Stage 3 passed on throughput — 27,339 events, zero rescues, Caddy
unmoved — and then the soak found what the load test could not.
Two more false positives, both the same shape as the ones before:
* EICAR matched an 8.5 MB rustc incremental-compilation cache, because
the test source being compiled contains the literal. Hound moved it to
quarantine mid-build and rustc panicked. The standard defines the
EICAR file as exactly that 68-byte string, optionally padded to 128,
so the rule now says filesize <= 128.
* The webshell rule matched a 4.3 MB AI session transcript, because the
conversation had been discussing webshells and therefore contained
"<?php", the eval pattern and "$_POST". The transcript was moved to
the vault and its history lost. A webshell is a PHP file: small, and
opening with a PHP tag. Now filesize < 1MB and $php in (0..4096).
The interesting part is why the second one happened at all. After the
first, I added a test asserting that a large file containing rule
strings is not a threat — and hand-listed the strings. I listed the
miner's and the rootkit's and forgot "<?php". The test passed and the
transcript was quarantined anyway.
So the test now extracts every string literal from the rule pack itself
and builds the haystack from those. A rule added tomorrow is covered
without anybody remembering to cover it. It also asserts the extractor
actually found the strings, because a parser that silently returns
nothing would make the whole thing vacuous.
Both fixes have a paired test that the detection still works: a real
68-byte EICAR file is caught, padded to 128 it is caught, and a real
webshell is caught.
Worth recording, because it is not a bug: six houndd tests failed while
the gate was armed. Hound quarantined the EICAR fixtures the test suite
had just written — correct behaviour, colliding with a suite that
creates real malware samples. Running the antivirus's own tests on a
gated machine needs thought; the tests are not wrong and neither is the
gate.
The definitions chain now works end to end: pack built from OSV, signed
with the release key, published to /srv/houndav/defs, installed, and
verified on load against the public half compiled into the agent —
"defs: 19 indicators from 1 pack(s) [2026.08.21]".
The public key is in the source on purpose. The agent is open source and
anybody should be able to check that the definitions they received are
the ones we published.
300 tests pass. Gate is off pending these fixes being soaked.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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