Security guidelines and vulnerability reporting for OwnCord.
Report privately via GitHub Security Advisories: github.com/J3vb/OwnCord/security/advisories/new.
Do NOT open public issues for security bugs.
The repository-root SECURITY.md is the canonical reporting policy — what to include and the response timeline (initial response within 7 days) live there, so the two files cannot disagree.
This applies to weaknesses in the repository's own automation and settings — workflow authorization, credential scope, release gating — as much as to bugs in the server or client. Planning documents cite this section as the rule; it is written here so the citation points at something.
- Public artifacts — commits, issues, pull request descriptions, changelogs — carry an opaque identifier, the affected property, safe acceptance criteria, and a status. Nothing more.
- Reproduction steps, source-to-sink traces, exploit conditions, and the state a fix replaced stay in the private advisory. A commit that fixes a weakness describes the control it adds, not the gap it closes.
- Every private finding has exactly one public owner, so nothing is tracked only in private and nothing is silently dropped.
- Release notes may describe repaired impact after coordinated remediation, without the detail needed to reproduce it.
This repository is public. A commit message is a disclosure channel.
OwnCord supports TOTP-based 2FA:
- Users enroll via Settings > Account (QR code + backup codes)
- Admins can enforce server-wide 2FA via the
require_2fasetting in the admin panel require_2farequires all users to have 2FA enabled and registration to be closed- Login flow returns
requires_2fa: truewith apartial_token(10-min TTL, 5-attempt limit) - Auth challenges are rate-limited to 10 req/min per IP
- TOTP code verification uses constant-time comparison (
subtle.ConstantTimeCompare) to prevent timing side-channel attacks
Users can delete their own account via DELETE /api/v1/auth/account with password confirmation. The last admin account cannot be deleted. After 3 failed password attempts, the endpoint locks out for 15 minutes.
Security-relevant actions are recorded in the audit_log table with actor, action, target, and detail:
- Auth:
user_register,user_login,user_logout,login_blocked_banned,account_deleted,password_change,session_revoke - 2FA:
totp_enabled,totp_verified,totp_disabled - Admin:
role_change,role_create,role_update,role_delete,role_reorder,user_ban,user_unban,force_logout,setting_change,server_setup,api_token_create,api_token_revoke,config_write - Content:
channel_create,channel_update,channel_delete,channel_perms_update,channel_perms_clear,channel_user_perms_update,channel_user_perms_clear,message_delete,message_purge,emoji_create,emoji_delete - Profile:
profile_update,identity_key_update - Ops:
backup_create,backup_delete,backup_restore,ws_connect
Note: backup_restore is written synchronously to the live database before
the pre-restore safety copy is taken, so the row survives inside the
pre_restore_*.db backup. The restored database itself will not contain it —
the restore replaces the database file wholesale.
The Tauri desktop client implements the following security measures:
- Credentials are stored in the OS keyring (Windows Credential Manager / macOS Keychain / Secret Service) via the
keyringcrate, with every write read back and verified; if no keyring is available they fall back to an encrypted file (Windows DPAPI withCRYPTPROTECT_UI_FORBIDDEN, ChaCha20-Poly1305 elsewhere) — see credential-storage.md - Plaintext passwords are never returned to the frontend over IPC — only tokens are accessible from JavaScript
- Auto-login uses stored tokens for reconnection, not passwords
- Filesystem write access is scoped to
$APPDATA/**and$APPLOG/**only - DevTools command is gated behind the
devtoolsfeature flag (excluded from release builds) - HTTP fetch is restricted to
https://origins plushttp://127.0.0.1:*(the Rust TOFU proxy's loopback tunnel), and denieshttps://localhost[:*]andhttps://127.0.0.1[:*]— no legitimate flow reaches loopback over https, so the deny list keeps the renderer from probing other local services http:allow-fetchis the only URL-scoped HTTP identifier.tauri-plugin-httpvalidates the URL exactly once, in thefetchcommand;fetch_sendandfetch_read_bodyoperate on an already-validatedResourceIdand never consult a scope, soallow/denyblocks on those identifiers are inert and were removed rather than left in place advertising a control that does not exist- The
https://*wildcard cannot be removed today: link previews (embeds.ts) fetch arbitrary user-posted URLs by design, and Tauri scopes per command, not per JS caller. Bounded in TypeScript byisPrivateHost/isBlockedForPreview, a 5 s timeout and a 50 KB body cap; the response is regex-scraped forog:tags and never executed - Regression-guarded by
tests/unit/capabilities-scope.test.ts; rationale and the follow-up that would remove the wildcard are in docs/plans/tauri-capability-narrowing.md
- Self-signed certificates are supported via Trust-On-First-Use (TOFU) pinning
- The WebSocket proxy (
ws_proxy) pins the server certificate fingerprint on first connection - The LiveKit proxy (
livekit_proxy) reuses the pinned fingerprint from the WS proxy - Certificate mismatch triggers a modal requiring user acknowledgment
- Update downloads validate
server_urluseshttps://and rejects URLs with userinfo
- IPC commands validate host format, string lengths, and character allowlists
- PTT virtual key codes are validated to the Win32 range (1–254)
- LiveKit proxy
remote_hostis validated against CRLF injection - API client validates host format before constructing URLs
- File uploads enforce a MIME type allowlist (images, video, audio, PDF, text)
- Error messages from server responses are capped at 200 characters
- Notification titles are sanitized (control chars stripped, length capped)
- All user-generated content is rendered via
textContent/setText— neverinnerHTML - The single
innerHTMLusage (SVG icons) operates on compile-time constants with a runtime guard - URLs are validated via
isSafeUrl(rejectsjavascript:,data:,vbscript:) - YouTube embeds use
sandboxattribute on iframes image/svg+xmlis excluded from safe MIME types for data URIs- GIF media URLs are validated against the trusted Klipy CDN origins
- Linkified URLs strip trailing punctuation to prevent misleading destinations
- Client-side search requests are rate-limited (500ms minimum interval + 300ms debounce)
- Server auto-updates depend on a dedicated pinned minisign/Ed25519 server release key in Server/updater/server_update_public_key.txt and a signed release manifest that binds the shipped binary hash to the release version; Windows Authenticode/SmartScreen code signing is still separate work
- CSP
connect-srcallowshttps:to any host (necessary for self-hosted server URLs not known at build time). Because of this, narrowing the Taurihttp:allow-fetchscope alone would not bound exfiltration from a compromised renderer — the webview's ownfetchreaches the same hosts without going through the plugin. Closing that requires narrowingconnect-srcand moving the link-preview fetch into Rust in the same change
- Enable TLS (self-signed is the default; custom certs recommended for production)
- Keep invite-only registration enabled (default)
- Set a strong admin password
- Configure rate limits (defaults are sensible but review for your use case)
- Run regular backups via the admin panel
- Keep the server updated (admin panel shows available updates)
- Firewall: only expose port 8443 (HTTPS); for voice/video also 7880-7881/TCP and 50000-60000/UDP (LiveKit signaling + media — see deployment.md); port 80 only when using ACME
- Enable server-wide 2FA requirement once all users have enrolled
- Set
admin_allowed_cidrsto restrict admin panel access to trusted networks