If you discover a security issue in The AnkiDote, please report it privately rather than opening a public GitHub issue.

Preferred channel: open a GitHub Security Advisory at https://github.com/mord58562/theankidote/security/advisories/new. This gives us a private workspace to discuss and patch before public disclosure.

Fallback: email the maintainer via the address shown on the GitHub profile https://github.com/mord58562.

Please include:

• A clear description of the issue.
• Steps to reproduce, ideally with a minimal config snippet.
• The Anki version (Help → About) and the operating system you tested on.
• Any relevant addon-debug-console output (enable debug: true in the addon config first to get full tracebacks).

The AnkiDote is an Anki desktop addon. Threats we treat as in-scope:

• Code execution via crafted card content (e.g. malicious data-sp-url attributes, JavaScript injection via popup HTML).
• Privilege escalation through the embedded webview profile.
• Cookie / session token leakage between the three webview profiles or to disk locations the user wouldn't expect.
• Bypass of the http/https URL whitelist on the tad_open: pycmd handler.
• Bugs that allow a malicious deck to navigate the user's authenticated Claude / UpToDate / DrugBank session to attacker-controlled URLs without their knowledge.

Out of scope:

• Vulnerabilities in Anki itself, in QtWebEngine / Chromium, or in PyQt - please report those upstream.
• Vulnerabilities in third-party services whose web UIs the addon embeds (Claude.ai, OpenAI, etc) - report those to the relevant vendor.
• Issues that require physical access to the user's machine (cookies stored at rest are documented as plaintext, in line with every desktop browser).

Maintainer will acknowledge receipt within 7 days, propose a fix window, and credit the reporter (with their consent) in the release notes once the patch ships on AnkiWeb.

The addon's defensive posture, for context:

• All deck-content URL navigations go through _is_safe_url (http/https only). Cross-origin navigations to unrecognised hosts are logged at debug level for audit.
• The three webview profiles use named QWebEngineProfiles so cookies are scoped to the addon and never leak into Anki's main webview or any other addon's webviews.
• No remote config, no telemetry, no auto-updates beyond Anki's normal addon-update path.
• No API keys, no credential storage. Authentication is via the user's own embedded browser session in each provider's web UI.
• Addon settings live in Anki's standard addon-config JSON (handled by mw.addonManager).
• Cookies + cache live in QtWebEngine's per-profile directory under ~/Library/Application Support/Anki2/QtWebEngine/<profile>/ (macOS), %APPDATA%\Anki2\QtWebEngine\<profile>\ (Windows), or $XDG_DATA_HOME/Anki2/QtWebEngine/<profile>/ (Linux). These are NOT encrypted at rest - same as every desktop browser. If you share the machine with someone you don't trust, set up a separate OS account.