Workflow approval is a security gate in CI/CD systems that forces a human review before an untrusted automation job is allowed to run. It is commonly used for pull requests from forks, external contributors, or other sources that should not receive immediate access to privileged runners, secrets, or internal networks.
This control matters because build and deployment jobs often execute code with broad permissions. Without approval, malicious workflow steps can steal credentials, modify artifacts, or probe internal services. In defense, approval gates are paired with restricted runner access, secret scoping, and branch protection so that only trusted changes can reach sensitive automation. In attacks, threat actors try to bypass the gate, trick reviewers, or abuse misconfigured policies that approve jobs too broadly.