Five field reports in the 24 hours after v0.10.0 all pointed at the same thing:
gates that were right in principle refused real, ordinary setups, and then
failed to say why. Per the consolidated strictness decision, each gate keeps the
protection that matters and drops the part that was refusing legitimate users —
and every refusal now names what it refused and how to proceed.
**Daemon image gate: npx and every ephemeral install path (#1539, #1383).**
The admission check treated "the peer's image hashes differently" and "the
peer's image cannot be examined at all" as one failure. The second is what
`npx codebase-memory-mcp` always produces (ephemeral cache path,
unfingerprintable), so every npx-invoked client was rejected — and, because the
client never reported it, agents saw a transport that closed mid-handshake with
zero bytes on stdout. Reported by @wassolles with the admission path already
read and the fix space mapped.
An unverifiable image is now admitted: the rendezvous HELLO immediately above it
has already proven semantic version, build fingerprint, and protocol/store/
feature ABI, and the image check was trading that real proof for an unavailable
one. It logs daemon.client_image_unverifiable_admitted so the weaker check is
never invisible. A fingerprint MISMATCH — the tamper case the gate exists for —
still rejects hard. Separate test seams keep the two modes testable apart.
**Client bootstrap failures are no longer silent (#1539).**
An MCP client that cannot reach the daemon now emits a JSON-RPC error on stdout
naming the reason, plus the same text on stderr. Previously the reason sat in
bootstrap_result.message and the process exited having written nothing at all.
**POSIX activation: group-writable ancestors (#1535, discussion #1526).**
activation_directory_secure required no group or other write bit on the install
directory AND every ancestor. WSL2 ships ~ and ~/.local at 0775, as do several
distro skeletons and any site using a shared primary group, so install.sh failed
for a large fraction of Linux users — reporting a policy refusal as "activation
transaction I/O failed", which sent reporters after disk errors and filesystem
types. Root-caused by @AmirF194 in a clean ubuntu container; @shochdoerfer and
@iandol confirmed independently.
World-writable ancestors are still refused (any local user could swap a path
component mid-transaction). Group-writable ancestors are now warned about and
admitted. The LEAF directory stays strictly owner-private — that is where the
binary is published, and group write there would let another account replace the
executable between validation and exec. Refusals now name the directory, its
mode, and which rule refused.
**The obsolete ui/standard chooser (#1538, from discussion #1526).**
v0.10.0 consolidated to one archive per platform with the UI always embedded,
but `update` still offered a variant choice: "ui" could only 404, and "standard"
quietly WAS the UI build. Reported by @iandol upgrading 0.9.0 -> 0.10.0. The
chooser, its --standard/--ui flags, and the ui- URL plumbing are removed, along
with the CBM_VARIANT=ui remnant in the npm installer.
Already-released 0.9.x binaries cannot be fixed retroactively, so the release
workflow now publishes byte-identical ui-*-named alias assets — their updaters
work again with no user action. The aliases are uploaded AFTER the VirusTotal
gate: they are the same bytes as archives it already cleared, and uploading them
earlier would duplicate every object in the scan set and the provenance manifest.
**macOS install noise and attribution (#1537).**
install.sh silenced the "No such xattr: com.apple.quarantine" line, which is
what happens when a curl-downloaded archive carries no quarantine attribute —
harmless, and it became the title of a bug report about an unrelated failure.
The session-stop refusal now points at `daemon status` to list the client
processes actually holding the daemon, instead of asserting sessions exist and
leaving the reader to guess. Reported by @listepo.
**Riders.** hatchling is pinned in pkg/pypi (an unpinned backend resolved fresh
inside `python -m build` is what emitted Metadata-Version 2.5 and broke the
v0.10.1 publish); SECURITY.md's supported-versions table moves to 0.10.x.
Tests: separate seams for unverifiable vs mismatched peer images with a test per
outcome; activation refusal must name directory + mode + rule; a group-writable
ancestor must stage successfully. The update tests drop the flag that no longer
exists. Verified against each reporter's environment shape.
**Open security alerts (all three, OSSF Scorecard).**
- HIGH, binary artifact: an 8.8 MB compiled Go ELF wrapper had been committed at
pkg/go/codebase-memory-mcp by accident. Removed, and both it and its .exe
sibling are gitignored so `go build` in that directory cannot repeat it.
- HIGH, GHSA-2v37-7h3g-55p8: nanoid < 3.3.17 loops forever when a custom
generator is called with size 0. It reaches us transitively (postcss -> vite),
so it is pinned through the existing graph-ui overrides block rather than
promoted to a direct dependency; the lockfile resolves 3.3.18.
- MEDIUM, unpinned pip command: the publish step installed build/twine by
version only, leaving the whole transitive graph resolved at run time.
pkg/pypi/requirements-publish.txt now hash-pins the complete toolchain (316
hashes), generated on a linux/amd64 python:3.12 image so the wheels match what
ubuntu-latest resolves, and the step runs pip with --require-hashes. Verified
by installing from it in that same image.
Signed-off-by: Martin Vogel <martin.vogel.tech@gmail.com>
Externalizing the integration templates (#1492/#1493) and the UI bundle
(#1501/#1503) was done to reduce the Microsoft `Wacatac.B!ml` surface. It did
not work: across dry runs the flagged artifact count stayed at ~3 and the
detections merely moved between artifacts.
Dissection of run 31286803592 shows there is no structural cause to fix. The
verdicts split across every axis at once — linux-amd64 (dynamic) flagged while
linux-amd64-portable (static) is clean, but linux-arm64 (dynamic) clean while
linux-arm64-portable (static) is flagged. The two macOS binaries have identical
segment structure and split clean/flagged. Siblings from one build landed in
different variant buckets (.B vs .C). Entropy is low everywhere
(code_vectors.bin 4.166, grammar tables 3.464 bits/byte, against 7.5-8.0 for
packed payloads), so the packed-payload hypothesis is excluded too.
So the complexity bought nothing, and installation goes back to being
self-contained: one binary that carries its own UI and agent integration
templates, with no adjacent data file that has to resolve before `install`
works. Only the UI-capable composition ships from now on, under the historical
unsuffixed archive name.
Removed: src/ui/asset_pack.{c,h}, asset_pack_stub.c, asset_manifest_stub.c,
scripts/pack-ui-assets.mjs, src/cli/integration_assets.{c,h},
assets/cbm-integrations.json, scripts/gen-integrations-hash.sh, the
--verify-runtime-assets probe (nothing adjacent left to verify), and the
composition gates A6/A7 whose property is now deliberately inverted.
Restored: scripts/embed-frontend.sh, src/ui/embedded_{assets.h,stub.c}, the
compiled-in hook/adapter template bodies, and the embed/EMBED_OBJS build path.
Kept from the reverted commits, re-applied by hand where a wholesale file
restore would have dropped them:
- cbm_module_path_utf8() in both self-path sites. GetModuleFileNameA renders
through the ANSI code page and mangles non-ASCII install paths.
- the /__cbm/ui-readiness HMAC proof, secure_random and cbm_hmac_sha256, so
`daemon start --open` still waits for a genuine CBM listener.
- X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff on served assets.
- the MinGW noexecstack gate, -lbcrypt, and the cppcheck/zip CI fixes.
Archives are now codebase-memory-mcp-<os>-<arch>[-portable] with exactly four
members (binary, LICENSE, installer, THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md). That restores the
names every static package manifest already points at — aur, chocolatey,
homebrew, scoop, winget and glama were all broken by the -ui- rename.
Signed-off-by: Martin Vogel <martin.vogel.tech@gmail.com>
Windows shipped a PAIR: a small permanent launcher (codebase-memory-mcp.exe)
plus the real product binary (codebase-memory-mcp.payload.exe). The launcher
existed for exactly one reason — a running .exe cannot replace its own image
on Windows, so an in-process self-update needs a second resident binary to do
the swap.
That stub is statically indistinguishable from a dropper: a small, unsigned,
zero-prevalence PE whose whole job is verify-and-execute another binary.
Defender's ML scored it Trojan:Win32/Wacatac.B!ml and blocked the v0.9.1-rc.1
release at the VirusTotal gate. It is not fixable in our code on x64 —
bcrypt-free, stripped, VERSIONINFO'd, minimal-resource and even
resource-FREE builds on CI's own MSYS2 CLANG64 toolchain were all flagged,
while the product binary scans clean on every platform.
So remove the stub and move self-update OUT of the process into install.ps1,
which runs while cbm is NOT running: Windows' image lock only blocks a
process from replacing ITSELF. now prints the exact PowerShell
command (with the Unblock-File hint for Mark-of-the-Web); install.ps1 is
idempotent, so re-running it IS the update — it stops the daemon, renames the
running binary aside (the one mutation Windows permits on a running image),
publishes the new one, and sweeps retired copies.
Windows now matches Linux and macOS: ONE binary per platform.
* packaging, install.ps1, npm and PyPI wrappers all carry a single binary
* the launcher/payload ABI contract and ~2500 lines of stub state machinery
are deleted
* every daemon start, CLI call and hook fire loses a process spawn, a named
pipe handshake and an stdio relay
* test_windows_bundle_contract.sh is rewritten as an INVERTED contract: it
now asserts no shipped surface can reintroduce a launcher/payload pair,
and that install.ps1 retires the running binary before publishing
Verified: VirusTotal 0/67 on the packaged binary and 0/58 on install.ps1 (no
certificate involved); macOS and Linux full suites green; Windows guards all
green including the new update-handoff contract; npm 10/10; PyPI 3/3.
Signed-off-by: Martin Vogel <martin.vogel.tech@gmail.com>
The npm and PyPI installers only ever fetched the standard (headless)
build, so the UI build (embedded graph visualization) was reachable only
through install.sh --ui or a manual archive download. Add a CBM_VARIANT=ui
opt-in to both installers that fetches the codebase-memory-mcp-ui-*
archive instead; the default is unchanged (standard headless build).
Document the per-channel opt-in in the README.
Signed-off-by: Martin Vogel <martin.vogel.tech@gmail.com>
The standard linux release binary dynamically links glibc 2.38+ and
GLIBCXX_3.4.32, so it fails to start on Debian 11, Ubuntu 20.04/22.04,
RHEL/Rocky 8/9, Amazon Linux 2, etc. — yet install.sh, the npm and PyPI
wrappers, and the binary's own self-update all fetched it by default,
contradicting the "single static binary" promise.
Point every linux install + self-update path at the fully-static
"-portable" asset (gcc -static), which has no glibc floor. macOS/Windows
are unaffected and unchanged.
- install.sh, pkg/npm/install.js, pkg/pypi _cli.py: select -portable on linux
- src/cli/cli.c: self-update download URL AND checksum archive name both use
-portable on linux (they must match or the update fails checksum verify)
- scripts/smoke-test.sh: assert linux self-update targets the -portable asset
- scripts/ci/check-glibc-compat.sh: new guard — runs the binary inside
debian:bullseye (glibc 2.31) and asserts it starts
- _smoke.yml: run the guard on the portable binary in smoke-linux-portable
Reproduced: standard binary -> "GLIBC_2.38 not found" on glibc 2.31;
portable binary runs cleanly.
- Add SHA256 checksum verification against checksums.txt (was missing,
all other installers had it)
- Validate URL scheme on every redirect hop (HTTPS-only, max 5 redirects)
- Replace execSync string interpolation with execFileSync array args
(eliminates shell injection vector)
- Add path traversal check on extracted binary (tar-slip defense)
Introduces pkg/ as a self-contained home for all package registry wrappers.
Each subdirectory is a ready-to-publish package that downloads the appropriate
pre-built binary from GitHub Releases — no source compilation at install time.
- pkg/npm/ — postinstall downloads binary; bin.js shim for CLI
- pkg/pypi/ — lazy download on first run via _cli.py; pipx-friendly
- pkg/homebrew/ — multi-arch formula (darwin/linux × arm64/amd64)
- pkg/scoop/ — Windows bucket manifest with autoupdate + checksum
- pkg/winget/ — v1.6.0 manifests (version + installer + locale)
- pkg/chocolatey/ — nuspec + install/uninstall scripts
- pkg/aur/ — PKGBUILD + .SRCINFO for x86_64 and aarch64
All hashes are real SHA-256 checksums from the v0.6.0 release.
Martin Vogel