The gate treated a literal process.env substring search as repository-wide source-ownership enforcement. It missed equivalent syntax while matching comments and strings, so the allowlist projected a security guarantee the implementation could not provide.
Remove the scanner and its allowlist. Keep the independently useful shipped-config inline tripwire, and narrow both the module contract and bilingual Agent Note to its actual source-shape claim.
Two had real security consequences:
The bootstrap rejection ran on npm dotenv's parser while process.loadEnvFile
applied the file with Node's own. Two independently maintained dialects meant
the check and the thing it guards could disagree: a name Node accepts but the
checker misses would reach process.env unchecked, and BASH_ENV there runs a
file of the project's choosing on every `bash -c` the bash tool issues. Parse
once with node:util's parseEnv — the same engine loadEnvFile uses — and assign
the entries already checked, which also drops the dotenv dependency.
llm-pi-ai still returned a literal profile.apiKey ahead of everything, and it
registers a settings namespace, so the defect removed from llm-deepseek
survived intact in its design twin. The field is gone from the profile schema,
the resolution path, and the tests.
The rest are consistency and documentation defects the review named:
- verify-config-source-ownership did not scan the Python runtime's bundled
cordis.yml, which still inlined apiKey and baseURL. Both are covered now, and
the line-anchored INLINE_DENY documents that it is a tripwire, not a parser.
- The deny list missed NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED, the askpass hooks, the
GIT_CONFIG_* redirections, and PYTHONHOME — all implied by its own stated
rule about what a variable does.
- Snapshot lookups folded case on Windows, where environment names are
case-insensitive and an exact-match Map could miss a higher-ranked layer.
- The credentials note claimed a read-time permission check was "not taken"
while this PR implemented it; the credentials-local README still described
two layers, live process.env reads, dotenv-era limitations, and a renamed
anchor; the llm-deepseek README still advertised the removed literal apiKey;
and web.ts and base.cordis.yml kept personal-overlay wording.
- The ownership note's literal-apiKey claim now names its scope: the
web-search providers keep a literal field but register no settings
namespace, so nothing can shadow a stored credential through them.
$DSH_HOME/.env had just become an ordinary environment layer, which left the
harness resolving user-facing values from a flattened process.env that could
no longer say where a value came from. A key stored through the web page
stayed shadowed by an older key in the user's own .env. An endpoint could be
redirected by the project: the invoking directory's .env is materialized like
every other layer, and a base URL decides where a resolved API key is sent, so
a DEEPSEEK_BASE_URL written into a model-editable workspace would send the
user's credential — and the prompts carrying their code — to whatever host
that file named.
Give every user-facing value one ordering, with four kinds of source:
explicit for this run per-operation override, CLI argument
> authored by deployment --config / --config-replace
> this launch's shell inherited process environment
> product-managed store settings.yaml, .credentials.yaml
> discovered file $DSH_HOME/.env
> defaults schema default, shipped base, public default
The domains differ only in which tiers exist. The earlier split — credentials
ranking the environment over the managed file while settings ranked over the
environment — was inconsistent: the distinguishing fact is who authored the
source, not the domain.
packages/util/environment owns an immutable snapshot with per-layer
provenance. getFrom(name, sources) searches only the layers a caller names,
and omitting one is a refusal rather than a demotion: the adapters ask for
['process', 'user-env'], so no reordering can let a project file back into a
decision it was excluded from.
isBootstrapOnly rejects, before anything is materialized, any .env setting a
variable that governs how a process launches (PATH, SHELL, NODE_OPTIONS,
LD_PRELOAD), where code or model-visible instructions load from (the whole
DSH_* namespace, HOME, XDG_*), or how the network is reached (proxy and CA
variables). The namespace is denied wholesale so a switch added later cannot
become settable by being forgotten, and there is no opt-out.
verify-config-source-ownership keeps both rules: no unregistered process.env
read under packages/*/*/src (26 allowlisted with reasons), and no apiKey,
baseURL, or headers inlined from the environment in shipped Cordis config —
removing those inlines is what makes the deployment tier meaningful.
