ANTHILL v0.3.8.72
v0.3.8.72 - the fix that would have looked right
The sweep for other copies of v0.3.8.71's defect — a scanner reading a serialization instead of the
values — found the more useful thing one layer up: the obvious fix was wrong, and it would have
shipped looking correct.
What was nearly shipped. v0.3.8.71 fixed the soldier at the feed (DecodeForScanning). The
follow-up's first move was to also widen PolicyScan.secret_material to tolerate an escaped quote
(\"), on the reasoning that the feed is not the only way encoded text reaches a scanner. That
allowance does nothing. Json.Dumps leaves JsonSerializerOptions.Encoder at
JavaScriptEncoder.Default, which never emits \" — it emits a " unicode escape, and treats
<, >, &, ' and + the same way. The widened pattern would have been exactly as blind as the
original while reading as fixed, and a guard written by hand-typing "the escaped form" would have
agreed with it, because both would have been guessing at the same wrong encoding. The same widening
was drafted for ArchivistAnt.SecretLike and has been reverted for the same reason.
So the rule is unchanged and the layering is the fix. A scanner that tries to recognise text
through an encoding has to know every encoding, and is wrong the first time one changes. Patterns
match source; callers hand them source. That is the rule this repository already applies to
containment (PathContainment) and to test collections — one place answers each question — applied
to policy scanning.
SecretPatternEncodingTests never hand-writes an encoding. Every encoded sample comes out of
Json.Dumps, the same call RecordPatchArtifact makes, and every decode goes through
DecodeForScanning. If .NET changes its default encoder these tests still describe the truth,
because they never claimed to know what the escaping looks like. The property is not "the rule
handles escapes" — it is "the rule is never asked to". NoScannerIsHandedARawArtifactPayload is the
layering rule enforced, and it says plainly what it cannot see: an adjacency check in the file where
the two meet, blind to a payload arriving through three helpers.
The rest of the sweep, including what was fine. PolicyScan.Scan has two callers, and the second
is why this hid for two releases: SecurityPolicyVerifier reads r.ChangedPath and r.NewContent,
raw strings that are never serialized — so one caller proved the rule healthy while the other could
not use it at all. ArchivistAnt.SecretLike has the same shape with the failure running the other
way (a miss writes a secret into durable memory rather than declining to block a patch), but its
inputs are plain strings and it never sees a payload; it is left alone, with the reasoning recorded
against it. TaskScheduler.SensitiveAssignment was already encoding-tolerant. Recorded because
"checked, and fine" is a finding.
Also: the duplicate encoding tests that shipped inside SoldierBlockLifecycleTests are deleted in
favour of the single file above — one of them described the escaping as \", which is the mistake
this release is about, sitting in a test that passed.
Docker: docker pull ghcr.io/formicaria/anthill:0.3.8.72
LXC: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Formicaria/Anthill/main/deploy/lxc/setup.sh | bash