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

[github-actions]

Performance comparison

Threshold: regressions >15.0% on gating scenarios fail the build. Higher ops/s is better; positive Δ means the PR is slower.

Scenario	Gating	Baseline (ops/s)	Candidate (ops/s)	Δ %	Status
azure_monitor_log	yes	19,221.2	18,915.0	+1.62%	✅
azure_monitor_span	yes	154,511.7	155,690.5	-0.76%	✅
otel_log	no	22,349.9	22,024.0	+1.48%	✅
otel_span	no	39,311.3	39,142.0	+0.43%	✅

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR hardens the repository’s CI/CD supply chain by replacing mutable GitHub Actions tag references with full-length commit SHAs across workflows, and adds a Dependabot configuration to manage GitHub Actions updates more conservatively.

Changes:

• Pinned third-party GitHub Actions in .github/workflows/ to full 40-character commit SHAs (with version comments for readability).
• Added .github/dependabot.yml to enable grouped GitHub Actions updates and enforce a 7-day cooldown before proposing newly released action versions.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 9 out of 9 changed files in this pull request and generated no comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
.github/workflows/pr-validation.yml	Pins checkout/setup-python/upload-artifact actions to full SHAs for PR validation jobs.
.github/workflows/performance.yml	Pins checkout/setup-python/upload-artifact actions to full SHAs for perf benchmarking workflow.
.github/workflows/performance-comment.yml	Pins checkout/download-artifact/setup-python/sticky-comment actions to full SHAs for trusted comment posting.
.github/workflows/needs-author-feedback.yml	Pins actions/github-script to a full SHA for issue automation.
.github/workflows/needs-author-feedback-followup.yml	Pins actions/github-script to a full SHA for scheduled follow-up automation.
.github/workflows/issue-notify.yml	Pins checkout and actions/github-script to full SHAs for CODEOWNERS notification workflow.
.github/workflows/issue-auto-label.yml	Pins actions/github-script to a full SHA for auto-labeling workflow.
.github/workflows/docs.yml	Pins checkout/setup-python/upload-pages-artifact/deploy-pages actions to full SHAs for docs publishing.
.github/dependabot.yml	Adds Dependabot GitHub Actions updates with grouping and a 7-day cooldown.

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