Pin GitHub Actions to full-length commit SHAs

[Microsoft Open Source Security Bot (OssSecurityBot)]

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.

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).

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_{For more information, visit https://aka.ms/action-pinning}

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR hardens the repository’s CI/CD supply chain by replacing mutable GitHub Action references (e.g., @v4) with full-length commit SHAs across workflows, and adds a Dependabot configuration for GitHub Actions updates with a 7-day cooldown.

Changes:

• Pinned third-party GitHub Actions in .github/workflows/*.yml to full commit SHAs with version comments.
• Added .github/dependabot.yml to enable grouped GitHub Actions updates and enforce a 7-day cooldown.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 24 out of 24 changed files in this pull request and generated 1 comment.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
.github/workflows/release-raiutils.yml	Pin actions/checkout and actions/setup-python to SHAs for release workflow reproducibility.
.github/workflows/release-rai-vision.yml	Pin actions/checkout and setup-miniconda to SHAs.
.github/workflows/release-rai-text.yml	Pin actions/checkout and setup-miniconda to SHAs.
.github/workflows/release-rai-test-utils.yml	Pin checkout, setup-python, and setup-miniconda to SHAs.
.github/workflows/release-rai-tabular.yml	Pin multiple actions (checkout, setup-node, artifacts, miniconda, npm-publish) to SHAs.
.github/workflows/release-nlp-feature-extractors.yml	Pin checkout and setup-python to SHAs.
.github/workflows/release-flask.yml	Pin checkout and setup-python to SHAs.
.github/workflows/release-erroranalysis.yml	Pin checkout and setup-python to SHAs.
.github/workflows/python-linting.yml	Pin checkout and setup-python to SHAs.
.github/workflows/GitHubPages.yml	Pin checkout, setup-python, and actions-gh-pages to SHAs.
.github/workflows/codeql.yml	Pin checkout and github/codeql-action steps to SHAs.
.github/workflows/CI-typescript.yml	Pin checkout, setup-node, and artifact actions to SHAs.
.github/workflows/CI-responsibleai-text-vision-pytest.yml	Pin checkout, setup-miniconda, artifacts, and codecov-action to SHAs.
.github/workflows/CI-raiwidgets-pytest.yml	Pin checkout, setup-miniconda, setup-node, artifacts, and codecov-action to SHAs.
.github/workflows/CI-rai_core_flask-pytest.yml	Pin checkout, setup-python, artifacts, and codecov-action to SHAs.
.github/workflows/CI-python.yml	Pin checkout, setup-python, artifacts, and codecov-action to SHAs.
.github/workflows/CI-notebook.yml	Pin checkout, setup-miniconda, setup-node, and artifact actions to SHAs.
.github/workflows/CI-notebook-vision.yml	Pin checkout, setup-miniconda, setup-node, and artifact actions to SHAs.
.github/workflows/CI-notebook-text.yml	Pin checkout, setup-miniconda, setup-node, and artifact actions to SHAs.
.github/workflows/CI-e2e-notebooks.yml	Pin checkout, setup-node, miniconda, and artifact actions to SHAs.
.github/workflows/CI-e2e-notebooks-text-vision.yml	Pin checkout, setup-node, miniconda, and artifact actions to SHAs.
.github/workflows/CI-codescan.yml	Pin checkout and github/codeql-action steps to SHAs.
.github/workflows/CD.yml	Pin several actions to SHAs for deployment workflow hardening (but one mutable reference remains).
.github/dependabot.yml	Add Dependabot config for GitHub Actions with grouping and 7-day cooldown.

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