Read 2026-11-03
gopasspw/gopass: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in gopasspw/gopass's code and history at 6171bae: 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 | strong |
| Security & Reliability Posture | adequate |
| Observability & Operations | adequate |
| Fit with the Acquirer | not assessable |
What the repository says
README.md:7: names OpenSSF
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
stronginternal/action/commands.go is 1,409 lines, 17× this codebase's median file
adequateThe median source file here is 80 lines. 2 files exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 1,409. 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.
internal/action/commands.go:1 — 1,409 lines (17× median) |
internal/store/leaf/recipients.go:1 — 1,006 lines (12× median) |
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
strongNo finding.
Product & Engineering Maturity
strongNo finding.
Security & Reliability Posture
adequate1 Dockerfile runs the application as root
adequateNo USER instruction switches away from root, so the process runs with full privileges inside the container. It is a one-line fix and an ordinary expectation, which is why its absence is worth asking about: it usually says more about whether anyone has reviewed the deployment than about this container specifically.
Dockerfile — runs as root |
6 outbound calls can wait forever
adequate6 HTTP calls use a client with no timeout (Python `requests` without `timeout=`, or Go's default client). When a dependency slows down, each one holds a worker until the connection gives up, and enough of them take the service down with the dependency.
helpers/postrel/main.go:542 — outbound call without a timeout |
pkg/hibp/api/client.go:38 — outbound call without a timeout |
pkg/hibp/api/downloader.go:179 — outbound call without a timeout |
4 advisories against this project in the last 24 months
adequateThe newest was published on 2026-10-28. 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 1 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 1.17.4. Answer lives in: the release you run, set against each fixed version.
| 2026-10-28: CVE-2026-118756 (moderate): gopass before 1.17.0 contains a path traversal vulnerability in the filesystem storage backend that allows attackers to delete directories outside the password |
| 2026-10-09: GHSA-v4c2-4fvx-chr3 (moderate): Symlinked store entry escapes the gopass store root |
| 2026-10-04: GHSA-4745-xr3q-p63v (moderate): `gopass link` creates symlinks outside the store root (Store.Link misses the safePath containment applied to every other fs method) |
| 2026-08-12: GHSA-rw43-4vhf-hcvj (moderate): Path traversal in Prune and IsDir allows arbitrary recursive directory deletion via a crafted secret name |
Observability & Operations
adequateNo structured logging library is in use
adequateNothing references a structured logging library. Logs that are written to be read by a person are not searchable by a machine, which means incident response here is proportional to how well someone remembers the codebase rather than to what the tooling can find.
| searched 789 files for 10 structured logging libraries; 0 matched |
One request cannot be followed through the logs
adequateNothing in the service carries a request or correlation id, and there is no tracing. When a customer reports a failure, the log lines that belong to their request cannot be picked out from everyone else's.
| no request id, correlation id or tracing found |
No error reporter is wired in
adequateNothing in the service initialises an error reporter (Sentry, Rollbar, Bugsnag, Honeybadger or an APM agent). An exception in production reaches a person only if someone is reading the logs, which usually means a customer reports it first.
| no error reporter initialised |
Fit with the Acquirer
not assessableNot rated: structurally not assessable from a repository.
Read more, or read your own
The full report on gopasspw/gopass: every dimension, the questions for the room, and the audit log.
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