Actions policy to cap permissions for workflow

[anarazel]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Workflow Configuration

Discussion Details

Hi,

At the moment keeping workflows for PRs from doing something bad requires perfect diligence (for folks approving workflow runs for PRs) and full trust for everybody with permissions to trigger PR runs. For things like PRs it's quite rare that more than repo read permissions and caches etc are already appropriately scoped to prevent things like cache poisoning. But any PR author can modify the workflows to add permissions: packages: write or such. While that may be caught when the PR is opened, it's less likely to be caught after the 15th incremental update to a PR.

Leaving mistaken approvals of PRs modifying the CI workflow aside, it's also a real hassle for both maintainers and contributors to have to get approval for every update to a PR to see the CI results. If PRs were restricted to 'read' permissions, without being able to change that as part of the PR, there'd be much less to worry about WRT PRs doing evil things and we wouldn't need to be this vigilant (and therefore could safely do things like allowing PRs for regular contributors).

Therefore I'd really like an option to limit the permissions for workflows outside of the source code. It seems the in-preview "workflow execution protections" would be a good candidate for allowing orgs to limit the permissions.

Unfortunately, based on the limited documentation, it doesn't seem one can currently limit what permissions a workflow can grant itself, just whether the workflow is executed at all.

Given how crucial and commonplace CI is, I don't think it helps that much to be able to limit when workflows run, what is crucial is limit what permissions a workflow has when being run in some context.

Greetings,

Andres

[github-actions[bot]]

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