Security policy

Reporting a vulnerability

Please do not open a public issue for security problems.

Instead, report it privately to a maintainer — message an op on #orbit (Libera.Chat or the Tchatou network). We'll acknowledge it, work on a fix, and credit you (if you'd like) once it's resolved.

Supported versions

Orbit is a work in progress; only the latest main is supported. Fixes land there and deploy from it.

Scope & trust model

A few things that are intentional, not bugs:

Plugins run with full page privileges. Orbit's plugin system is operator-controlled — a deployment lists plugin scripts in config.json, so they run with the same trust as the app itself. There is no user-uploaded plugin mechanism. Only load plugins you trust; treat them like part of your deployment. See the plugin docs.
The client is static. It holds no server-side secrets; account auth is via the IRC server (SASL) and the connection is TLS (wss://).

Things we do want to hear about: ways a remote party (a malicious message, channel, or server response) could run code, steal a session, or break out of the intended sandbox in the client.

Hardening a deployment

Subresource Integrity for plugins

Pin any plugin served from a third-party origin with an SRI hash, so a compromised host can't silently swap the file. A plugins entry may be an object instead of a bare URL:

{
  "plugins": [
    "/app/plugins/orbit-clock.js",
    { "url": "https://cdn.example/orbit-x.js", "integrity": "sha384-…" }
  ]
}

Generate the hash with: openssl dgst -sha384 -binary file.js | openssl base64 -A (prefix the result with sha384-). Same-origin plugins don't strictly need it.

Content-Security-Policy

Orbit ships no <meta> CSP because the right policy depends on your deployment (IRC WebSocket host, whether you use the Turnstile challenge, where plugins are hosted). Set it as a response header at your edge. A good starting point, with the parts you must adjust marked:

# Replace wss://YOUR-IRC-HOST with config.json → server.url's origin.
# Add any off-origin plugin hosts to script-src. Drop the challenges.cloudflare.com
# lines if you don't use the Turnstile challenge. frame-src 'self' is required for
# sandboxed plugins; youtube-nocookie serves the inline YouTube link cards.
add_header Content-Security-Policy "
  default-src 'self';
  script-src 'self' https://challenges.cloudflare.com;
  style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' https://fonts.googleapis.com;
  font-src 'self' https://fonts.gstatic.com;
  img-src 'self' data: blob: https:;
  connect-src 'self' wss://YOUR-IRC-HOST;
  frame-src 'self' https://challenges.cloudflare.com https://www.youtube-nocookie.com;
  worker-src 'self';
  manifest-src 'self';
  base-uri 'self';
  form-action 'self';
  object-src 'none';
  frame-ancestors 'self';
" always;

Roll it out with Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only first and watch the browser console / report-to for violations, then switch to the enforcing header once it's clean. Self-hosting the Google Fonts CSS/woff2 files lets you drop the fonts.googleapis.com / fonts.gstatic.com origins entirely.

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