While GitHub obsess over shoving AI into everything, the rest of the platform is genuinely crumbling and its security flaws are being abused to cause massive damage. Last week Aqua Security was breached and a few repositories it owns were infected. The threat actors abused widespread use of mutable references in GitHub Actions, which the community has been screaming about for years, to infect potentially thousands of CI runs. They also abused an issue GitHub has acknowledged but refused to fix that allows smuggling malicious Action references into workflows that look harmless.

GHA can’t even be called Swiss cheese anymore, it’s so much worse than that. Major overhauls are needed. The best we’ve got is Immutable Releases which are opt in on a per-repository basis.

Public service announcement

You can pin actions versions to their hash. Some might say this is a best practice for now. It looks like this, where the comment says where the hash is supposed to point.

      Old -->   uses: actions/checkout@v4
      New -->   uses: actions/checkout@11bd71901bbe5b1630ceea73d27597364c9af683 # v4

I worry that CI just got overcomplicated by default when providers started rocking up with templated YAML and various abstractions over it to add dynamic behaviour, dependencies, and so on.

Perhaps mixing the CI with the CD made that worse because usually deployment and delivery has complexities of its own. Back in the day you'd probably use Jenkins for the delivery piece, and the E2E nightlies, and use something more lightweight for running your tests and linters.

For that part I feel like all you need, really, is to be able to run a suite of well structured shell scripts. Maybe if you're in git you follow its hooks convention to execute scripts in a directory named after the repo event or something. Forget about creating reusable 'actions' which depend on running untrusted code.

Provide some baked in utilities to help with reporting status, caching, saving junit files and what have you.

The only thing that remains is setting up a base image with all your tooling in it. Docker does that, and is probably the only bit where you'd have to accept relying on untrusted third parties, unless you can scan them and store your own cached version of it.

I make it sound simpler than it is but for some reason we accepted distributed YAML-based balls of mud for the system that is critical to deploying our code, that has unsupervised access to almost everything. And people are now hooking AI agents into it.

> GHA can’t even be called Swiss cheese anymore, it’s so much worse than that.

That's a high bar though. Few things are better than Swiss cheese.

If you want more ammo for your ranting (no offense meant, I also rant): an issue as massive as https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/142308 lingering for years should do the trick.