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>
ClamAV is a temporary dependency. Everything ClamAV-specific moves
behind a 4-method trait in crates/houndd/src/engine.rs:
trait ScanEngine { name; probe; scan; update }
struct ClamAvEngine // today
const ENGINE // one-line flip when the native engine lands
- parse_clamscan() is now a pure fn with unit tests (OK/FOUND/INCOMPLETE,
dedup, malformed lines)
- main.rs drops all clamscan/clamd/freshclam knowledge; Status reports
engine='clamav' via the trait
- README documents the seam and the wire contract that stays stable
GUI (gui/, Tauri 2, standalone workspace, vanilla JS premium-dark shell):
- system-tray sentinel on the 4-state dog-head ladder (green/amber/red/gray)
with tooltips; clicks open the window / scan / update
- window: protection hero, path + recursive scan, progress bar, results
table, signature update log; state mirrored to the tray
- compiles clean (cargo build, 0 warnings) on Mint 22.3 + webkit2gtk-4.1
All 11 workspace tests pass, incl. the E2E EICAR scan over the real
Unix-socket daemon (clamscan finds the planted EICAR).
