Malware scanning asks whether a file is hostile. The check that
actually loses people their accounts is a different one: what has
already been exposed, and what is about to be? crates/hound-supply/src/
hygiene.rs answers it, and runs as part of every project sweep.
- A secret file tracked by git. The emergency case: it is in the
history, in every clone, and in every fork. The advice says rotate
BEFORE `git rm --cached`, because removing a pushed secret does not
un-share it, and a test asserts that ordering.
- Credentials hardcoded in source, recognised by issuer format —
AWS, GitHub, Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe, Slack, GitLab, npm, PyPI,
Google, and the PEM private-key headers.
- Secret files readable by every account on the machine.
- Secret files with nothing in .gitignore covering them: the near
miss that the next `git add -A` turns into the emergency above.
- GitHub Actions: pull_request_target with a checkout of the pull
request (a stranger's code, your secrets, your write token), a
secret echoed into the build log, a downloaded script piped into a
shell, and third-party actions on a moving tag.
Two rules govern all of it. **Findings are actionable**: no entropy
heuristics, because "high entropy string" is a coin flip a human then
has to adjudicate, and people stop reading after the second false
alarm. Every detector recognises a documented credential format or
reports a structural fact that is true or false. **Nothing secret is
copied into a finding** — a report naming the key it found has moved
the key into a log, a CI artefact, or an assistant's context window,
which is the thing being prevented. There is a test for that.
Tracked-file status comes from parsing .git/index rather than running
git: the sweep is pointed at repositories precisely because they are
not trusted, and starting a subprocess inside one is what a hostile
repository wants.
Against a deliberately bad test repository: four critical, five
warnings, and correctly silent on .env.example and actions/checkout@v4
— flagging those is how a scanner gets ignored.
Also in this release:
- Right-click "Scan for Threats with Hound" in Nemo, Caja and
Dolphin, whose menu entries are system files. GNOME Files and
Thunar keep theirs per-user, so `hound context-menu install`
handles those. The icon is symbolic, so the file manager recolours
it to the menu's own theme instead of dropping a violet dog into a
monochrome menu.
- A right-click while the app is already open hands the request to
the running instance rather than refusing. A menu item that
silently does nothing because the app happens to be open is
indefensible.
- Two fixes for the duplicate tray icon. The updater slept a fixed
600ms after SIGTERM and then started the replacement; if the old
process outlived that, the panel kept its item and the result was
two dogs, the older of which could not be clicked or closed because
nothing was behind it. It now waits for the process to actually
leave /proc, escalating to SIGKILL after five seconds. And the app
itself now holds an advisory lock for its lifetime, so a second
instance cannot exist — the kernel releases the lock however the
process dies, so a stale one is not a state that can happen.
402 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A home scan reported two EICAR threats whose paths were Hound's own
vault. SKIP_PREFIXES held the system vault at /var/lib/hound/vault but
not the per-user one under $XDG_DATA_HOME/hound/quarantine, which is a
different absolute path for every user and so cannot be a literal. The
check now matches a `hound` component followed by `quarantine` or
`vault` anywhere in the path, with a test that ordinary paths merely
mentioning either word are still scanned. A scanner that detects its
own evidence locker reports threats that no longer exist anywhere they
can hurt anyone.
Appearance settings, the third pair of fields declared from the start
and wired to nothing (after close_to_tray and auto_update_signatures):
- Theme: follow system | light | dark, previewing live rather than
only on save, since a control that does nothing until you press
another control feels broken.
- Monochromatic tray icon: one glyph instead of the colour ladder.
The tooltip still names the state, so only the colour is dropped.
The light theme had to be built — the stylesheet was dark-only. It is
not an inversion: the state colours are darkened until they hold their
contrast on white (the dark theme's green is 2.2:1 there, unreadable as
text) and the neutrals keep a slight violet bias so they read as chosen
rather than as a default grey. One hardcoded near-black on the log
panel would have been near-invisible in light mode; it is a token now.
Which monochrome tone to draw depends on the panel, and no portable way
exists to ask a panel what colour it is — so the webview resolves the
theme (including "follow system", which only prefers-color-scheme can
answer) and tells the tray. One place decides which theme is showing.
The tray now announces a release once per version rather than once per
poll, and its menu entry reads "Update available — install Hound X…".
Also removes ~120 lines: the GUI had its own download, hash-check and
staging implementation for updates. `hound update` does exactly that,
as root, and is the path with tests behind it, so the app runs it under
pkexec instead. That left `hound stage-update` with no caller, and dead
privileged code paths are liabilities, so it is gone.
Verified end to end: 0.1.2 discovered 0.1.3 and installed it
unattended. 380 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two mechanisms Joe asked for, neither of which existed.
**Definitions now update themselves.** `auto_update_signatures` shipped
from the start and nothing ever read it — definitions only moved when
somebody typed `hound update`, which for a security product means most
installations were running whatever they were installed with. There is
now a scheduler thread: definitions hourly, release check daily, and a
90-second startup delay so a fleet that reboots together does not
arrive at the CDN in one wave. It calls the same install path as
`hound update` rather than a second implementation that could drift.
**Release notifications, signed.** dl.houndav.com/latest.json carries
an Ed25519 signature from the same key as the definition packs, for the
same reason: whoever serves that host must not be able to invent a
version and point our users at a binary of their choosing. A manifest
that does not verify is discarded, and no manifest means "nothing newer
known" — never "update available". The safe default is silence.
The signature covers a canonical byte form defined identically in
release.rs and tools/publish-release.py. Signing a re-serialisation of
a parsed struct is the classic way to verify one thing and act on
another, so a test runs a real manifest produced by the Python tool
through the Rust verifier against the production key. If those drift,
manifests verify nowhere and the only symptom is that nobody ever hears
about an update.
Version comparison is numeric, not lexical, because "0.9.0" > "0.10.0"
as strings and that is precisely the pair where it would first be
noticed. Downgrades are never offered — a signed-but-old manifest must
not become a way to reintroduce a fixed vulnerability.
The app does not replace its own binary. A root daemon that can rewrite
itself is the mechanism a supply-chain attacker most wants. Installing
goes through apt with the user present and authenticating: the package
is downloaded, checked against the manifest's SHA-256, staged into a
root-owned 0700 directory so nothing can substitute it between the
check and the read, and handed over. Two guards beyond the signature —
the URL must be on our own download host, because a signature proves
publisher intent and not that the publisher got the URL right.
Tray, per Joe's design: a new amber "attention" state ranked below a
threat and an in-flight scan, above protected. Deeper amber than
"scanning" so the two are distinguishable — scanning lasts seconds and
the user started it, attention persists. The tooltip carries the reason
rather than only that there is one, and "Install Hound X…" appears
enabled only when there is something to install; a permanently greyed
item teaches people the menu is decorative.
Definition staleness is a first-class signal, not just update
availability: amber at 7 days, and at 30 the wording stops pretending —
"this machine is not currently protected against anything found since
then". An antivirus showing green on month-old definitions is lying in
the same way a dead front-end showing "Protected" was.
Also: the four files that declare a version now have a test asserting
they agree. Drift there means a release looks older than what is
installed and the update silently never offers, or offers forever.
377 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Phase 2. "Distro-agnostic" was a claim with no packaging behind it.
.deb and AppImage are both built and tested here; the rpm spec and
PKGBUILD are written but not yet built, since neither rpmbuild nor
makepkg exists on this machine.
The AppImage is deliberately not a packaged daemon. An AppImage is
unprivileged by design — no install, no root, no systemd — so the
execution gate cannot exist in one, and pretending otherwise would be
worse than saying so. What it is instead is the try-before-you-install
build: on-demand scanning, quarantine under the user's own data dir,
rootkit and supply-chain checks, all with nothing left behind. Asking
it for the gate prints why it cannot and how to get it. Verified with
an isolated HOME: status, scan, EICAR caught, gate refusal.
Two packaging bugs caught by looking rather than assuming:
* mktemp -d creates 0700 and dpkg applies the staging root's mode to
"/". Installing that package would have chmodded the root directory
to 0700 and broken the machine.
* AppRun wrote its log before creating the directory, and built a
socket path that can exceed sun_path (108 bytes) when
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is long. Both fixed; the socket falls back rather
than failing with an error nobody can act on.
The systemd unit is hardened as far as this daemon can be. Notably
ProtectSystem=strict is WRONG here and is left off on purpose: it
remounts everything read-only, and quarantine has to remove a threat
from wherever it landed. ProtectHome is off for the same reason. The
CapabilityBoundingSet mirrors what caps.rs drops to, so the machine is
protected even if the binary is replaced by one that does not reduce
itself.
App icon: the mark in white on a periwinkle tile, per Joe. Small sizes
are not the same artwork scaled down — the mark is line-weight, so at
16px a 62% inset leaves about a pixel and a half of stroke and the head
turns to mush. Each size is authored with its own inset and corner
radius, and the ground goes flat below 32px because a gradient across
16 pixels is just noise. The tray ladder is untouched: those glyphs stay
transparent and re-tint per state so they can sit on any panel colour.
Package installs are NOT enabled by default beyond the daemon itself —
exec_gate stays off until the operator turns it on, in every packaging
format.
99 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
dev
