v5.3.1

Changed

• Reviewed dependency maintenance. Adopt OpenAI SDK 3.24, pyodbc 5.3 and
  React Refresh lint plugin 0.5.5 with matching dependency manifests and
  generated frontend lock. Retain the compatible Agent Framework, Search,
  Azure Monitor, MSAL and Tailwind dependency families.
• Prompt template escaping. Enable Jinja autoescaping for local prompt
  templates and reusable agent instructions. Substituted markup and special
  characters are now entity-encoded; literal template text and strict missing
  variable checks remain unchanged. Review prompt expectations for those
  values when adopting this security update.
• Shared repository protection standard. Require pull requests and passing
  quality, behavior and frontend checks without mandatory second-person review.
  Restrict the workflow integrity guard to the quality pipeline instead of
  unrelated automations, preserve evaluator and policy protections, and route
  ownership to the maintainer without requesting another reviewer.

Fixed

• Security dependency updates. Upgrade aiohttp and PyJWT to patched
  releases and refresh dashboard tooling and transitive dependencies. Vite 6
  replaces the vulnerable Vite 5 dashboard toolchain. A scoped patched
  selector-parser override removes Tailwind typography's vulnerable pin.
  Pair hosted responses 2.0.0b1 with core SDK 2.2.0 so clean installs retain
  the experimental API required by the pinned response adapter.
• Bounded deletion diagnostics. Log confirmed conversation deletion
  without interpolating user-controlled conversation or principal IDs.
• Explicit deployment workflow permissions. Limit the manual dev workflow's
  GitHub token to repository content read access without changing Azure
  credentials, deployment steps or its manual-only trigger.
• Immutable GitHub Actions references. Pin the remaining workflow actions
  to verified full-length commit SHAs without changing their selected versions,
  and require agents to preserve SHA pinning when editing or regenerating CI.

Validation

• Release PR Azure/agent-app-orchestrator#425 passed all required repository checks and the protected quality gate. The main release tree matches that validated candidate.
• Shared contract files are unchanged from the previous stable release.
• Validation was offline; no Azure deployment or live Azure end-to-end test was performed.

Publication scope and recovery

• This release publishes the source tag and GitHub Release only, not a container image or Python package.
• Prefer a forward corrective patch if an adoption issue appears; preserve immutable published tags. Previous stable reference: v5.3.0.