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SECURITY

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Chuyue Wang edited this page May 19, 2026 · 1 revision

Security Policy

Reporting a vulnerability

Please do not open a public GitHub issue for security reports.

Use GitHub Security Advisories to file a private report. You will receive an acknowledgement within a few days. If you do not have GitHub access, email the maintainer listed in pyproject.toml.

Supported versions

Cortex is a personal portfolio project maintained by a single author on a best-effort basis. Only the most recent tagged release receives security fixes.

Version Supported
latest tagged release ✅
older tags ❌

Privacy & biometric boundary commitments

Cortex processes physiological data locally. The codebase enforces these invariants and changes that weaken them are considered security regressions:

  1. No video is persisted. Webcam frames are processed in memory and discarded. No frame buffer is written to disk.
  2. No biometrics in LLM payloads. Heart rate, HRV, blink, posture, and respiration never leave the machine. The LLM call carries only workspace text context (file paths, error messages, tab titles).
  3. Local-only network surface. FastAPI (:9472), WebSocket (:9473), and the launcher agent (:9471) bind to 127.0.0.1.
  4. Capability-token gate. Every mutating HTTP route and the WebSocket handshake require a 256-bit token written to ~/Library/Application Support/Cortex/auth.token at mode 0600 and rotatable from the desktop UI.
  5. Consent ladder. Workspace mutations require earned trust through a 5-level consent system (OBSERVE → SUGGEST → PREVIEW → REVERSIBLE_ACT → AUTONOMOUS_ACT). Destructive actions are reversible via the undo stack.

If you believe any of these invariants is violated by current code, please file a security advisory.

Out of scope

The following are not security vulnerabilities for the purposes of this project:

  • Bugs that require root, physical machine access, or a malicious app already running on the user's Mac.
  • LLM output content (the LLM is a third-party service; Cortex validates output against a strict schema and degrades gracefully).
  • Issues caused by user-supplied API keys leaking outside the Cortex runtime (Keychain storage is the documented path).
  • Issues in macOS, Chrome, Edge, MediaPipe, OpenCV, or other upstream dependencies — please report those to their respective maintainers.

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