microsoft / microsoft/sbom-tool

Lack of a "proper" Github Action prevents pinning to specific versions as hardening advice recomments.

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Description

Best practice in actions these days is to pin an action to its sha commit number. This prevents problems when an attacker compromises an action and releases a newer version with dodgy code.

The github actions instructions show there's no marketplace action at all for the SBOM tool, which means you can't follow the recommended best practices for third party actions.

The instructions to just curl down the latest release present the same risk that pinning an action would avoid (assuming any action you publish also downloads a specific version, rather than just latest).

While you could reduce the risk by having sbom generation run in a separate action, and upload its own artifact that way this is a bunch of work for a lot of people which could be avoid if you'd publish a marketplace action instead. Additionally, an action would also tie into dependabot nicely, giving users a notification, and appropriate PR when a new version is published.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with docs/setting-up-github-actions.md and review the current instructions for downloading the latest SBOM Tool release. Define how a published GitHub Action will be versioned and pinned, then update the instructions to use it. Done means the action is available for marketplace use and the documented workflow supports secure version pinning.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
github-actions
Domain
ci-cd, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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