Fine-tune access to external actions

You can now fine-tune access to external actions. These updated settings make it easier to achieve your security and compliance goals with GitHub Actions.

Limiting to GitHub and GitHub-verified authors

GitHub authors a number of essential actions which are widely used, such as ‘checkout’. When you check the box for GitHub-authored actions, you’re allowing workflows to use any action in the GitHub organization or the actions organization, including those that will be created in the future.

You can also limit the community actions that can be executed to just those created by GitHub-verified authors. With GitHub-verified authors, GitHub ensures that the organization that created the action is authentic, and truly represents the company or entity which it appears to represent (GitHub does not review any code or security practices as part of its verification process). When you check the box for GitHub-verified authors, you’re allowing workflows to use any action in the verified author’s organization, including those  that will be created in the future.

Limiting to specific actions

The most secure way to use GitHub Actions includes a review of the source code of all external actions. You can now ensure that workflows use only those actions that have been reviewed by creating an explicit allow list. You can use the * syntax to create flexible patterns. When you use the allow list, only actions that patch a pattern in the list are allowed.

The allow list for specific actions can be used for any public repository, or private repositories that are part of a GitHub Enterprise plan.

Learn more

To get started with Actions policies, visit our documentation.

Written by

Jennifer Schelkopf

@jenschelkopf