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). This groups Dependabot PRs for GitHub Actions and enforces a minimum 7-day cooldown between updates. 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 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 CI/CD security by replacing mutable GitHub Actions references with full commit SHAs (improving supply-chain integrity and reproducibility) and updating Dependabot settings for Actions updates.

Changes:

• Pinned multiple workflow uses: references to full-length commit SHAs with version comments.
• Added a Dependabot github-actions update configuration and introduced a 7-day cooldown setting (but the placement/commenting needs adjustment for clarity).
• Updated version annotations on already-SHA-pinned actions for consistency.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 6 out of 6 changed files in this pull request and generated 2 comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
.github/workflows/stale-bot.yml	Pins actions/stale to a full commit SHA.
.github/workflows/pr-title-checker.yml	Pins amannn/action-semantic-pull-request to a full commit SHA.
.github/workflows/broken-links-checker.yml	Pins actions/checkout and lycheeverse/lychee-action; updates the version comment for tj-actions/changed-files.
.github/workflows/azure-dev.yml	Pins actions/checkout, Azure/setup-azd, and azure/login to full commit SHAs.
.github/workflows/azd-template-validation.yml	Pins actions/checkout but leaves another action on a mutable tag (see PR comment).
.github/dependabot.yml	Adds github-actions updates section and cooldown, but the cooldown placement/comment is misleading as written.

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