README: "Configuring the HarnessX agentic plane" becomes "The agentic plane (ax)" (ousast plane run|status|doctor|remember, per-task Model, budget and egress, pointer to ops/ax/README.md, one tagged retirement line); "The HarnessX self-improving cycle" becomes "The self-improving cycle", and its MetaAgent paragraph is replaced by the memory proposer (`ousast improve --memory`, provenance, train-on-test guard). The fusion panel_model/decider_model lines and the [harnessx] spend caps are gone. The README reference test now passes without its strict xfail. docs/examples.md section 6 runs the plane; docs/threat-model.md describes the per-task EgressPolicy, the usd/calls budgets and the start-request credential path. RELEASE_NOTES.md gets an Unreleased entry: HarnessX removed, the retired keys and their errors, the silent loss of the second hunter for users who set [models] hunter, and the plane as the agentic path. Dated retirement notes (2026-09-30) head the requirements, design and brief of harnessx-self-improving-rulesets, learning-harness, three-stage-scan and openrouter-sast-harness, and follow the spec table in steering/overview.md; history is unchanged. All tasks are checked, so spec.json moves to implementation-complete. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EmM1j46qgKMh3zqD1QMwEo
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Threat model & hardening
OpenUltraSAST analyzes untrusted code. This document states what it trusts, what it does not, and the controls that keep a scan safe to run in CI and safe to share.
Trust boundaries
- Scanned code is untrusted input, never executed. Quick and standard modes read
source as text (regex rules, evidence ladder, optional LLM review). They never import,
build, or run the target. Only
deepmode would execute target-derived code, and only inside the sandbox below — and deep mode is not yet implemented (it exits with a clear message rather than running anything). - The ruleset and CWE policy are trusted, governed data. They change only through
reviewed commits or the bounded self-improvement loop (
ousast improve), which can flip rule status and tune score constants but can never edit pattern text or the authoritative 0–5 severity. See the self-improving cycle in the README. - Provider credentials are the operator's. The zero-dependency core makes no network
calls. A local scan calls a model only for the optional
[models] huntertool hunter in standard mode. Agentic work runs on the plane (ousast plane run):ousastreads the variable a task's Model names (secretKey.key) from the operator's environment or.envand sends the key only in that task's start request, through Agent Substrate's router to that task's actor. It is not baked into an image or task template, and it is never logged or written to artifacts.
Controls
Secret redaction
Scan artifacts can quote source that contains live credentials. redaction.py masks
recognizable secret shapes (provider API keys, AWS/GitHub/Slack/Google tokens, bearer
tokens, URL-embedded credentials, PEM private keys, and key = value assignments for
sensitive names) before traces (trace/events.jsonl) and the markdown report are
written. On by default; disable with [hardening] redact_secrets = false.
Plane egress
Each plane task runs in its own actor behind Agent Substrate's egress gateway, which
denies by default. The task's EgressPolicy (src/openultrasast/plane/egress.py) allows exactly three
things: plain HTTP to the artifact receiver, and TLS passthrough to the Git hosts of the
task's bound Workspaces and to the hosts its bound Model declares
(openultrasast.io/egress-hosts). There are no wildcards, no IP addresses and no TLS
interception. The policy is deleted with the actor.
Cost & CI budgets
- Agentic spend is bounded per plane task by the Run's
budget: {usd, calls}. The metered client refuses the next call once either ceiling is reached (the task isunfinishedand resumes on a rerun with a larger budget). A usd budget on a Model without prices is refused rather than metered as zero, and an account or authentication error fails the task and starts nothing further. The standard-mode tool hunter is bounded by the per-tier hunter budgets. - Output size is bounded by
[hardening] max_findings(0 = unlimited). Truncation is severity-ordered and disclosed as abudgetdegradation in the manifest.
Provider reliability
LLM/embedding calls retry transient failures (HTTP 429/5xx, connection errors, timeouts) with exponential backoff; non-transient errors (e.g. 4xx, malformed JSON) fail fast.
Visible degradation & determinism
When an optional capability is missing (the extra, a model, a provider key), the scan
falls back to its deterministic equivalent and records a degradations entry in the
manifest — it is never silently downgraded. Runs are reproducible: fixed config,
artifact manifests, prompt hashes, and model identifiers are recorded.
MCP surface
ousast mcp exposes only the ten narrow project tools. No tool runs arbitrary shell,
Docker, or internal hunter tools, and no tool accepts a free-form command argument.
Sandbox limits (deep mode, when implemented)
Dynamic analysis runs under the bounds in [sandbox] (config.SandboxConfig):
| Control | Default |
|---|---|
| network | disabled (network = false) |
| workspace | read-only (workspace_readonly = true) |
| memory | 2048 MB (memory_mb) |
| pids | 512 (pids_limit) |
| timeout | 300 s (timeout_seconds) |
Dynamic probes additionally declare their network scope, log commands, and capture artifacts; a hardened runtime (e.g. gVisor) is used when available. Until deep mode ships, no target code is executed at all.