xpipe-mirror/SECURITY.md

# Security

This document summarizes the approach of X-Pipe when it comes to the security of your sensitive information.
If any of your questions are left unanswered by this document, feel free to file an
issue report so your question can be answered individually and can also potentially be included in this document.

## Goals

The main goals of the security approach of X-Pipe can be summarized as follows:
- Any sensitive information should be kept as secure as possible exclusively on your local machine,
  both while X-Pipe is running and also not running
- When sensitive information is required on another remote system that is connected through X-Pipe, that information should
  remain there as briefly and securely as possible
- Any infected remote system should be isolated enough such that any infection can't spread through X-Pipe

## Assumptions

The general assumption is that the system on which X-Pipe runs on is not infected.
This refers to your local system on which you installed X-Pipe, not any remote systems that you then connect too.
If your local system is infected, then there is no
technical way of preventing malicious programs to also infect X-Pipe and the connected systems as well.

Any underlying remote connection command-line tool should be secure.
If for example your SSH connection is susceptible to MITM attacks, or
vulnerable in any other way, there is no way for X-Pipe to keep the sensitive information secure.
As X-Pipe completely outsources any connection handling to your command-line tools,
it is your responsibility to keep them up to date with security patches and more.
X-Pipe can only be as secure as your underlying command-line tools itself.

## Storage of sensitive information

All sensitive information is encrypted when it is saved to disk on your local machine using AES
with either:
- A custom master key that can be set by you (This option is only as secure as the password you choose)
- A somewhat dynamically generated key (This option can be reverse
  engineered though, there is no way of perfectly securing your data without any custom user input)

## Passing of sensitive information

When any kind of login information is required by a command-line tool, it has to be passed somehow to it.
If this commandline tool runs on your local system, the data does not leave your local system.
If login information is required on a remote system, then that data is transferred to that remote system.

In case a tool accepts password input via stdin, this process is relatively straightforward.
Then the passed sensitive information does not show up in any history or file system.

When a program only accepts password input via an environment variable or an askpass program,
a self deleting password supplier script file is generated by X-Pipe.
This script contains the encrypted password and will supply
to password to the target program exactly once and immediately deletes itself.
This behavior ensures that there is no leftover password script after an operation is performed.
As a secondary measure, for cases in which the calling program crashes
and is not able to execute and therefore delete the password script,
the generated script directory is also frequently cleaned.

As a result, no sensitive information of yours should show
up in any kind of shell history or on any file system in plaintext and also in general.

## The purpose of shell scripts

Whenever you open any remote connection in a terminal from X-Pipe, you will notice that your terminal shows
the name of a script located in your temp directory in the title bar to indicate that you're currently executing it.
The naming scheme of these scripts is usually something like `xpipe/exec-<id>.(bat|sh|ps1)`
This is intended as these scripts contain all commands that are required
to realize the functionality of connecting and initializing the shell environment.
These scripts do not contain any sensitive information,
you are free to inspect them yourselves in the temp directory.

## Isolation of remote systems

When you add remote system as a host, it is implicitly assumed that you trust this system.
Any required login information is sent to and handled on that remote host when required,
so it would be possible for malicious programs to obtain any information send to that host.

It should however not be possible for any malicious program on the remote host to obtain
other information stored by X-Pipe that is not explicitly sent to that host.
During development, a lot of focus lies on preventing all
sorts of attacks like injection attacks from the remote host

## Reporting a security vulnerability

If you believe that there is a security vulnerability in X-Pipe,
you can make use of the [private security report feature](https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/security-advisories/guidance-on-reporting-and-writing/privately-reporting-a-security-vulnerability) of GitHub.