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Security: IBM/data-scout

SECURITY.md

Security Policy

Reporting a Vulnerability

Please do not open a public issue for a security report.

Report privately using GitHub's private vulnerability reporting: open a draft advisory from the repository's Security tab. This reaches the maintainers privately and keeps the discussion attached to the repository.

We will not publish or confirm a vulnerability until the report has been analysed and a fix or mitigation is available. We will keep you updated while that work is in progress, and we are glad to credit you in the resulting advisory unless you prefer otherwise.

Scope

This tool downloads and processes content from user-specified URLs. When exposed as an API service, operators should:

  • Enable API key authentication (API_KEY environment variable)
  • Run behind a reverse proxy with rate limiting
  • Restrict network egress if the service should not reach internal hosts
  • Review the crawl-policy allow/deny lists before relying on them. They are not shipped: src/processing/crawl_policy/ is empty on a fresh clone and is filled in at runtime by the LLM classifying each domain it encounters, so early runs have no policy to enforce

Known and accepted exposures

These are documented rather than fixed. Reports about them are welcome as discussion, but they are known and not treated as new vulnerabilities:

  • REACT_APP_API_KEY is embedded in the frontend bundle. Create React App inlines REACT_APP_* variables at build time, so the key is readable by anyone who loads the page — and it is the same key that guards every API route. This is accepted because the tool is intended to run locally. Do not reuse a key that protects anything else, and do not serve the built frontend to untrusted users while relying on that key for access control.

There aren't any published security advisories