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 PR hardens the repository’s GitHub Actions supply chain by replacing mutable tag-based action references with full-length commit SHA pins, and updates Dependabot configuration to add a cooldown window for GitHub Actions updates.

Changes:

• Pinned actions/checkout, actions/setup-node, and github/codeql-action/* usages in workflows to full commit SHAs (with version comments).
• Added a github-actions Dependabot update entry with a 7-day cooldown (and configured grouping / schedule for those updates).

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 5 out of 5 changed files in this pull request and generated 1 comment.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
.github/workflows/UpgradeCompatibility.yml	Pins actions/checkout and actions/setup-node to full SHAs for upgrade-compat workflows.
.github/workflows/PrValidation.yml	Pins actions/checkout and actions/setup-node to full SHAs across PR validation matrix jobs.
.github/workflows/copilot-dependabot-agent.yml	Pins actions/checkout to a full SHA for the Copilot Dependabot agent workflow.
.github/workflows/codeql.yml	Pins actions/checkout and github/codeql-action/* to full SHAs for CodeQL scanning.
.github/dependabot.yml	Adds github-actions ecosystem updates with weekly schedule + 7-day cooldown (and groups).

Suppressed comments (1)

.github/dependabot.yml:18

• This change sets the github-actions Dependabot schedule interval to weekly. If the intent of this PR is only to add a 7-day cooldown (per the description), consider whether changing update frequency is desired and, if so, document it in the PR summary.

    schedule:
      interval: "weekly"

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