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Bypassing GitHub Actions policies in the dumbest way possible


Jun 11, 2025 Tags: security TL;DR: GitHub Actions provides a policy mechanism for limiting the kinds of actions and reusable workflows that can be used within a repository, organization, or entire enterprise. Unfortunately, this mechanism is trivial to bypass.

The recent tj-actions attack typifies this: even popular, widely-used actions are themselves software components, with their own supply chains (and CI/CD setups). GitHub also provides special “preset” cases for this functionality, such as allowing only actions and reusable workflows that belong to the same organization namespace as the repository itself. The downside is that it would potentially break existing users of policies who also use local actions and reusable workflows, assuming there are significant numbers of them.

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