Handling a security report

SECURITY.md is the reporter’s side of this. It promises things the maintainer has to keep; this page lists them and the steps around them. The operator-facing summary of Kept’s defences is the security model.

The channel

GitHub private vulnerability reporting is the only channel: the repository’s Security tab → Report a vulnerability. There is no security email address. Only the reporter and the maintainer see the report. Conduct reports use the same private route, titled “Conduct report”.

Switch it on

Private vulnerability reporting is off while the repository is private. It must be switched on right after the flip (Settings → Security), or the button SECURITY.md points to isn’t there (1.0 checklist, row 6.4).

A report that arrives anywhere else (a public issue, a discussion, a pull request) should be moved to the private channel without discussing the details in public.

What SECURITY.md commits to

Commitment	Detail
Supported versions	the latest minor release (X.Y); the one before it for 90 days after the latest is published; nothing older
Critical fixes	within 7 days of a confirmed report
Response	an acknowledgement, then a fix or a reasoned answer
Disclosure	a date agreed with the reporter
Credit	in the release notes, unless the reporter prefers not
When it applies	from 1.0; Kept has no supported release before it

These come from D187 (the support window and the 7 days) and D83 (SECURITY.md and GitHub’s private advisories) (decision labels).

Working a report

1. Acknowledge in the report’s thread.
2. Confirm it on your own instance. Kept is self-hosted: there is no Kept-run service, and SECURITY.md asks reporters to test only their own instance too. The report should name the version (/version answers it).
3. Fix it privately. The report becomes a draft security advisory on GitHub, which can open a temporary private fork for the fix (a GitHub feature; Kept has no written procedure of its own for it). The fix follows the same rules as any change: a test first, the full local gate (bash scripts/ci-local.sh), additive migrations.
4. Release. Merge the fix to main and cut a release the usual way (releasing): a tag starts release.yml. The release tooling only publishes a version newer than every existing v* tag, from a commit on main, so a fix ships as the next release; there is no backport path to an older line today.
5. Disclose on the agreed date: publish the advisory, and credit the reporter in the release notes unless they declined.

Signed releases matter here

A fix is only useful if people can trust the image they pull. From 1.0.0 every release is signed (signing) and users can check it (verifying a release).

The audit record

Kept has had a security review of personal tokens, the API, MCP, OAuth connectors, the assistant, webhooks, OIDC and semantic search (2026-10-06: 0 high, 5 medium, all fixed with a test, 19 low left as they are), and an audit of secrets, personal data and attribution across the whole history before going public. The operator’s summary of the threat model is the security model.

A review takes one shape: what was reviewed and how, a result line counting findings by severity, the findings with what was fixed, and how the fixes were verified.