Commit Graph
73 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 573b764bbb fix(ranker): scope a region to the file that defines its handler (M1b 12.4)
A route-registration module registers handlers that other modules define.
app/routes/index.js requires seven handler modules and defines none, yet regions
there were scoped to handleContributionsUpdate and its siblings. The graph rightly
held no such method, so every question in those regions was unresolvable: 138
across six families on that one repository.

The entry record still names the handler. The authorization question is which
middleware guards which handler, and that is cross-file by nature. It now also
records whether the file defines what it names, and a region built from an entry
that does not is scoped to the file instead of to a method the file lacks. The
handler's own module still gets its function-scoped region, so nothing is lost.

My first attempt changed the mapper to stop naming cross-file handlers at all. An
existing control caught it by asserting that a multi-line registration names the
handler its middleware guards, which is exactly the attribution the authorization
family needs. The evidence was against me and the fix belonged one layer up, in
region construction.

1,407 tests passed, nine skipped.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EmM1j46qgKMh3zqD1QMwEo
2026-09-17 14:04:39 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 b95a371b7e feat(contributor-scan): name the function a question cannot locate (M1b 12.3)
After per-family context, every remaining unresolved question reported
context_scope_empty, all in three files. The cause is not a missing producer:
app/routes/index.js requires seven handler modules and defines none of them, so a
question naming handleContributionsUpdate there names a function that file
genuinely does not hold, and the empty scope is the correct answer.

Reporting that as "scope empty" hid which of two different things had happened. A
file the frontend produced no methods for is one problem; a question naming a
function defined in another module is another, and it is the common one. Taint and
configuration now separate them, reporting context_function_unresolved with the
name in the first case and context_scope_empty only when the file has no methods at
all. The driver no longer stacks its generic gap on top of a query that already
explained itself, and the new gap is question-owned so it cannot block another
question's comparison.

Completion is deliberately unchanged. The tempting fix is to widen such a question
to its whole file, which would raise the number by answering a question nobody
asked; a question whose function the graph does not hold stays unresolved, with the
name now recoverable from the question that asked it.

Group 12 is complete: admission no longer rejects genuine findings on a
mis-extracted operation symbol, both families that could never complete their change
context now can, and the remaining unresolved questions say precisely why.

1,406 tests passed, nine skipped.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EmM1j46qgKMh3zqD1QMwEo
2026-09-17 13:28:40 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 a91551e547 feat(contributor-scan): give each family its own change context (M1b 12.2)
Access control and configuration could not complete their change context on any
repository, which left 231 of 436 questions unresolved on the measured Node case
and made two of the three shipped families unable to answer.

The gap was larger than a missing query block. The evidence pass dispatches taint
only, because only taint has an evidence vector to rank by, so these families were
never asked for context at all. A new context pass asks each family with the flag
set.

Each query describes its own scope, which the owner research required and which
matters: copying taint's projection would describe a reachability walk these
queries never perform. Dominance exports the file's methods labelled operation,
guard or sibling, because its claim is that a file contradicts itself. Configuration
exports the file's methods labelled setting or sibling, because it asks what a file
declares. Both report an empty scope explicitly rather than implying one.

A family whose context query answers nothing keeps no context and stays unresolved,
so none can complete on another family's context. A control asserts that directly.

Confirmed on a real NodeGoat graph through the production backend: both families
produce a context summary and seven scoped methods where they previously produced
nothing. All seven are siblings for that file, which is the honest answer since it
declares no access-control operation and no matched setting.

1,405 tests passed, nine skipped.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EmM1j46qgKMh3zqD1QMwEo
2026-09-17 11:19:30 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 566b862b0a fix(cpg): end an engine session with the transaction that owns it (M2)
The first session-enabled replay produced correct detections and no speedup,
reporting session_query_failed:census:session_request_failed on both sides. A
targeted probe ruled out the sequence I suspected: an overlay followed by a census
in one session both answer correctly, with the census confirming the overlays were
saved.

What the probe exposed instead is a leak. A build runs on a copy of the backend, so
the session started during the build belonged to that copy and was never closed,
leaving a JVM holding the configured 2 GB heap for the life of the process. Two
builds per transaction meant two of them, which is enough to exhaust a 3 GB
container and make every later request fail. It also matches the host running out
of memory during these runs.

The build now closes any session its copy started, and the driver ends the session
with the transaction, since that is what transaction-owned means. Controls cover
both: a build leaves nothing alive on the copy that started it, and a completed
scan closes the backend's session. Closing never fails a scan that found things.

This is a genuine defect found by measurement rather than by the suite, which
passed throughout. Whether it was the whole cause of the census failure is not yet
established; the next session-enabled run will say.

1,399 tests passed, nine skipped. Rollout stays NO-GO.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EmM1j46qgKMh3zqD1QMwEo
2026-09-16 21:15:00 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 c1cc332bc1 feat(pre-push-safety-net): stop declared exclusion vetoing first-party answers (M1b 10.6)
vendor_semantics_unresolved was grouped with the graph integrity failures, so any
declared exclusion demoted every otherwise complete answer in the repository to
graph_incomplete. Every real repository excludes its dependencies, so this fired
on all of them, including on a complete first-party census with successful query
receipts.

Graph boundaries are now split by what they mean. An integrity failure says the
graph could not be read or is incomplete, so an answer drawn from it is demoted:
unparsed files, an empty or sharded graph, an incomplete or unavailable census,
an unresolved symlink, an unsupported frontend, unreadable source, an ambiguous
frontend path and unvalidated TypeScript property support all keep that behavior.
A declared exclusion is a deliberate scope choice. It stays physical, stays out of
targets and graphs, and stays reported in coverage, but it is not evidence that a
first-party answer is wrong.

Whether a particular answer needed the excluded semantics is carried by that
question's own unresolved call destinations, recorded per question in 10.5, rather
than assumed for every answer in the repository.

Controls exercise the real partition logic rather than an injected reason: a
vendored directory leaves the answer completed with the exclusion still reported,
an unresolved symlink still demotes, and the two together still demote.

1,365 tests passed, nine skipped. Rollout stays NO-GO.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EmM1j46qgKMh3zqD1QMwEo
2026-09-16 17:35:00 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 b202aabd8b feat(pre-push-safety-net): bind the reachability boundary to what it limits (M1b 10.5)
dynamic_external_or_depth_context_unresolved was applied as though it invalidated
everything about a question. It does not. Bounded reachability can hide further
flows; it cannot invalidate a flow that was traced, and it cannot remove a call
from a structurally scoped enumeration.

At scan level the boundary is now recorded against its owning question without
demoting that question's answer. An unavailable context projection, an empty
context scope and an unreadable method extent are unknown ownership and still
demote.

In comparison it no longer blocks the head's own claim, since the finding rests
on a path that was actually traced, and no longer blocks an absence read off the
enumerated inventory. It still blocks every claim that rests on a flow not having
been traced, including the anchored source-connection branch, which now reports
base_reachability_bounded rather than silently passing.

The query declares the basis of its enumeration. A file- or nesting-scoped
question walks calls structurally, so an unresolved destination cannot remove one
from scope. Following the call graph makes the reachable set the scope, so the
same unresolved destination can shrink what was enumerated; that inventory cannot
establish absence while reachability is bounded, and says so.

One prior control asserted a question's own reachability gap blocks its own
claim. It is updated with its reason and split, so an own projection gap is still
proven to block while an own reachability gap no longer does.

1,362 tests passed, nine skipped. Rollout stays NO-GO.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EmM1j46qgKMh3zqD1QMwEo
2026-09-16 17:26:16 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 c73efd2bde feat(pre-push-safety-net): export the enumerated operation inventory (M1b 10.4)
A taint answer reports traced flows, so an absent row means either that the
operation is not present or that no traced path reached it. Change comparison
needs that distinction to say a change introduced an operation, and reachability
is deliberately bounded, so the two can never be separated from flow rows alone.
That is why the veto guarding the confusion is permanently true on any real
Express application, and why it could be neither discharged nor safely removed.

The taint query now exports one row per operation it enumerated in scope, plus a
completion marker. The marker is what makes an empty inventory meaningful:
without it a scope that was never enumerated and a scope holding no such
operation are indistinguishable.

Comparison separates three outcomes on a changed line: the operation is present
in the base without a traced flow, which is a reachability statement and not
novelty; the operation is absent from an enumerated base, which establishes that
the change introduced it; or the base scope was never enumerated, which stays
explicitly unresolved. A malformed inventory row is not an empty inventory.

The arbiter now skips any row carrying a kind, so an inventory row cannot be
normalized into a flow with an empty source that names no attacker input.

Verified against the real engine on an authored two-revision JavaScript control:
the operation is enumerated on both sides, the base carries it with zero traced
flows, the zero-operation marker appears for an empty scope, and answers and
findings are unchanged. No new sink inference, alias resolver or second source
IR. 1,354 tests passed, nine skipped. Rollout stays NO-GO.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EmM1j46qgKMh3zqD1QMwEo
2026-09-16 16:46:00 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 8ff1d9a638 feat(pre-push-safety-net): scope comparison completeness and ambiguity (M1b 10.2, 10.3)
Two vetoes M1a recorded were global where the evidence is local.

Comparison required every selected base question to complete, so one unsupported
family anywhere prevented an otherwise complete target comparison. Completeness
is now demanded over the required scope: the counterpart question plus the
dependencies the change context actually recorded for it. Every other gap stays
in aggregate coverage and is still reported, never discharged. An incomplete
counterpart, an incomplete recorded dependency, an unknown-ownership boundary
and a truncated base scan all still yield unknown.

Correspondence ambiguity was recorded file-wide and inherited by every question,
so repeated unchanged lines in one file invalidated every question in the
repository and blocked the whole transaction comparison. It is now decided per
operation by the correspondence classifier: an operation needing an ambiguous
anchor stays uncomparable, while a uniquely mapped or newly introduced operation
in the same file is unaffected. The mapping is still withheld and still reported.

On the NodeGoat case the ambiguity is on the target's own file, so file-level
scoping would not have been enough; only per-operation resolution is.

1,347 tests passed, nine skipped. No capability enabled; rollout stays NO-GO.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EmM1j46qgKMh3zqD1QMwEo
2026-09-16 15:45:57 +02:00
Marius Ciepluch 7c1c2d4475 fix(contributor-scan): retain declared Gruntfile and report census gaps honestly 2026-09-14 08:07:06 +02:00
Marius Ciepluch 6fb5ad2cff feat(pre-push-safety-net): publish and evict complete local artifacts safely 2026-09-13 16:11:19 +02:00
Marius Ciepluch 8fe3a7e51e fix(pre-push-safety-net): stop semantic planning at the shared deadline 2026-09-13 15:11:42 +02:00
Marius Ciepluch 6b12b73411 feat(pre-push-safety-net): render bounded reports and preserve full evidence 2026-09-13 13:25:44 +02:00
Marius Ciepluch eb320730b6 feat(pre-push-safety-net): compare targeted base and head evidence 2026-09-13 12:42:15 +02:00
Marius Ciepluch 6ba2b06353 feat(pre-push-safety-net): exclude vendor inputs and partition frontend coverage 2026-09-13 11:53:29 +02:00
Marius Ciepluch ebad83009e feat(pre-push-safety-net): connect change context to ranked questions 2026-09-13 10:41:32 +02:00
Marius Ciepluch 546db24b8e feat(pre-push-safety-net): preserve exact ranker scope and outcomes 2026-09-13 10:16:22 +02:00
Marius Ciepluch bd53b6dc9d feat(pre-push-safety-net): bound backend execution by one deadline 2026-09-13 10:03:03 +02:00
Marius Ciepluch 948ee020db feat(pre-push-safety-net): retain bounded change and rename context 2026-09-12 21:12:45 +02:00
Marius Ciepluch 05da202d67 feat(pre-push-safety-net): resolve immutable push comparisons 2026-09-12 20:43:51 +02:00
Marius Ciepluch 14a2a60e52 feat(pre-push-safety-net): establish shared push and engine contracts 2026-09-12 19:21:31 +02:00
Marius Ciepluch 051f3b0058 feat(pre-push-safety-net): preserve uncertainty in benchmark scoring 2026-09-12 19:04:20 +02:00
Marius Ciepluch 8acada0d98 feat(pre-push-safety-net): pin labeled evaluation inputs 2026-09-12 18:45:54 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Fable 5.1 b821ac6e4e feat(facts): the [[layout]] fact -- vendored trees are out, test paths are not product
Two decisions the maintainer made, as rows rather than constants. A vendored tree (vendor/, node_modules/,
third_party/) is somebody else's unit: out of the targets in preprocess and out of the graph through the
frontend's --exclude, which the scan hands to the backend because the CPG seam imports only the standard
library. A test path (tests/, test-*.php, *Test.php) stays in scope -- a test that reaches a sink still
names the sink -- but its regions are not shipped and order after the product's. Measured before the row:
207 of WP Statistics's 357 PHP files were vendored, and 14 of the 67 regions ahead of MW WP Form's CVE
were test files. The position benchmark applies both, so it measures the order the scan spends.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-11 14:27:50 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Fable 5.1 2de873274f feat(model): shipped joins the evidence vector as a within-tier weight; v5 baseline
v5 (parameter-fed carried confirmed by the exact flow): pmpro 69, wpstatistics 172, mwwpform 68,
vampi 16. Reading the recorded head of each order: every region ahead of a CVE is in its tier on a tied
or higher score, and 10 of the 67 ahead of MW WP Form's are test-mail.php. The build's own word on what
is product was on the region and not in the vector; it is now, at -2.0 for an unshipped file. Orders
only, never promotes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-11 13:45:00 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Fable 5.1 d1f37abadd feat(model): carried with provenance -- source-fed promotes a tier, parameter-fed only orders
Structural carried (v3) measured: pmpro 391 -> 69, wpstatistics 504 -> 172, mwwpform 513 -> 68 -- and
tier 4 swollen to 555 and 569 regions, because "assigned from a parameter" was folded in with "assigned
from a source" and every constructor does the former. The query now reports carriedKind; the vector
promotes on "source" and gives "parameter" a within-tier weight of 0.75.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-11 13:11:00 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Fable 5.1 1741b6bed6 feat(model): phase 2 measured (weights v1) and carried reported by the evidence branch
budget_at_recall by a real evidence pass over every region: pmpro 391 -> 116, wpstatistics 504 -> 223,
mwwpform 513 -> 292, vampi 16 -> 16. The gate (< 50) is not met. pmpro's CVE is inside its 121 tier-4
regions; WP Statistics's and MW WP Form's are one tier low because `carried` -- stage one of the
two-stage join -- was not reported as evidence. taint.sc now reports it where a sink exists, and the
vector reads the query's answer when given.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-11 11:47:06 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Fable 5.1 60d13d7b6e feat(model): phase 2 of flow-aware-ranking -- spend the region budget by evidence, weights published
`Evidence.score` orders pairs within a tier by one table of weights (open sinks, cleansed sinks, local /
carried / near sources, entry, declared public), capped so volume stops counting, and zero for tier 0 so
the weights can rank but never manufacture. `ScanBudget.order_by_evidence` runs the evidence pass over
every region and cuts `max_regions` from each region's best (tier, score); `order_by_evidence()` is the
one ordering function, used by the scan and by `benchmarks/ranking/position.py --evidence`. Off by
default until the position benchmark says where the pinned CVEs land under it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-11 10:47:47 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Fable 5.1 9a8e9f083f feat(ranking): phase 1 -- tier-0 taint requests are no longer asked
A pair with no sink of its family in reach cannot yield a flow, in any
language under any dataflow model, so its taint request is never issued. The
count is recorded as requests_pruned -- exact, so not a degradation -- and a
test asserts that every other pair's request still goes out.

    637-file plugin, 500-region budget
    tier_counts   {0: 2161, 1: 60, 2: 20, 3: 211, 4: 48}
    pruned        2,161 of 2,500 = 86%        evidence pass 94.5s
    taint         339 requests -> 2,400s TIMEOUT

Gate met and exceeded; the scan still does not finish, and the reason corrects
phase 0. "1,148 ms per request" was an average over a 250-request set that was
88% tier 0 and answered instantly; the ~30 real requests in it cost ~9.5s each.
Pruning removes exactly the cheap questions and keeps the expensive ones, so it
cannot make them faster. The honest cost of a taint question that CAN have an
answer is 7-10s at callDepth=3, and that is what phase 2 and 5.13 design
against -- not 1.1s, and not 6.6s either. Both specs corrected.

869 tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-10 19:18:20 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Fable 5.1 88ada8e48c feat(ranking): phase 0 -- the baseline, the evidence instrument, and a 7x taint speedup found on the way
flow-aware-ranking phase 0: measure before changing anything.

THE BASELINE, committed as benchmarks/ranking/baselines/2026-09-10-access-rank.json
from benchmarks/ranking/position.py, which sorts regions exactly as the scan does:

    pmpro         4,463 regions  83.8% at 0.30   CVE at 390   budget_at_recall 391
    mwwpform        983 regions  81.7% at 0.30   CVE at 512   budget_at_recall 513
    wpstatistics  1,673 regions  75.3% at 0.30   CVE at 503   budget_at_recall 504
    vampi            25 regions                  BOLA at 15, 10; SQLI reached transitively

That corrects the brief's own cross-assessment: "concentration, not inclusion"
was measured on pmpro alone. On the other two plugins the CVE sits OUTSIDE a
500-region budget and is never examined; the slices found those CVEs only
because a slice has too few regions to exclude anything.

THE INSTRUMENT: `evidenceOnly` mode on the taint query -- what is in scope,
which sink calls, what shape, whether a sanitizer wraps THEIR argument, whether
a source is local or reachable -- returning before reachableByFlows is ever
called. model/evidence.py turns its rows into a vector per (region, family)
and a tier; scan.py records every pair's tier on the result and acts on none of
it. Every later phase is measured against a record made by scans that did not
know they were being measured.

    2,500 pairs in 98.9s incl. JVM load, ~40 ms per pair
    tier 0 -- no sink of that family in reach: 2,161 of 2,500 = 86%

Two earlier attempts ran past an hour each with no payload, and both were my
fault: repository-wide walks repeated per request -- the sink scan, the
reachable-method BFS, familyInRepo. Memoised across the batch.

AND THE SAME FIX REACHES THE DATAFLOW MODE. sinkCalls and reachableMethods do
not depend on the family, and were recomputed for all 2,500 requests. The
identical 250-request set with both joins on:

    2,026.3s -> 287.0s      8,105 -> 1,148 ms per request      same 5,779 rows

Most of what 5.13 measured as "the base taint query" was never dataflow. A 7x
speedup with nothing about the analysis changed; both corrections recorded in
the specs. Combined with 86% tier 0, the whole-repository taint query that
timed out at 40 minutes is ~339 real requests at ~1.1s: about six minutes.

Also: the module audit manifest is regenerated (91 load-bearing, 7 standalone,
0 orphaned) because evidence.py is now imported by the scan, and the
failed-query test is order-independent since the evidence pass records its own
failure before taint's.

869 tests pass; query compile test 4 passed; gates byte-identical.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-10 18:22:18 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 f496f41be1 fix(cpg): reclaim the scratch tree, and sweep what earlier runs abandoned
Every build allocated a temp directory for the graph, its request files and
joern's own working copy of the CPG. Nothing ever reclaimed it. A day of
scanning left 1,055 directories and 355MB in /tmp on a disk already at 95%,
and the runs that leaked hardest were the ones that FAILED -- which is exactly
backwards, since a failed scan has the least to show for the space it took.

Two mechanisms, because they cover different deaths:

  * `CpgResult.cleanup` disposes of the tree, and `scan_repository` calls it
    when the graph has answered everything it is going to. Never raises: a scan
    that found things must not fail while tidying up.
  * A sweep at build time removes trees older than six hours. A process killed
    mid-scan never runs its cleanup -- which is how most of the 1,055 died --
    so the disposal alone is not enough. Only directories under the system temp
    root carrying this module's own prefix are touched, and a scan running in
    another process right now is left alone.

Note for the record what was NOT a product leak: 6.3GB of /tmp/joern-cli-*
was three copies of the Joern CLI I made by hand during today's container
experiments, and 63MB of workspace/ in the repo came from running joern from
the repo root instead of a scratch directory. The product already runs joern
with cwd set to the scratch tree, so its workspace is contained and now
disposed with it. Both are cleaned up; neither was the code's fault, and
conflating my litter with its leak would have hidden the real one.

Disk went from 6.1GB free to 19GB.

857 tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-10 15:54:50 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 83ab533fc4 docs(contributor-scan): the ranker is 84% one tier, and the loop is closed
Three corrections and one design requirement, from measurement and from
maintainer direction.

MEASURED. 4,463 PMPro regions carry five distinct ranks, and 3,742 of them --
83.8% -- share rank 0.30, ordered alphabetically by path. That tier spans
positions 159..3,900, and 341 of the 500 examined regions come from it: two
thirds of the budget spent on an arbitrary alphabetical slice. It is not a
weak ranker, it is barely a ranker.

CORRECTED. CVE-2023-23488's region is at position 390 of 4,463 -- INSIDE the
budget and examined. I stated repeatedly that it ranked ~1036 and was never
reached; that number came from before the array-callable and method-recogniser
fixes moved it. The reason it goes unreported is the taint query timing out,
so no region got a verdict at all. Ranking is a real problem; it is not this
miss, and conflating them would have sent the fix to the wrong place.

DIRECTION. Ranking is the LLM's job, not a tie-breaker for a residue. The
judgement "is this worth looking at" is a judgement about unfamiliar code.
Facts and generic features stay as cheap evidence for the model to read and as
the fallback when none is configured.

AND THE LOOP IS CLOSED, which is worse than train-on-test and was the sharper
point. A region the ranker excludes is never arbitrated, so it never produces
a label, so the ranker never learns it was wrong -- the feedback is censored by
the policy being trained, and every run confirms the ordering it already had.
Optimising on that makes it more confident, not more correct.

Breaking the loop is therefore a design requirement, with two cheap mechanisms
recorded: an exploration slice (~10% of budget sampled from outside the top-K,
the only labels the policy did not choose) and full labelling on repositories
small enough to arbitrate every region, which is policy-independent ground
truth. Inverse-propensity weighting is noted as available if the ranking is
made stochastic, and as unnecessary otherwise.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-10 15:49:57 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 07df314e12 fix(cpg): prove the frontend can read the source before building, and check the graph always
Two permanent guards, and a correction that motivates both.

THE CORRECTION. There is no php2cpg defect. Every PHP build on this machine
ran through a local `php` shim proxying stdio through `docker run`, and
php2cpg depends on the INTERLEAVING of its parser's stderr banners with its
stdout JSON to attribute each document to a file. The proxy scrambles it:

    streaming shim   drops 72-88   767KB / 969KB / 1.2MB   different every run
    buffered shim    drops 0       5,703 bytes             empty, and silent
    NATIVE php       drops 0       2,872,996 bytes         identical x3

The 637-file tree with native php: 0 drops, a 4,329,471-byte CPG, 20.0s,
1.9GB peak -- which is exactly what task 5.10 said before I started
"correcting" it. No intermittent failures, no malformed graph, no dataflow
assertion, no scale limit.

GUARD 1: the interpreter must prove it can read the tree, before anything is
built. Every instrument failure this project has had takes one shape -- the
input was unreadable and the tool reported a plausible ZERO -- and it has cost
four wrong diagnoses in a day:

    a php that could not see ~/.cache   -> "cannot handle 637 files"
    a php whose stdio was proxied       -> "drops half its batches"
    a container missing a bind mount    -> "0 dropped", 5,703-byte graph

None announce themselves: file_exists() is false, the parser writes nothing,
the frontend exits 0, and "no errors" reads exactly like success. Checking the
output cannot separate that from an empty repository. Checking that the input
arrived can, and costs one exec.

GUARD 2: the graph census is taken on EVERY build, not only one the frontend
warned about. A graph holding nothing arrives with no warnings at all --
silence is the symptom that has no symptom -- and the shortfall is now
reported as "the frontend reported no failures but the graph holds N of M
source files".

`cpg_build_failed` carries that detail through to the report instead of being
a bare reason.

Also adds tests/test_cpg_queries_compile.py: the queries are 900 lines of
Scala that nothing compiled. A rowsFor signature change shipped with 850 tests
passing and broke every query at runtime, found by a measurement failing hours
later. Each query is now compiled AND run against a real graph wherever joern
exists, and must return a parseable payload.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-10 11:35:35 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 83adf049be feat(model): say when the region cap hid most of the repository
Paid Memberships Pro yields 4,463 regions from 637 files. The default budget
examines 500 of them -- 11% of the repository -- and nothing in the output
said so. A report whose silence covers the other 89% invites that silence to
be read as a clean bill of health.

`budget_exhausted` is a different fact and already reported: that is the JUDGE
running out on work already collected. This is the work never being collected.

Renders in "What could not be analysed" as: only the N highest-ranked of M
regions were examined, and nothing above says anything about the rest.

850 tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-10 08:30:38 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 7f83977add perf(model): stop sending 42MB of the same string, and stop enumerating for nobody
Two defects the first whole-repository scan made visible. It ran for 23
minutes over Paid Memberships Pro and decided nothing.

**The batch was 97.5% duplication.** `hookCallbacks` describes the REPOSITORY,
not the region, and I put it in every request when the hook half landed. On a
637-file plugin that is 16,270 characters repeated across 2,500 requests:

    taint-requests.json   42.5 MB, of which 41.7 MB is one string over again

Joern parsed that with ujson inside a 2GB heap and the batch died in
ForkJoinPool. The driver reported `query_failed` for all 2,500 regions, which
was the honest answer to a question that never should have been asked that
way. Repository-wide fields are now hoisted to a single `--param`, and only if
they are identical across the whole batch -- a field that genuinely varies per
region stays where it belongs.

**Arbitration spent 737 seconds enumerating candidates nobody would read.**
Candidates exist to be put to the judge, and `scan_region` discards them the
moment there is no judge to put them to -- but the driver enumerated them
first regardless, parsing each region's file once per family. With the budget
at zero model calls that is 2,500 parses whose results are dropped on arrival.

    build 264.8s   query 401.3s   arbitrate 737.3s   total 1403s

Nobody should pay for a question nobody will ask.

848 tests pass; gates byte-identical.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-10 08:18:17 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 9cce5a3181 feat(cpg): give the files a frontend refuses a CPG of their own
A dropped file is dropped from the ONLY graph there is, so every question
about it has no answer -- which is how a 637-file plugin became a scan of
nothing. But those files build perfectly well alone: the failure is
per-invocation, not per-file. So a file the main build refuses is excluded
from it, given a second CPG, and both are queried with rows concatenated per
request id.

    pmpro two-file slice   before: cpg_empty, 0 findings
                           after:  18 entailed incl. CVE-2023-23488 at :936,
                                   reported with cpg_sharded

What this does NOT buy is a flow that crosses the shard boundary: a source in
the excluded file whose sink is in the rest of the tree is invisible to every
question asked, and no merging of results recovers it. That is why the split
is REPORTED rather than quietly served as if it were whole.

The excluded-file tree is symlinks at the original relative paths. A region
asks about `classes/class.memberorder.php` and the queries match a filename by
suffix, so a flattened copy would cheerfully answer about a file nobody asked
about.

Reports gain "What could not be analysed", rendering cpg_sharded, cpg_empty,
files_unparsed, query_failed and budget_exhausted in the reader's terms. A
degradation is a fact about coverage, not a warning to file away: silence in
the coverage table means "no fact table covered this", and silence about an
empty or split graph means something else entirely.

Also removes the WordPress vocabulary from the query, which was the other half
of this request. `apply_filters` was a hardcoded Set in taint.sc and
`add_action|add_filter|add_shortcode` a hardcoded alternation in mapping.py.
Both are now a `[[dispatch]]` fact:

    [[dispatch]]
    id = "wordpress_hooks"
    register = ["add_action", "add_filter", "add_shortcode"]
    apply = ["apply_filters", ..., "do_action", ...]

The shape is general -- a registry keyed by a string literal at both ends, as
Django signals, jQuery events and Symfony's dispatcher all are -- so a second
framework is a row in a TOML rather than an edit to a query. `dispatch_apply`
is empty for every language that declares none, and the hook half then does
nothing at all rather than looking for names that mean nothing there.

848 tests pass; gates byte-identical. wpstatistics 3/2 with the CVE at :225 on
the vulnerable side only, mwwpform 1/0, pmpro 18/1, VAmPI 4 unchanged.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-10 07:32:20 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 d6908f18ba feat(cpg): the hook half — CVE-2022-25148 found across an add_filter/apply_filters edge
The last of the three WordPress flaw classes 5.8 measured as missed. The
value crosses a registry inside WordPress core:

    add_filter('wp_statistics_current_page', array($this, 'set_current_page'));
    return apply_filters('wp_statistics_current_page', $current_page);

php2cpg drops the callback argument entirely -- the CPG holds
`add_filter("wp_statistics_current_page", )` -- so the edge cannot come from
the graph at any price. It comes from the source text instead, where both ends
are literals, via `mapping.php_hook_callbacks`.

                 vulnerable                              fixed
  wpstatistics   3 entailed, incl. pages.php:225:record  2, that one absent
  mwwpform       1 ($this->attachments)                  0
  pmpro          18, incl. CVE at :936                   1
  VAmPI          4                                       unchanged

The correctly-prepared sibling query one line below the CVE is not flagged on
either side.

Four things this cost, each measured rather than guessed:

  * Half one must be asked per ARRAY KEY, not per callback. "Does an
    unsanitized value reach this callback's return" is TRUE on both sides: the
    fix escapes `type` and `id` and leaves `search_query` alone. A
    callback-level answer flags the fixed side as readily as the vulnerable
    one, which is a leak, not a detection. The key is a literal at both ends,
    so it joins the way the hook name and the field name do -- the same idea
    for the third time.

  * The sanitizer test had to stop crediting a sibling's cleansing. The
    vulnerable query is ONE concatenation holding both `esc_sql($page_uri)`
    and the injectable `{$current_page['id']}`, so asking whether a
    sanitizer's name appears in a path element's text marked the whole flow
    sanitized. An element must now BE the cleansing -- a call to it, or its
    name as a string literal, which keeps `array_map('esc_sql', ...)` working.

  * Hook seeds are repository-wide where field seeds are file-scoped. A hook
    registry is global by construction: the callback is in one file and its
    `apply_filters` in another. The query returned nothing until those two
    scopes were separated.

  * `sourceKind` had to be REPORTED, not inferred. By the time a row reaches
    Python a hook source reads as `$current_page["id"]` and a parameter as
    `$args`, and `_usable_flows` discards parameter flows whenever a modelled
    one is present -- so seven sanitized `$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]` flows
    displaced the CVE between the query and the verdict. That preference then
    had to move PER SINK SITE: applied across a region it decides one site's
    question with another site's evidence, and PMPro's CVE at :936 vanished
    from a region still reporting fifteen other findings.

`verdict` now delegates to `verdicts` rather than running its own selection
over the union, because two copies of "which flow decides" is exactly the
duplication this module has been bitten by before -- and had been again: the
per-site preference did not reach the single-verdict path, so the two entry
points disagreed about the same rows.

841 tests pass; gates byte-identical; VAmPI unchanged.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-09 20:42:35 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 e0442d146c fix(cpg): a graph the frontend emptied must not read as a clean repository
Scanning a two-file WordPress slice returned 64 regions examined, zero
findings and zero degradations. The graph it examined had no methods in it.

php2cpg 4.0.623 feeds several files to one `php-parse` process and reads its
stdout and stderr merged. php-parse writes a `====> File <next>:` banner to
stderr the moment it starts the next file, while the previous file's JSON --
megabytes of it -- is still draining from a block-buffered stdout. The banner
lands inside the JSON, ujson reports

    expected json value or } got "=" at index 5011645

and the frontend drops that file. Reproducible on real plugin code, and the
size that matters is one file's AST dump, not the repository's:

    class.memberorder.php alone (1834 lines)     -> 142KB CPG, no failures
    the same file + a two-line file              ->   5.7KB CPG, BOTH dropped

One oversized file empties the whole graph. `joern-parse` then does not
propagate any of the frontend's warnings: 13 lines of output, exit status 0,
"Successfully wrote graph". This is what made a 637-file plugin unscannable
and reported it as clean -- it was never a scale limit.

Two fixes, because the failure arrives on two different paths:

  * `_unparsed_files` reads the per-file warnings the frontend does emit, and
    the scan reports them as `files_unparsed`. This covers the direct-frontend
    path where the warnings are visible.

  * The batched query now carries a `__census__` of the graph -- method and
    file counts -- under a key no request id can collide with, and a scan over
    a graph with no methods degrades as `cpg_empty`. This covers joern-parse,
    which shows nothing. It rides the batch rather than costing its own
    invocation, because avoiding a JVM start is the entire reason batching
    exists.

Neither invents a verdict. There is no rung for "the graph was empty" because
the ladder labels verdicts and none was produced, which is exactly why it has
to be a degradation.

    pmpro two-file slice  before: 0 findings, degradations=[]
                          after:  0 findings, degradations=[cpg_empty]

Gates byte-identical; 840 tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-09 18:07:28 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 21fdb554aa fix(cpg): a query that could not be asked is not an empty answer
contributor-scan 5.7, and it was the wrong question.

**The 117k-line pmpro CPG does not load.** Importing it throws in a
ForkJoinParallelCpgPassWithAccumulator during overlay application, so every
query against it returns nothing. It is not a call-graph question at all.

Isolated by running the ARBITER against two prebuilt CPGs rather than
writing a sixth ad-hoc Scala probe, four of which had already failed on my
own mistakes:

  small wpdb CPG   get_order_by_code       -> 1 model_entailed
  pmpro CPG        getMemberOrderByCode    -> 0

Both have their source and sink in ONE function, both were asked with
parameter sources and depth 3, same arbiter and same spec. The CPG is the
only difference.

That clears the facts, which is worth stating: `$wpdb` sinks work, the
parameter-source rule works, and a PHP parameter reaching `$wpdb->get_var`
through a concat is entailed. Whether php2cpg resolves `new X()` and
`$this->method()` is still unmeasured -- it cannot be measured on a CPG
that will not load -- and is recorded as 5.10 along with finding the size
boundary.

**And the defect underneath it, which is the fourth quiet failure found on
this one checkout.** `query_batch` returned `{}` for a failure and `{}` for
a genuine empty answer, so a caller could not tell "could not ask" from
"nothing found". Every query on this scan failed at load and it reported
500 regions examined, no findings, and no degradation: a vulnerable plugin,
clean.

A failed batch now returns None, unparseable output counts as a failure
rather than an empty answer, and the driver records a `query_failed`
degradation naming the kind and the request count.

This is the failure mode the rung ladder structurally cannot catch. Every
other honesty mechanism here labels a VERDICT -- suspicion,
regions_unjudged, regions_unasked, stated family limits -- and when no
verdict is produced there is nothing to label.

Gates byte-identical.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-09 17:15:51 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 9c50e17c11 fix(cpg): retry a failed build through the language frontend
Scanning a 637-file WordPress plugin reported 1577 regions with 0 scanned
and `cpg_build_failed`. The build was not slow or out of memory -- it
failed in 42 seconds -- and `php2cpg` run directly on the same tree
produced a 4.3MB CPG with no errors at all.

The difference is that `joern-parse` detects the language and then shells
out to the frontend in a separate process. On this tree it got as far as
applying overlays and then threw, while still writing an unusable cpg.bin.
Joern's own output recommends the direct route for a large codebase:

  "Invoking CPG generator in a separate process... If you are importing a
   large codebase (and/or running into memory issues), please try:
   invoke the frontend: php2cpg -J-Xmx3072m /tmp/src -o cpg.bin"

So a failed `joern-parse` now retries through `<language>2cpg`, with the
driver passing the dominant region language. A language with no mapping
fails closed exactly as before -- no guessing at a frontend name.

This is the documented fallback rather than a workaround, and it was
diagnosed rather than assumed: the standalone build was run first, and only
after it succeeded on the identical tree was the retry added.

Gates byte-identical.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-09 16:19:32 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 47b00d739b feat(model): one defect is one finding, however many regions reach it
contributor-scan 2.9. Task 2.4 let a region's question follow the call
graph, and the moment it did, many entry points could reach one shared
sink: libpng reported the same site twenty-six times. A contributor shown
the same defect twenty-six times learns to scroll past it.

Findings are deduplicated on (site, family), keeping the strongest rung
and counting the regions that reached it -- "reached from 26 regions" is
the useful half of that observation and one row is the readable half. Two
families at one site stay two findings, because `echo $_GET[...]` is an
injection question and an output-encoding question with different answers.

The duplication that motivated this was removed by another route: the 26
rows were all the `fgets`-matched-as-`gets` false positive, and the sink
matcher fix took them out. So this changes no current number and is a
structural guarantee rather than a measured reduction -- the mechanism that
produced them is untouched, and only the finding that made it visible is
gone.

+25 lines for a guarantee, in a session that has been asked to watch its
growth. The audit is unchanged at 97 modules, 90 load-bearing and 7
standalone, with no orphans.

Gates byte-identical.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-09 15:56:01 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 60d2a1a92c feat(model): an endpoint its contract declares open carries no obligation
contributor-scan 2.8. VAmPI's last two false positives were register_user
and login_user, both declared open by its OpenAPI spec: the arbiter was
reporting a missing guard on endpoints whose contract says there is
nothing to miss.

**The fix keys on provenance, not on the value, and that distinction is
the whole task.** The mapper says "public" in two very different
situations. An OpenAPI operation with no `security` block is DECLARED
open, because the spec is a complete contract. A Flask handler with no
`@login_required` is "public" only because nothing was found -- which is
precisely the bug this family exists to report. Suppressing on the value
alone would have silenced the detector on its primary case, so
EntryPointRecord now carries `access_declared` and only a declaration
removes the obligation.

WordPress supplied the second source of declared access on the same day --
wp_ajax_nopriv_ for a logged-out handler, wp_ajax_ for a logged-in one,
permission_callback => __return_true for an open REST route. A rule resting
on one framework's convention would be a special case; two make it a shape.

  vampi entailed              6 -> 4
  access-control precision    2 of 4 -> 2 of 2
  known vulnerabilities       3 of 3 still entailed
  access_control offered to   6 of 14 handlers, exactly the six the spec
                              declares authenticated

**And the guard that decides whether it is a real improvement:** the
access-control pair corpus, which nobody tuned this against, is unmoved --
pair_correct 3 and leak 1 across all nine, pair_correct 2 and leak 0.0%
across the seven from projects unrelated to VAmPI, identical to task 2.6.
The precision was not bought by silencing the family. Pair excerpts carry
no route manifest and no hook, so nothing in them is declared open and the
rule correctly does not fire.

Gates byte-identical.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-09 15:39:58 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 af7e33ef3e feat(reports): say what was looked for, and what cannot be decided
contributor-scan 2.16, implementing the approved Req 5.6. `c/memory`
scored zero true positives across 89k lines of C and three distinct
classes of false one, for a structural reason: it models string CALLS and
libpng overflows through arithmetic.

The task allowed retiring the family. Kept, scoped and stated instead --
`strcpy` misuse is real in plenty of C and the family earns its place for
that. Retiring it would have removed the disclosure along with the
coverage, leaving a C scan silent for a reason nobody could read.

**Its own description was the quiet-failure risk.** It claimed "bounds,
lifetime, arithmetic", which is exactly what it does not decide. It now
names the APIs it models, and a new `limits` field in families.toml says
what it cannot: an overflow expressed as an index, a pointer offset, or a
memcpy whose size is computed -- which is how most real C overflows are
written, and how every one of libpng's is.

A limit recorded in a fact table nobody reads is no better than silence, so
the report renders it. **What was analysed** lists every family offered to
a region whether or not it found anything, because a family that ran and
reported nothing is the case a reader is most likely to misread, and it
states plainly that silence means no fact table covered the code rather
than that the code is safe.

The counts are derived from the fact tables the arbiter actually used, so
they cannot drift from what the engine looked for; only the limit sentence
is authored, because "cannot decide an overflow expressed as an index" is a
statement about an abstraction and no table can produce it.

A C scan that finds nothing now says:

  | c | `memory` | 121 | 9 |
  **`memory` (c)** — Models CALLS, not arithmetic...

Gates byte-identical.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-09 15:08:01 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 0ffa99b5e6 feat(model): one finding per sink site, and WordPress's registration model
contributor-scan 5.4. Both halves, and the second found a frontend blocker.

**One verdict per region was right for a pair and wrong for a file.** A
pair is one labelled function with one bug, so one answer is correct. A
region spanning a PHP file is not: the probe's SQL injection on line 5 and
command injection on line 13 produced ONE injection verdict, `system` won
it on flow length, and the SQL injection went unreported by construction
rather than by any failure of the analysis.

`taint.verdicts()` now returns one verdict per distinct sink site,
strongest first, and its first element is exactly what `verdict()`
returns -- so the pair path and every committed measurement resting on it
are unchanged, and the gates are byte-identical. Both entry points share
`_usable_flows` so neither can drift from the other.

  php probe   2 of 3 -> 3 of 3
  vampi       6 entailed, unchanged, now with lines on access-control
              findings from task 2.7 (users.py:187, books.py:51 -- the two
              documented BOLAs at their exact lines)
  libpng      1 -> 2 entailed; the second was hidden by the collapse.
              Neither is validated and both are in contrib/.

**WordPress registers handlers rather than decorating them, and the hook
name is the declaration.** `wp_ajax_nopriv_*` is WordPress saying
logged-out callers reach this, so it is public; `wp_ajax_*` fires only for
logged-in ones; `permission_callback => __return_true` declares a REST
route open. That is the declared-provenance signal task 2.8 needs,
arriving from a second framework. Plus every top-level PHP function as its
own region, without which a file is one region however many functions it
holds: 1 file-level region became 10 function-scoped ones.

**And a blocker, recorded as 5.5.** php2cpg emits a CPG containing only
ONE PHP file, the last alphabetically. Reproduced twice on independent
samples; both files parse cleanly under `php -l` and under PHP-Parser
directly, and joern-parse reports success either way. php2cpg logs "Found
warning in PHP-Parser JSON output" naming the survivor, and that warning is
PHP-Parser's own `====> File X:` banner appearing in what php2cpg expects
to be pure JSON.

Not isolated yet: this machine has no PHP interpreter, so php2cpg was
driven through a container shim. The banner comes from PHP-Parser rather
than the shim, which makes a shim-only cause unlikely but not excluded, and
rerunning with the native php-cli in the shipped image is the first step.
It blocks WordPress outright -- a plugin is many files, and a scan that
silently covers one of them and reports success is the quiet failure Req
5.6 was approved for.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-09 14:30:48 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 61811512a8 feat(facts): PHP semantic facts, validated against a real PHP CPG
contributor-scan 5.1, the first step toward the v0.1 WordPress target.

Written against a PHP CPG rather than against PHP source, because the two
do not look alike. Verified with joern-parse 4.0.623 / php2cpg on a probe:

  $_GET["name"]               ->  call `<operator>.indexAccess`, CODE $_GET["name"]
  mysqli_query($conn, $sql)   ->  call NAMED mysqli_query
  echo $_GET["msg"]           ->  call NAMED echo

So sources match on code and sinks match on name, and every entry the
probe did not exercise is marked unverified in the file -- `include` and
`require` among them, which is PHP's most characteristic path bug and the
first thing to check on a real checkout.

Five families derive (injection, output_encoding, path, deserialization,
untrusted_destination) with no sink that is its own sanitizer -- asserted
by a test, because that bug class has now appeared three times in three
matchers. `php` is added to the region model's languages, without which
the facts would have reached nothing.

The arbiter decides 4 of 4 on the probe: the SQL concat entails, its
`mysqli_real_escape_string` twin drops to corroborated, `echo` XSS entails
and `system` command injection entails.

**A whole scan finds 2 of those 3, and the gap is the finding.** PHP files
yield FILE-LEVEL regions because no PHP entry points are mapped, and the
taint arbiter returns one verdict per region per family -- so a file-level
region reports at most one injection finding however many it holds.
`system` won on flow length and the SQL injection went unreported. That is
the mirror image of task 2.9: that one is many regions collapsing to one
site, this is many sites collapsing to one verdict, and it bites hardest
exactly where PHP needs it not to, since a WordPress file is large and has
no decorator for the mapper to find.

Recorded as task 5.4 with WordPress's registration model (add_action,
add_filter, admin-ajax, REST routes), which the mapper already handles in
principle for other frameworks.

A 13-line probe is not a WordPress result. What is established is that the
seam works end to end for PHP; everything about scale and coverage is
unmeasured, and there are still zero PHP pairs in a corpus of 263 python,
351 c_cpp, 47 javascript and 49 java.

Gates byte-identical.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-09 14:18:57 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 c1191b3a6b feat(model): an access-control finding names a line, and what the PDG does not give us
contributor-scan 2.7. Taint and config verdicts have always carried a
`path:line:function` location; dominance never did, so every
access-control finding reached a contributor as
`api_views/users.py:?:update_password` -- the right file by accident,
because the region was asked about that file, and no line at all. The
query now reports the operation's file and the verdict carries the
location, with an engine that cannot report one getting no location rather
than an invented one.

Two questions answered by measurement while doing it.

**Does this factor in the PDG?** The data half, centrally: `reachableByFlows`
is the entire taint arbiter and `joern-parse` applies the `dataflowOss`
overlay. The control half, not at all -- and it is not available to us.
Measured: 0 of 13,184 calls in the libpng CPG and 0 of 1,152 in the vampi
CPG have a controlling control structure, so `controlledBy` returns nothing
in either. Everything guard-shaped therefore runs on CFG dominance or on
syntactic conditions, which is exactly why 2.12's first attempt failed:
libpng's bound reaches its sink through an `error` flag, and that is a
control-dependence fact and nothing else. Recorded as 2.14, including the
possibility that it cannot be enabled -- which would bound what guard
reasoning this engine can ever do.

**Would checking out a vulnerable libpng find a known CVE?** No, and not
because of the version. Every one of the twelve files using
`strcpy`/`strcat`/`sprintf`/`gets` is under `contrib/`; the library itself
uses none of them. libpng overflows through array and pointer arithmetic
and `memcpy` sizing, and five of its buffer-overflow fixes touch no
modelled sink at all. Pinning an older commit would produce the same
silence for the same reason.

That leaves two routes of very different size, recorded as 2.15: pin a C
project whose CVE genuinely runs through a string function, which is cheap
and would give the memory family its first true positive; or model how C
actually overflows, which is size arithmetic rather than sink matching and
should not be started by accident.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-09 13:09:47 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 9221ba8e40 feat(model): a bound on the data lowers the rung, it does not clear it
contributor-scan 2.12. c/injection and c/memory carried zero sanitizers,
so no C flow could ever be discharged: every `argv -> strcpy` entailed
however carefully it was bounded.

Which sinks can be discharged this way is read from the sink fact's own
CWE rather than declared: CWE-121 is a stack buffer overflow, so
gets/sprintf/strcat/strcpy qualify. It is the only overflow CWE in the
fact tables and it is C-only, so no Python or JavaScript sink is touched
and the pair corpus is unaffected -- gates byte-identical.

Not a sanitizer list, because `strlen` appears in the guarded and the
unguarded case alike; the discharge is a guard, not a call.

**The first implementation required the bound to DOMINATE the sink, and it
found nothing.** libpng guards `strcpy(outname+len, ".png")` with
`(len = strlen(inname)) > 250`, but that check sits on an else-if chain
whose sibling branch skips it entirely, and the protection reaches the
sink through an `error` flag: `++error` in the guarded branch, `if
(!error)` around the copy. Joern's dominator set for that sink has 89
calls and correctly excludes the bound; `controlledBy` returns none
either. Verified against the CPG before the rule was changed rather than
after it failed.

So the bound is searched in the method, and the consequence is
corroborated rather than silence. That is the honest rung: a bound on this
variable means the graph has NOT shown the copy is unguarded, and it has
not shown it is guarded either -- off-by-one being how bounds fail. The
judge is asked. Proving the flag-mediated case needs path-sensitive
reasoning this arbiter does not do.

  libpng entailed   3 -> 1

The survivor is also a false positive: `strcpy(output + len, ".icc")` in
iccfrompng.c, where `output = malloc(len + 5)` makes it fit exactly. That
is a different discharge shape -- allocated to size, not bounds-checked --
and it is recorded as 2.13 rather than chased. Both shapes were found on
one repository, and extending a rule until that repository is clean is the
overfitting Req 8 exists to prevent; 2.13 requires a second C checkout
with a genuine CWE-121 so the change can be measured for what it silences
as well as what it clears.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-09 13:01:30 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 6dc25d77e4 feat(model): let the project say what it ships, and rank that first
contributor-scan 2.10. Every one of libpng's twenty-five entry-point
regions was a `main()` -- twenty-three under contrib/, plus example.c and
pngtest.c -- and those regions carried the fifty interprocedural taint
requests that dominated a 300s query phase. A library has no entry points,
so entry-point-driven analysis had nothing to anchor to except its own
example programs.

The task said to derive this rather than hardcode `contrib/`, and a project
already declares it. Makefile.am names installed targets in
`lib_LTLIBRARIES` and `bin_PROGRAMS`, each target's `<target>_SOURCES`
names its files, and `check_PROGRAMS`/`noinst_PROGRAMS` are automake's own
word for "not installed" -- exactly the distinction wanted. Taking every
`_SOURCES` would have called libpng's whole test suite shipped code, since
contrib/libtests declares its sources the same way the library does.

  interprocedural regions   25 -> 1
  taint query               300.1s -> 125.0s
  total query               311.9s -> 138.5s
  regions                   121 -> 121, unchanged by design

The surviving interprocedural region is contrib/tools/pngfix.c:main, which
libpng genuinely installs.

Two rules keep it honest. **Silence is not exclusion**: a project with no
build file this can read gets None back and nothing changes, so vampi's
numbers are untouched. **Not shipped is not unscanned**: those regions are
still arbitrated function-locally, because a contributor editing a test
must still get an answer -- what they lose is the expensive treatment and
first claim on the budget.

Entailed findings went 0 -> 3, and all three are false positives at
contrib/gregbook/wpng.c:374, `strcpy(outname+len, ".png")`. It is safe:
outname is char[256] and line 325 guards with
`if ((len = strlen(inname)) > 250)`. They were not introduced so much as
uncovered -- a different callDepth meant a different sink set, and the 26
fgets false positives were masking them.

The structural cause is recorded as 2.12: c/injection and c/memory carry
ZERO sanitizers, so no C flow can ever be discharged and every
`argv -> strcpy` entails however carefully it is bounded. The discharge
here is not a call but a guard that dominates the sink, which is precisely
what dominance.sc already does for access control and is wired to that one
family.

Also adds Group 7, five tasks for stopping the same false positive twice.
Two of today's three false-positive classes were one bug in three
matchers -- `resolve` in `resolveUrl`, `user` in `users`, `gets` in
`fgets` -- each fixed locally and each next one surviving because nobody
carried the fix across. A model may group counter-examples by cause and
draft an edit; only a split-respecting measurement may adopt one, because
the predecessor's improve lever admitted shapes taught by the holdout pairs
they then recovered and turned a -0.059 Youden into +0.059.

Gates byte-identical.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-09 12:45:21 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 68b4e551f3 feat(model): the envelope checkout, and no to Joern server mode
contributor-scan 2.2 for libpng and the 2.3 decision it exists to inform.

89,082 lines of C across 93 files, under a 2GB heap cap:

  CPG build      16.1s (25s cold)
  Joern queries  250.0s
  arbitration    122.0s (105 calls, $0.0122)
  whole scan     446s
  peak RSS       911MB
  regions        121, all arbitrated, 32 unasked
  CVE-2025-66293 out_of_scope, as the recipe declares

Memory is not the constraint a fleet runner would hit: 911MB leaves room
for the rest of the job on a 2-vCPU/7GB runner. The memory pressure seen
while building this was concurrent JVMs on one desktop, not repository
size.

**Server mode: no.** The query phase splits taint 243.3s / config 10.7s
over two invocations, and fixed overhead measured on the same CPG is ~13s
per invocation. So ~26s of the 250s is JVM startup and ~224s is CPGQL
evaluation: a warm server removes 6% of the scan and none of the part that
costs. The driver now records query seconds per kind, because a single
total cannot tell startup from evaluation and the two answer this
oppositely.

The small repository pointed the other way. vampi's 34.3s over three kinds
is roughly three startups and almost no evaluation, which made a warm JVM
look worth having; the ratio inverts with size. That inversion is why the
task was sequenced after a real repository rather than decided on a
520-line file.

On whether one whole-repository CPG is the only shape for a horizontal
fleet: no, and it is also not where the pressure is. The build
parallelises and costs 16s; the query does not shard and costs 250s, so
splitting a repository across runners divides the cheap phase -- and after
2.4 a shard boundary hides exactly the cross-module flows that matter.
Scoping to a contributor's diff cuts the expensive phase instead. 911MB
for 89k lines extrapolates to roughly 5GB at a million lines, which would
exceed a standard runner, so the ceiling is real and further out than this
checkout can locate.

Two defects recorded rather than fixed, both invisible at vampi scale:
2.9, all 26 entailed findings are the same site reported 26 times, because
regions that share a sink each emit their own; and 2.10, 22 of the 30
highest-ranked regions are libpng's `contrib/` example programs rather than
the library.

Also ignores Joern's `workspace/`, which a maintainer querying a CPG by
hand from the repository root will create.

Gates byte-identical.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-09 11:30:02 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 d15985f695 fix(model): a guard discharges the obligation it is a guard of
contributor-scan 2.6. Access control entailed 7 of 9 VAmPI handlers,
including three that do authorize and three the OpenAPI spec declares
public. Five separate defects, each invisible to a corpus of one-function
excerpts and each found by asking the query what it actually matched.

**A trailing segment is not a match.** `query.get` was matched by its last
segment, so every `.get(` in the repository became a protected database
operation -- `request.headers.get('Authorization')` and
`request_data.get('username')` included. Four of the seven false positives
came from this, and so did the apparent detection of the known BOLA: it was
entailed because fetching the Authorization header had no dominating guard,
not because of the defect. A qualified token now requires its qualifier.

**Configuration is not authorization.** dominance_specs took every
obligation fact. `security_setting` operations are discharged by a VALUE,
which config_specs already claims them for; pooled in here they made
`app.run(...)` an operation requiring an authorization guard and put
thirteen tokens in BOTH lists -- an obligation that is its own discharge,
the same shape as the taint sink that used to sanitize itself.

**Input validation is not authorization.** `jsonschema.validate` was
counted as a guard, so handlers with no authorization check at all read as
guarded. No operation in the table requires validated_input.

**A guard discharges the obligation it is a guard of.** The largest one.
`orm-read` requires an identity_constraint or an ownership_check;
`token_validator` is a path_guard. Flattened into one list, authenticating
the caller discharged an object-level obligation -- a handler that
authenticates and then looks the record up by a PATH parameter read as
fully guarded. The facts state that relation and the spec was discarding
it; it is now carried and the engine asks per operation.

**A word boundary needs a word.** Found while fixing the above. Guard
matching wrapped every token in `(?<![A-Za-z0-9_])...(?![A-Za-z0-9_])`.
The identity token `['sub']` begins with `[`, and the character before it
in `resp['sub']` is `p` -- so the assertion could never hold. Every
identity token starting with punctuation was unmatchable, and the identity
constraint that separates a correct lookup from an IDOR was invisible.

Also: dominance rows were repository-wide, so the model's unguarded
`delete_user` was attributed to the API handler of the same name. Rows are
scoped to the region's file, which is what the rung's own justification
says -- the evidence is a file contradicting itself.

Measured against VAmPI's OpenAPI `security` blocks, which declare per
operation whether auth is required, and agree with the code:

  vampi precision   28.6% (2/7) -> 50.0% (2/4)
  known found       3 of 3, all model_entailed

And on the labelled access-control pairs, which nobody tuned this against:

  all 9 pairs       pair_correct 3 -> 3, leak 44.4% -> 11.1%
  7 non-VAmPI       pair_correct 2 -> 2, leak 42.9% -> 0.0%

Every detection lost was on a pair whose FIXED side was flagged too, which
scores nothing. No correct detection was traded for the precision.

get_by_title was flagged before it was in the recipe: its code carries the
comment "# Broken Object Level Authorization" and the README lists it, so a
real finding was being scored as a false positive. It is now the recipe's
third known vulnerability.

Both remaining false positives are endpoints the spec declares public.
Recorded as 2.8, with the reason the mapper's access_level cannot simply be
trusted: for decorator frameworks "public" means "no decorator found",
which is the bug itself.

Gates byte-identical.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-09 11:02:48 +02:00
Marius CiepluchandClaude Opus 5 0fcd5feade feat(model): a region for the code that is in no function
contributor-scan 2.5. VAmPI's `host='0.0.0.0'` is now reported exactly
once, at app.py:17:<module>. Before task 2.2 it was reported eight times
in eight files that do not contain it; after 2.2 it was reported nowhere.

Two causes, one shape: nothing could ask about module-level code.

**The main-guard marker is not a function.** `__main__` is what the mapper
emits for `if __name__ == '__main__':`. Sent to the engine as a function
name it matched nothing, because a CPG calls a file's top-level code
`<module>` -- verified against the VAmPI CPG rather than assumed. The
region model translates the marker, which is the one place that turns what
the mapper meant into what the scanner asks.

**A function-scoped file had no region for its module body.** Settings,
route registration and globals live in no function, and every region's
query filters by function name. A file-level region beside the handlers
would report each handler's findings a second time, which is why the
earlier rule dropped it as "a second full-file pass". A module-scope region
PARTITIONS the file instead of overlapping it. That only became cheap after
batching: before it, a region was a JVM.

Two things this needed to be correct rather than merely present:

- A module method spans its whole file, so the taint query's line-range
  containment made `<module>` the parent of every function in it. Under
  module scope, membership is direct -- otherwise the module region reports
  every handler's sinks again, which is the duplication the old rule was
  avoiding.
- A module body is not a handler. The marker-derived region inherited the
  handler families and entailed a missing authorization check on the main
  guard: a finding with no possible remediation. Caught by the first
  repository run that had the region, and now covered by a test.

  bind address   8 wrong files -> 0 -> 1, at app.py:17:<module>
  regions        22 -> 25
  entailed       8 -> 9
  query time     37.4s -> 41.3s
  peak RSS       827MB -> 823MB
  cost           $0.0067 -> $0.0068

Three more regions for four seconds and no more model calls: the budget is
a total and was already spent, so regions_unasked rose 17 -> 20 -- those
regions got the free pass and are reported as unasked, not as clean.

`<module>` is Joern's Python name for a module body; JavaScript uses
`:program`, so this is verified for Python only.

Gates byte-identical.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
2026-09-09 09:43:53 +02:00