Read 2026-10-04
denoland/deno: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in denoland/deno's code and history at 461f32e: its licence, security advisories, releases, review practice, tests, dependencies and operations. Every finding cites the file and line it rests on. The full report also covers the team and asks the questions the code cannot answer.
| Dimension | Rating |
|---|---|
| Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance | strong |
| Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity | strong |
| Product & Engineering Maturity | adequate |
| Security & Reliability Posture | strong |
| Observability & Operations | not assessable |
| Fit with the Acquirer | not assessable |
What the repository says
- Releases are cut from another branch than the one surveyed
.github/CONTRIBUTING.md:3: states a policy on AI-generated contributions.gitmodules:1: 5 submodule(s) this survey does not read: tests/util/std, tests/wpt/suite, tests/node_compat/runner/suite
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
strongcli/tsc/dts/lib.webworker.d.ts is 15,608 lines, 1560× this codebase's median file
adequateThe median source file here is 10 lines. 217 files exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 15,608. Size is not a defect on its own — some problems genuinely live in one place — but these are where merge conflicts, review fatigue and single-owner knowledge concentrate, and they are the first thing that slows an inheriting engineer down.
cli/tsc/dts/lib.webworker.d.ts:1 — 15,608 lines (1560× median) |
runtime/permissions/lib.rs:1 — 11,757 lines (1175× median) |
cli/tsc/dts/typescript.d.ts:1 — 11,511 lines (1151× median) |
ext/node/ops/llhttp/c/llhttp.c:1 — 10,103 lines (1010× median) |
libs/cli_parser/src/tests_full.rs:1 — 9,995 lines (999× median) |
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
strongNo finding.
Product & Engineering Maturity
adequate22% of the code is legacy or compatibility code, the oldest 43 months old
adequate308 of 1428 source files sit in paths named legacy, compat, shim, polyfill or deprecated, and some have been there 43 months. That is usually a migration that never finished. Ask whether finishing it is planned, and what keeping both costs.
cli/tsc/dts/node/compatibility/iterators.d.cts — legacy or compatibility code |
ext/node/polyfills/01_require.js — legacy or compatibility code |
ext/node/polyfills/02_register_cloneable.js — legacy or compatibility code |
8 files still carry code deprecated more than two years ago
adequate8 files were marked deprecated over two years ago and still are, the oldest since Apr 2023. A deprecation is a promise to remove. Ask what still depends on these, and whether removing them is scheduled.
ext/node/polyfills/internal/crypto/keygen.ts — deprecated since Apr 2023 |
cli/tsc/dts/lib.dom.d.ts — deprecated since Jul 2023 |
cli/tsc/dts/lib.webworker.d.ts — deprecated since Jul 2023 |
cli/tsc/dts/typescript.d.ts — deprecated since Jul 2023 |
cli/tsc/dts/lib.deno.unstable.d.ts — deprecated since Aug 2023 |
Releases are cut from another branch than the one surveyed
adequateThe newest release, v2.9.7, is not on the branch this survey read; the newest release on it is v2.9.2. The shipped product may differ from what this report describes. Survey the release branch too.
| tag v2.9.7 |
Security & Reliability Posture
strongThe build runs third-party code it does not pin
adequate7 third-party CI actions are referenced by a tag or branch rather than a commit, so they run whatever that tag points to on the day. Tags have been moved to malicious commits in real supply-chain attacks, and a piped script is whatever the server returns that minute. Pinning to a commit is the fix, and it is small.
.github/workflows/cargo_publish.ts:41 — action pinned by tag |
.github/workflows/cargo_publish.ts:44 — action pinned by tag |
19 locked dependencies have published vulnerabilities, 1 high or critical
adequate19 of 1,126 locked dependencies match 21 published advisories in OSV, 1 of them rated high or critical. A lockfile says which version is installed, not whether the flawed code is reachable from this product, so each needs a look. Most are fixed by an upgrade, and the advisory names the version. This lockfile pins development tools alongside what ships and does not say which is which, so some of these may never reach a user.
Cargo.lock — hickory-proto 0.25.2: GHSA-3v94-mw7p-v465 (high) |
Cargo.lock — rsa 0.9.10: RUSTSEC-2023-0071 (moderate) |
Cargo.lock — rand 0.8.5: GHSA-cq8v-f236-94qc (low), fixed in 0.8.6 |
27 advisories against this project in the last 24 months, 13 high or critical
adequateThe newest was published on 2026-09-30. A project that publishes advisories is telling its users about its fixes, and the count and pace say how much security work it carries. Whether 6 of them are fixed in the code you ship could not be told from this history: its version is only known to be at least 2.9.2. Answer lives in: the release you run, set against each fixed version. The record is incomplete: NVD: 12 records name deno with nothing tying them to this repository (CVE-2024-49770, CVE-2025-32395, CVE-2025-55152, …).
| 2026-09-30: CVE-2026-103473 (critical): Deno versions 2.7.0 through 2.9.7 on Windows contain a command injection vulnerability in node:child_process where shell arguments are escaped for the wrong she |
| 2026-06-17: GHSA-x2qc-cmh9-f4hf (moderate), fixed in 2.7.5: Denial of service via non-ASCII bytes in WebSocket response headers |
| 2026-05-27: GHSA-4c8g-jvcx-v4hv (moderate), fixed in 2.8.1: process.loadEnvFile() bypasses env permission checks and mutates process.env with only read access |
| 2026-05-27: GHSA-83pc-3rw9-qpwj (moderate), fixed in 2.8.1: WebSocket API sandbox bypass via missing post-DNS check |
| 2026-05-27: GHSA-cpgj-f7g3-2pp2 (moderate), fixed in 2.8.1: `fetch()` API sandbox bypass via missing DNS resolution check |
Observability & Operations
not assessableNot rated: only 5 of 16 checks could reach a conclusion here; the rest do not apply to this repository or could not read it.
Fit with the Acquirer
not assessableNot rated: structurally not assessable from a repository.
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