Yes, this has been an issue for so long and GitHub just doesn't care enough to fix it.

There's another way it can be exploited. It's very common to pin Actions in workflows these days by their commit hash like this:

  - uses: actions/checkout@378343a27a77b2cfc354f4e84b1b4b29b34f08c2

GitHub just doesn't care about security. Actions is a security disaster and has been for over a decade. They would rather spend years migrating to Azure for no reason and have multiple outages a week than do anything anybody cares about.

> But this commit doesn't even have to belong to the preceding repository. You can reference a commit on a fork. Great way to sneak in an xz-utils style backdoor into critical CI workflows.

Wow. Does the SHA need to belong to a fork of the repo? Or is GitHub just exposing all (public?) repo commits as a giant content-addressable store?

yikes.. there should be the cli equivalent of that warning banner at the very least. combine this with something like gitc0ffee and it's downright dangerous