GitHub Actions Native Egress Firewall – Early Access

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GitHub - github-early-access/actions-native-egress-firewall: Early access program for the GitHub Actions native egress firewall for GitHub hosted runners · GitHub

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Actions Native Egress Firewall — Early Access

Important<br>Status: Technical Preview. The native egress firewall is currently in technical preview for audit mode without rule enforcement. Linux is the only supported platform at this time.

Welcome to the early access program for the GitHub Actions native egress firewall . This program gives design partners hands on access to the firewall for GitHub-hosted runners, with both audit and enforcement (later date).

Getting started in early access

The native egress firewall builds on GitHub Actions' existing runner image architecture, but operates within the context of a nested-VM. Separating the runner from the firewall. We provide both a standard firewall enabled runner image and a larger firewall enabled runner image, giving customers the same image options they use today with native egress controls included. For now, logs are available as an artifact at the conclusion of a workflow run.

Runner access in early access:

Standard GitHub-hosted runners are available by default. Set runs-on: ubuntu-24.04-firewall in your workflow file.

Larger runners are available by request during technical preview. Open a larger runner access request and include:

whether access is for an enterprise or organization

the exact enterprise or organization name

a point of contact

After approval, ask your administrator to create a Linux larger runner using the GitHub-maintained Ubuntu 24.04 with Firewall image.

Note<br>Performance during preview. With the firewall enabled, expect roughly a 15–20% increase in workflow runtime for typical workloads, driven by the virtual machine monitoring your network traffic. Reducing this overhead is an active investment, and we will publish per-release performance deltas alongside public preview.

Reporting feedback

Issue report — report a bug, blocked request, false positive, or unexpected behavior.

Feature request — request a new rule kind, a managed rule, or a platform expansion.

Larger runner access request — request early access to larger runners using the Ubuntu 24.04 with Firewall image.

What is the native egress firewall?

GitHub hosted runners today allow unrestricted outbound network access. Any workflow can reach any host on the internet, regardless of GITHUB_TOKEN permissions, secret scoping, OIDC, or SHA pinning. Those controls govern identity, code, and what the workflow can do inside GitHub — but nothing today governs where the workflow can talk on the network.

The native egress firewall closes that gap. It runs outside the runner VM, inspects DNS and HTTP/HTTPS traffic, and remains immutable even if a workflow gains root access inside the runner. It complements — and does not replace — OIDC, SHA pinning, and GITHUB_TOKEN permissions; together they produce a workflow that is identified, deterministic, least-privileged, and network-bounded.

The capability ships in two modes:

Audit mode records every outbound DNS lookup and HTTP request without blocking anything. This is the safe entry point.

Enforcement mode (Future) applies an allow list. Traffic outside the list is blocked, recorded, and surfaced in the workflow summary with the offending command and the rule that denied it.

How HTTPS inspection works

To support URL-level allow rules, the firewall terminates TLS at the egress boundary and re-establishes TLS to the destination . Each workflow run gets a unique, ephemeral certificate that is destroyed when the run...

firewall github access egress native runner

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