Pin GitHub Actions to full-length commit SHAs

[Dan Fiedler (danfiedler-msft)]

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

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This pull request improves CI/CD supply-chain security by pinning GitHub Actions to immutable full-length commit SHAs and introducing a Dependabot cooldown for GitHub Actions updates. This aligns the repo’s workflows with GitHub’s recommended Actions hardening practices and reduces exposure to tag-retargeting attacks.

Changes:

• Pinned actions/checkout, actions/setup-python, and github/codeql-action references to full-length commit SHAs (with version comments) for reproducibility.
• Added .github/dependabot.yml to manage github-actions updates and enforce a 7-day cooldown window.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 3 out of 3 changed files in this pull request and generated no comments.

File	Description
.github/workflows/python-package.yml	Pins checkout/setup-python actions to full commit SHAs for reproducible CI runs.
.github/workflows/codeql.yml	Pins checkout and CodeQL init/analyze actions to full commit SHAs for hardened code scanning.
.github/dependabot.yml	Adds Dependabot config for GitHub Actions updates, including a 7-day cooldown.

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[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Copilot reviewed 3 out of 3 changed files in this pull request and generated no new comments.

Suppressed comments (1)

.github/workflows/python-package.yml:25

• The PR description’s verification example references actions/checkout@v7, but this repo’s workflows use actions/checkout v4 (now pinned to v4.4.0). Consider updating the PR description example so readers can verify the correct major version/tag for this repo.

    - uses: actions/checkout@11d5960a326750d5838078e36cf38b85af677262 # v4.4.0