ci: drop contents and actions read from the scorecard job

[ryanhill1]

Follow-up to #94, which merged before this came up in review on qBraid/pyqasm#412. Same change is open there and needed on qbraid-algorithms.

Both permissions are private-repository only

contents: read and actions: read do nothing on a public repository. Evidence, strongest last:

1. The only Actions API call Scorecard makes is publicly readable. ListWorkflowRunsByFileName (checks/raw/github/packaging.go, checks/raw/binary_artifact.go) hits GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/workflows/{file}/runs. Requesting that for a public repo with no authentication at all returns 200 with total_count; /user returns 401 in the same session, confirming the request really was anonymous.

2. Upstream ships both commented out. actions/starter-workflows code-scanning/scorecard.yml:

         # Uncomment the permissions below if installing in a private repository.
         # contents: read
         # actions: read

3. OSSF dogfoods exactly this. ossf/scorecard and ossf/scorecard-action are both public and run with security-events: write and id-token: write alone. Their last five runs are green, and the checks that touch the Actions API score Packaging 10, Binary-Artifacts 10, CI-Tests 10. That is also the evidence for dropping contents: read — their actions/checkout step works without it.

Risk

Low but not zero. Both affected checks return an error rather than degrading if the API call fails, so a wrong call here would show as a check erroring rather than silently scoring low — visible, not silent. The run that merged with #1343 succeeded, so we have a known-good baseline to compare the next run against.

Worth noting Token-Permissions scores 9 rather than 10 on ossf/scorecard because they keep permissions: read-all at workflow level; ours is permissions: {}, which is stricter.

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Chores
  • Updated the security analysis workflow permissions to follow a more restrictive access model.
  • Preserved the permissions required to publish security findings and authenticate securely.

[coderabbitai]

No actionable comments were generated in the recent review. 🎉

ℹ️ Recent review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: Organization UI

Review profile: ASSERTIVE

Plan: Pro Plus

Run ID: 3f6e39f2-7567-483c-980c-eca58a309984

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 53da882 and 68f51d9.

📒 Files selected for processing (1)

• .github/workflows/scorecard.yml

Included review availability: Your plan provides up to 1 included review per hour; 0 remain after this review.

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Walkthrough

The Scorecard analysis job permissions were reduced. The job now requests only security-events: write and id-token: write.

Changes

Scorecard workflow permissions

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Reduce analysis job permissions .github/workflows/scorecard.yml	The job no longer requests contents: read or actions: read permissions. It retains security-events: write and id-token: write.

Estimated code review effort: 1 (Trivial) | ~3 minutes

Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to 68f51

This narrowly removes unnecessary read permissions from the Scorecard workflow; no actionable merge-blocking risk remains beyond normal checks and review.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly and concisely describes the primary change: removing the contents: read and actions: read permissions from the Scorecard job.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 0 functions across 0…
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

Full details: Docstring Coverage

Explanation

No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 0 functions across 0 files. (1 skipped: 1 unsupported.)

✨ Finishing Touches

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Commit unit tests in branch ci/scorecard-least-privilege

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[codecov]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.

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