"Is this path inside that root" is asked in twenty places in this tree and
answered twenty times by a locally written realpath/commonpath pair. Nine test
files exist because nine call sites each needed their own proof. Each one is
defensible alone; together they are the defect, because the boundary has no
single definition and a site that gets a detail wrong is wrong by itself.
src/path_confinement.py is that definition, and it settles the details the
copies disagreed on. Both sides get canonicalized: comparing a realpath-ed
candidate against a root that was only abspath-ed is the macOS /tmp ->
/private/tmp mismatch that has already produced a false failure here, and
canonicalizing one side is worse than canonicalizing neither. commonpath rather
than startswith, because /a/bc begins with /a/b and is not inside it. A relative
candidate joins the root rather than os.getcwd(), which is whatever directory
the server happens to be running in. NUL and newline are refused with a reason
instead of caught by a bare `except Exception` and reported as an ordinary
escape. Eighteen call sites go through it now. It deliberately does not decide
whether a path is sensitive -- that deny list answers "allowed" rather than
"inside", and it stays with src/tool_execution, which owns it. The one
commonpath left in the tree, in src/workspace_paths.py, stays: that function
translates a host path into a container path, so canonicalizing either side
would change the relative path it computes and break the mapping. It is not a
confinement check.
Two of those sites were weaker than the rest and are fixed rather than moved.
The email attachment check used abspath, which folds `..` but does not resolve
symlinks, so a symlink written into the extraction directory passed it and was
then read through. The skill-reference guard compared a realpath-ed target
against a raw dirname, so on a host where the skills tree is reached through a
symlink the two sides never matched and the guard could not fire.
The execution boundary had two separate holes.
The workspace namespace bound /home and /mnt read-write. On the one platform
where that namespace engages at all, a command inside it reaches outside the
workspace and writes to the user's home directory -- measured by running this
argv on a Linux host with working bubblewrap, not inferred from the source.
Binding the user's whole home directory into a workspace-confinement namespace
gives back most of what the namespace was for. Both are read-only now. The
workspace is also bound writable at its real host path, not only at /workspace:
BashTool's own /tmp redirect rewrites `/tmp/` to `<agent_cwd()>/.tmp/` before
the namespace is built, so the command bwrap receives already names the real
path, and those writes previously landed only because the workspace happened to
sit under the writable /home.
`namespaced or _replace_workspace_alias(...)` chose between a mount namespace
and a regex with nothing in the result saying which one ran. The fallback
rewrites the literal token /workspace in the command string, so a command that
never mentions /workspace is untouched by it and runs on the host unrestricted
-- which is every agent shell command on macOS. Both tools now ask
containment.probe() instead of each deciding for itself, and every bash and
python result carries a containment block naming the mechanism and stating
whether the filesystem dimension actually held. Under enforcing mode the
command is not run and the result says so.
That block reports the filesystem dimension only, and says so in a
reported_dimensions field. The probe knows this host could also give a process
group and a real wall clock, but these two tools still assemble their own
create_subprocess_* call and pass neither, so listing those dimensions would be
exactly the false claim src/containment.py calls worse than an honest absence.
probe() is new on src/containment.py: the same mechanism table and the same
arithmetic as acquire(), stopping before the side effects. acquire() is the
wrong shape for a decision -- it writes a durable grant record, and a record
whose pid is never filled in and whose release() never runs is an entry a
restart reaper keeps finding.
CONTAINMENT_MODE stays report_only. Flipping it refuses every agent shell
command on macOS and on any Linux host without bubblewrap, which is a product
decision rather than a code one.
Smaller things in the same area: the /tmp redirect's makedirs was unguarded, so
a read-only workspace turned a command that merely mentioned `/tmp/` into an
OSError traceback instead of a tool error; it degrades now. WORKSPACE_MOUNT
moved to src/constants.py so the namespace and the path resolvers read one
definition of the contract rather than two. The ".tmp" dirname got a constant,
since it appeared in both tool paths.
One generated artifact moved with it: website/configuration-reference.md pins
the source line where each ODYSSEUS_* variable is read, and three of those
shifted. Regenerated with scripts/generate_env_reference.py; the diff is line
numbers only.
Three existing tests changed. test_workspace_artifact_tool_floor asserted that
an unsafe interpreter prefix produces no `--ro-bind <prefix> <prefix>`, which
now fires on /home because /home is legitimately a read-only base mount.
Asserting the absence of a literal flag string cannot distinguish "the prefix
was rejected" from "the argv mounted that root itself", so it compares the argv
against the no-prefix baseline instead: an unsafe prefix must add nothing.
The Windows bash test asserted dict equality on the
whole result, which makes adding a field to every bash result impossible without
touching a test about tmux; it asserts the shape now. The personal-dir symlink
test grepped the resolver's source for the literal "os.path.realpath", which is
gone because the resolution moved into the shared boundary -- it keeps the
negative assertion that the closure must not grow its own abspath check again,
and the behavioural half now runs against the boundary, where it covers every
call site instead of one closure.
Not verified: the bubblewrap argv is asserted, not executed. There is no bwrap
on macOS, and in Docker it needs --privileged to work at all -- default and
seccomp=unconfined both fail with "Creating new namespace failed", and
--cap-add=SYS_ADMIN fails at pivot_root. The Python tool's
needs_virtual_namespace gate means ordinary Python code gets no namespace even
on a Linux host that could provide one; that is reported now but deliberately
not changed, because it alters the Linux Python path on every call and cannot be
checked from here.
Agent-reachable execution has 25 independent spawn sites and no single
place deciding where a process runs or under what limits. All three
consequences are visible on this SHA. When bwrap is absent the workspace
namespace degrades to a regex that rewrites /workspace to the real path,
and nothing in the tool result says which one you got. No spawn site
passes start_new_session, so a wall-clock kill reaches the wrapper shell
and leaves its backgrounded grandchildren running while reporting the
process killed. Teardown stops at SIGTERM without ever checking death.
src/containment.py gives those paths one boundary. acquire() establishes
containment or refuses -- a string rewrite is not a mechanism it can
select -- and the grant states which dimensions actually hold, which were
best-effort and are missing, and which were required and are missing.
run() enforces the wall clock and the output cap. release() signals the
process group, escalates to SIGKILL, and reports dead only for a group it
observed go empty.
Containment never sees the command: acquire() takes a workspace and
limits, and the command text only reaches run(). Nothing in a request can
widen a boundary it is never shown.
CONTAINMENT_MODE chooses between refusing an unestablishable required
dimension and recording it. It ships report-only, so landing this changes
no behaviour on a host without bwrap -- which is every host today.
No call sites move here; they follow on this branch. The configuration
reference is regenerated because the page records src/constants.py line
numbers and the new path constant shifts two of them.
The configuration surface was undiscoverable. .env.example has three active
lines, and of the ODYSSEUS_* variables the code actually reads, most appear
nowhere in .env.example, docs/, website/ or README.md - including several that
change security-relevant behaviour (ODYSSEUS_BROWSER_NO_SANDBOX,
ODYSSEUS_ALLOW_PRIVATE_CALDAV, ODYSSEUS_ENABLE_HOST_DOCKER,
ODYSSEUS_MCP_ALLOWED_COMMANDS). Every question about one of them lands in the
issue tracker.
A hand-written page would drift within a month, so the page is generated:
- scripts/generate_env_reference.py walks the Python sources, collects each read
with the default it falls back to and the file it is read in, groups by area,
and marks the internal variables rather than omitting them.
- website/configuration-reference.md is the generated output, wired into the
Pages layout and linked from setup.md and .env.example. .env.example stays a
short deployment-level example and links onward rather than growing.
- tests/test_env_reference.py regenerates and compares, so adding a variable
without documenting it fails the suite. That is the point: the current state
happened because nothing objected.
Finding the reads needs more than one pattern. Two families - the upload caps in
src/upload_limits.py and the media-ingress overrides in src/media_ingress.py -
are read through helper functions, so the generator detects env-reader helpers
rather than hardcoding a list. Others span two lines, hold the variable name in
a module constant, or read through a mapping passed in as an argument. One lives
inside a string literal, in the Ollama probe script routes/cookbook_helpers.py
builds line by line. A line-based grep for os.environ.get("ODYSSEUS_ finds 70 of
the 98 the generator finds; the page reports that gap and recomputes it on every
run so the claim cannot go stale.
No application behaviour changes.
Léo