Security Policy

Security Policy

Supported versions

AssayPDF is in pre-1.0 development. Only the latest released version on the main branch receives security fixes.

Version	Supported
0.1.x (current)	yes
anything older	no

Reporting a vulnerability

Please do not open a public GitHub issue for security problems.

Email [email protected] with:

• a description of the issue and the impact you believe it has,
• the AssayPDF version (uv run assay --version) and commit SHA,
• a minimal reproduction (input PDF, command line, or code snippet),
• any logs, stack traces, or proof-of-concept output.

If you’d prefer to encrypt, request a public key in your first email and we’ll respond with one before you send details.

What to expect

• Acknowledgement within 3 business days.
• Triage and severity assessment within 7 business days.
• Fix or mitigation timeline communicated once triage is done. Critical issues (RCE, arbitrary file write outside the working tree, credential exfiltration) are targeted for a patch release within 14 days.
• Public disclosure is coordinated with the reporter. We prefer a CVE + GitHub Security Advisory once a fix is available.

Scope

In scope:

• The assay_pdf Python package (CLI, generator, harness, scorer).
• Vendor-asset fetcher and SHA-256 verification logic in src/assay_pdf/vendor/.
• CI workflows under .github/workflows/ that have write access to the repository.
• Dependency confusion or typosquatting affecting pyproject.toml / uv.lock.

Out of scope:

• Vulnerabilities in third-party preflight engines (callas pdfToolbox, Enfocus PitStop, veraPDF, Ghostscript, qpdf, MuPDF). Report those upstream.
• Defects in the GWG 2022 specification itself.
• Findings against generated PDFs that depend on a downstream consumer mishandling a deliberately malformed test file — the corpus is, by design, full of files that violate PDF/X-4. That’s the product.
• Social-engineering attacks, physical attacks, or denial-of-service through obviously expensive operations (assay generate on the full corpus is intentionally not free).

Hardening notes

A few things to be aware of when running AssayPDF:

• assay fetch downloads assets from GWG-canonical URLs over HTTPS and verifies SHA-256 against vendor/checksums.json before writing. If a checksum mismatch occurs, the run aborts and nothing is unpacked.
• The harness invokes external binaries (verapdf, engine CLIs) with argument lists, never via shell. Engine output is parsed, not executed.
• Generated PDFs are written into the project’s corpus/ directory only. No paths are taken from network input.

Credit

We’re happy to credit reporters in the changelog and the GitHub Security Advisory, unless you ask to remain anonymous.