Protostar is in active pre-1.0 development. Security updates are applied only to the main branch and the latest release tag. Previous releases do not receive backported security patches.

Please do not report security vulnerabilities in public GitHub issues, discussions, or pull requests.

Report all vulnerabilities privately through GitHub's Private Vulnerability Reporting.

When filing a report, please include:

• A clear description of the vulnerability and its potential impact.
• Step-by-step instructions or a minimal proof-of-concept (PoC) demonstrating how to reproduce the issue.
• Any relevant details regarding the environment, operating system, or flags used.

Reports will be acknowledged promptly and coordinated privately through GitHub Security Advisories before public disclosure.

Protostar scaffolds, manages, and executes project lifecycles, and executes external shell commands and filesystem transactions on user projects.

• Path Traversal / Archive Slip: Bypassing workspace boundaries (enforce_path_jail) or extracting archives that write outside the target workspace.
• Trust Violations: Running any command for an untrusted template (a --from path or URL, or an alias without trusted = true) on init or sync without listing it and requiring the user's confirmation. That covers Protostar's own commands, such as uv add, which run in files the template wrote, as well as the template's system_tasks and post_install_tasks.
• Binary Safelist Escapes: Bypassing subprocess execution boundaries (enforce_binary_safelist) during template execution.
• Secret Scanning Bypasses: Flaws or bypasses in credential detection that allow committed secret patterns past the variable safety net without --allow-secret.

• Vulnerabilities in third-party executables that Protostar coordinates (e.g., uv, git, ruff).
• Commands executed after a user has confirmed them, passed --trust, or configured a template alias with trusted = true.
• Attack vectors requiring full local administrative access or arbitrary code execution capabilities already present in the user's local shell.