commit that referenced this pull request Nov 4, 2026
…68)

Picks up @danfiedler-msft's action pinning from #66 and brings it in
line with the follow-up work done in microsoft/windows-drivers-rs#745.

Actions are refreshed to their latest releases, and the
`dtolnay/rust-toolchain` steps that used `@stable`/`@nightly` now pass
`toolchain` explicitly since a SHA pin no longer carries the toolchain
in the ref. Dependabot now groups Cargo updates per dependency and
batches minor/patch action bumps, with staggered weekly runs to match
windows-drivers-rs.

Also does a one-time Cargo refresh. `windows-sys` 0.61 moved `BOOL` to
`windows_sys::core`, so `echoapp` needed a one-line import fix. Serde,
clap, thiserror and prettyplease stay on their latest Syn 2 releases to
avoid duplicate `syn` versions.

Supersedes #66.

---------

Co-authored-by: Dan Fiedler <danfiedler@microsoft.com>
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

None yet

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

2 participants