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

[github-actions]

Thank you for your contribution Dan Fiedler (@danfiedler-msft)! We will review the pull request and get back to you soon.

[azure-pipelines]

Azure Pipelines:
Successfully started running 1 pipeline(s).
31 pipeline(s) were filtered out due to trigger conditions.
There may be pipelines that require an authorized user to comment /azp run to run.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR hardens the repository’s GitHub Actions security posture by replacing mutable tag-based uses: references in workflows with full-length commit SHAs (for reproducibility and supply-chain risk reduction) and by introducing a Dependabot cooldown window for GitHub Actions updates.

Changes:

• Pin third-party GitHub Actions in .github/workflows/ to full 40-character commit SHAs with version comments (e.g., # vX.Y.Z).
• Add .github/dependabot.yml to enable grouped github-actions updates and apply a 7-day update cooldown (per GitHub’s Dependabot cooldown support documented in the Dependabot options reference).

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 8 out of 8 changed files in this pull request and generated no comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
.github/workflows/verify-links.yml	Pin actions/checkout to a full commit SHA for link verification workflow reproducibility.
.github/workflows/spring-docker-tests.yml	Pin actions/checkout and actions/setup-java to SHAs for deterministic Spring Docker CI.
.github/workflows/scheduled-event-processor.yml	Pin actions/upload-artifact to a SHA for deterministic artifact archival.
.github/workflows/post-apiview.yml	Pin actions/checkout to a SHA for deterministic APIView post-processing.
.github/workflows/event-processor.yml	Pin azure/login and actions/upload-artifact to SHAs for deterministic event processing.
.github/workflows/copilot-setup-steps.yml	Pin actions/checkout to a SHA for deterministic Copilot setup workflow execution.
.github/workflows/actionlint.yml	Pin actions/checkout to a SHA for deterministic workflow linting.
.github/dependabot.yml	Add Dependabot configuration for GitHub Actions with grouping and a 7-day cooldown.

---

💡 Add a code-review agent skill for context-aware, tailored reviews. Learn more in the docs.