Open the 0.2 alpha: harden acquisition and preserve bare locators

[b1rdmania]

Status

Alpha merge waiver: security work in progress. This PR addresses reproduced acquisition and locator defects. It is not a comprehensive security review, penetration test, or security approval. On 28 August 2026 the repository owner explicitly waived the independent-review gate for the 0.2.0a1 alpha merge only; stable 0.2.0 remains blocked on that review.

This branch is rebased onto main@0e61510, after PR #39 and the a15 snapshot-qualification work in PR #41. The already-merged document-coordinate fix is not duplicated here.

Summary

• restrict the shared HTTP resolver to absolute ASCII HTTP(S) URIs and public IPv4/IPv6 destinations
• validate every redirect and bind each default connection to an admitted address while preserving the original HTTP/TLS hostname
• bound declared and streamed response bytes, gzip/deflate output, extracted characters and PDF pages
• run PDF parsing in a separate worker with wall-clock, CPU, resident-memory and output ceilings
• reject unsupported media, encodings, embedded credentials and ambiguous/malformed URIs with typed fail-closed outcomes
• require explicit opt-in for privileged injected HTTP/DNS test transports
• preserve bare source locators without inventing a URL
• classify locator-only evidence as unresolvable_source, keep it in coverage, and route it to citation_unconfirmed
• preserve a15 byte-exact/normalised anchoring, hollow-capture detection, canonical snapshot resolution and capture declaration v3
• open the 0.2.0a1 alpha line, with artifact segmenter v4, ledger segmenter v7, claim verification v4 and verification metrics v5

Reproductions closed by this batch

• data: is no longer accepted as a source
• loopback, private, link-local, metadata, multicast, reserved and unspecified destinations fail before the default request
• redirect destinations pass the same URI/address policy and the socket does not repeat hostname resolution between admission and connection
• declared, streamed and decompressed oversized bodies fail distinctly
• malformed lengths and invalid or concatenated compressed streams fail closed
• PDF parser failure and resource exhaustion stay outside the resolver process and fail closed
• a bare locator survives Markdown, rendered HTML, canonical assessment, metrics and the IC ledger

Verification

• focused acquisition/capture/snapshot-resolution/artifact/verification/support/ledger suite: 176 passed
• full repository suite: 392 passed
• live default-resolver probes: HTTP and HTTPS succeed; data:, loopback and 169.254.169.254 fail closed
• git diff --check
• Python bytecode compilation

Remaining boundaries requiring review

• The connection-pinning and PDF-worker controls are newly implemented and have not passed independent adversarial security review. The owner waiver permits this alpha merge but does not satisfy the review required for stable 0.2.0.
• Custom injected opener/address-resolver code is privileged and outside the default connection guarantee; using it requires allow_injected_transport=True.
• The default transport deliberately does not inherit ambient proxy configuration. Any future proxy support needs its own destination and connection policy.
• PDF limits combine native process limits with parent-side resident-memory observation because operating-system facilities differ; OS behavior and watchdog sampling remain review surface.
• Artifact segmenter v4 has deterministic regression coverage for bare locators. It does not inherit the frozen v3 cross-format admission result.

Please review this as a hardening implementation with named residual risks, not as evidence that Groundnut is secure or comprehensively audited.

[coderabbitai]

Important

• 🔍 Trigger review

This repository does not receive automatic reviews because it has fewer than 10 stars.

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: defaults

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro Plus

Run ID: a071eaed-531d-4480-b3c3-2cb5c1937f33

---

Thanks for using CodeRabbit! It's free for OSS, and your support helps us grow. If you like it, consider giving us a shout-out.

❤️ Share

• X
• Mastodon
• Reddit
• LinkedIn

_{Comment @coderabbitai help to get the list of available commands.}

[b1rdmania]

Owner waiver recorded — 28 August 2026: merge of the 0.2.0a1 alpha is authorized without the outstanding independent security review. This does not satisfy or remove that review gate for stable 0.2.0, and all security-work-in-progress language remains in force.