The census recorded this family completing 44 questions on a Node application and finding
nothing, which is what a client-only vocabulary must do there: all six declared sinks were DOM
sinks. NodeGoat's cross-site scripting is server-side.
Decision: the family asks about a value reaching a rendering call, and states in its own
declaration that it cannot decide template-mediated escaping. Whether res.render is safe depends
on the engine's autoescape setting and on the template's markup, neither of which is at the
call, so res.render is not a sink and the family's limits field says so. A new CWE-79 sink
covers res.write, res.end, res.send and the response.* spellings; res.json stays out because an
application/json body is not a document.
Template auto-escaping is claimed where its evidence is, as a configuration defect:
swig.setDefaults, nunjucks.configure and marked.setOptions are security settings now.
It establishes a finding: app/routes/research.js:25, model_entailed,
`req.query.url + req.query.symbol -> res.write(body)`. The handler fetches a URL the caller
chooses and writes the response body into a text/html response, so the document served from
this origin is the attacker's. The record states how coarse the step is: the path from url to
body runs through the client's callback parameter, which the graph treats as reachable from the
call's arguments, so the conclusion rests on the call's semantics rather than on what the graph
established. Five of seven families now establish findings.
Four defects were found on the way, three of them false positives this change would otherwise
have shipped.
- The permissive-value set was shared across every setting, while a boolean's polarity belongs
to the setting: true leaves the door open in cors({origin: true}) and closes it in
swig.setDefaults({autoescape: true}). Adding the template engines would have reported the fix
as the defect on the line that offers it. ConfigSpec now carries per-setting values, and
Jinja2's Environment moved out of Python's shared list for the same latent reason.
- config.sc matched a dotted setting on its trailing segment alone, so marked.setOptions would
have claimed an editor's setOptions. dominance.sc already required the qualifier.
- taint.sc asked its flow query of every argument including the receiver at index 0. On a
response sink the receiver is the response object, so res.end() -- which takes no data -- was
reported exactly like the res.write(body) two lines above it. Flows now use the real
arguments, as arity already did.
- The arbiter sorted a file's settings by line number as TEXT, so line 126 preceded line 78 and
which setting a file reported depended on the spelling of its line numbers.
Template escaping disabled at server.js:135 is detected, measured model_entailed against the
real query and the real arbiter, and still not reported: the arbiter returns one verdict per
question and that file has an earlier permissive setting. Task 14.6 carries it rather than
hiding it.
1,415 tests pass, thirteen skipped; nine Joern-gated query tests pass in the image.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EmM1j46qgKMh3zqD1QMwEo
The family census recorded this family completing 44 questions on NodeGoat, finding the open
redirect, and having no way to ask about the repository's documented SSRF: needle.get on a
query-string URL at app/routes/research.js:16. A thin vocabulary is a silent false negative.
One data change, no query change. The declared set now covers axios, got, needle, request,
superagent, unirest, undici and fetch as bare module tokens, plus http.get, http.request,
https.get and https.request dotted. Bare is the documented call form of each module and covers
its verb methods too, since a token matches word-bounded against the callee and axios is
bounded inside axios.get; axios.get and axios.post are dropped as subsumed rather than
unwanted. http and https stay dotted because their namespace also holds createServer, and a
bare token would have claimed every server a repository starts.
The request is now reported at app/routes/research.js:16, model_entailed, witness
`req.query.url + req.query.symbol -> needle.get(url, ...)`. This family goes from one finding
to two on NodeGoat, every other family is unchanged, and 299 of 299 questions still complete.
Measured on that graph, needle matches exactly one call and the eleven other clients match
none in first-party or vendored code, so NodeGoat shows the gap closing and cannot show those
clients' noise.
A control asserts both halves. A handler calling axios.get with a literal and needle.get with
req.query.url reports the tainted client alone, and it reads the shipped vocabulary rather than
a copy, so removing the client fails it. The CWE-601 redirect entry is untouched: a
Location-header redirect is value-shaped and stays outside what this family asks.
1,411 tests pass, eleven skipped; seven Joern-gated query tests pass in the image.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EmM1j46qgKMh3zqD1QMwEo
The group-4 finding: JavaScript is callback-heavy, so the method containing a
sink routinely is not the labeled function. `fs.readFileSync` inside the
callback passed to `fs.stat` has enclosing method `<lambda>0`, and filtering on
`sinkMethod == function` dropped it -- the whole path family measured 0/8.
Scope is now decided by line-range containment within the same file
(astParentFullName is empty for lambdas, so nesting is not readable there), and
reported as `inLabeledScope`; the Python side trusts that flag and keeps the
name comparison only as a fallback, so an engine that cannot report scope never
has its sinks silently treated as scoped. Parameter sources stay bound to the
labeled function's OWN parameters -- a callback's `err`/`stats` are not
attacker input.
Fixing the scope exposed three further bugs, each of which would have raised
the number while making the answer untrue:
* Shortest-flow-wins picked the wrong witness. With closures in scope the
same sink has flows from `req.url...` (10 steps, the vulnerability), `res`
(3) and `this` (7). A flow whose source matches the source model now
outranks a shorter one from a bare captured name; shortest still breaks
ties, so the order stays total and the verdict deterministic.
* The JS fact file had NO sanitizers at all, so no JavaScript fix of any
family could ever be recognised. Added the documented path-normalisation
and HTML-escaping APIs, with provenance.
* Adding them regressed the witness, because `resolveUrl` CONTAINS `resolve`
and the substring test marked the vulnerable flow sanitized. This is the
same bug class already fixed in dominance.sc and not carried across -- the
exact fix-the-instance-miss-the-class failure. taint.sc now matches on word
boundaries too.
And the principled rule the fix turns on: parameter sources are a FALLBACK,
never an override. When a modelled source reaches the sink, those flows are the
evidence; otherwise a captured `res` reaching a sanitized sink reports the fix
as still vulnerable on a flow that names no attacker input.
Also recorded: req.url was NOT wrong as a diagnosis, it was untestable in
isolation -- the scoping bug masked it. Both were needed. On the pair that
motivated all of this:
vuln model_entailed req.url.split('?')[0] -> readFileSync(possibleFilename)
fixed model_corroborated same flow, sanitized by path.normalize
distinguished: true
700 passing, mypy/ruff clean, gates byte-identical.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
4.1 is the arbiter for the class no crash oracle reaches. An access-control bug
is the ABSENCE of a guard: no flow to follow, no crash to reproduce. What the
model can establish is a consistency violation -- an obligated operation no
discharging guard governs, in a file where its siblings are governed by one.
"Governed" turned out not to be one relation, and asking pure CFG dominance of
the operation gets two of three shapes wrong. Measured against the real engine:
identity constraint the guard is INSIDE the operation's arguments
filter_by(owner_id = current_user.id)
identity branch abort(403).controlledBy == [note.owner_id != current_user.id]
-- the check runs AFTER the fetch, so it never dominates
the operation, but it controls whether the value escapes
dominating guard a discharger-naming call that dominates the operation
That is why the query uses controlledBy rather than dominatedBy for shape 2.
Two bugs found by running it, both the same class as the sanitizer bug in group
2 -- part of a fact flattened, the part carrying the signal dropped:
* dominance_specs used only `calls` and `decorators`, omitting
identity_sources (current_user, request.user) and constraint_params
(owner_id, user_id) -- which is how an identity constraint is actually
written. The arbiter reported "no guard" on handlers that plainly had one.
request_sources and permissive_values stay excluded: they describe the
vulnerable shape, and including them would let the arbiter read a bug as
its own fix.
* matching operations by code containment yielded four or five desugared rows
per operation (the bare `tmp1.filter_by` receiver among them, carrying none
of the guards the real call has), so a guarded operation could be flagged.
Matching is by call name now.
Live, deterministic, zero model calls:
leaky -> model_entailed no discharging guard, while 2 sibling handlers are guarded
edit_note -> no finding (ownership check controls the denial)
list_notes -> no finding (identity constraint in the query)
4.2 authors the sink facts the go/no-go measured as its largest miss class (11
of 23): Django ORM raw SQL, and the four families that previously had no fact
routing to them by CWE at all -- path, output_encoding, untrusted_destination,
prototype. Each entry is a documented dangerous API of the named library with
its provenance recorded inline, and rule_ids left empty because a sink fact is
not a detection rule. Flagged for maintainer review as data, given the standing
"no LLM-authored patterns" constraint. The exact-set assertion written in task
1.1 to hold this gap open is updated rather than deleted, so it still fails if a
family ever loses its seed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T7XD7x5KonMdmGRkp63EQG
Regex inventory stays the proposer. MAP attaches promote/demote/unadjudicated/coverage
from intra-file taint (tree-sitter when a grammar parses, Python ast as last resort).
Deep sandboxes promotions only, ordered by the existing heuristic ranker plus optional
OpenRouter mechanism recall. The SAST pair slice scores overlay outcomes; the stage-1
detection gate and local pair gate stay inventory-only.
