Read 2026-11-03
montferret/ferret: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in montferret/ferret's code and history at 3dcc184: 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 | adequate |
| Product & Engineering Maturity | strong |
| 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
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
strongpkg/parser/fql/fql_parser.go is 36,848 lines, 497× this codebase's median file
adequateThe median source file here is 74 lines. 7 files exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 36,848. 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.
pkg/parser/fql/fql_parser.go:1 — 36,848 lines (497× median) |
pkg/vm/vm.go:1 — 1,930 lines (26× median) |
pkg/formatter/internal/expression.go:1 — 1,771 lines (23× median) |
pkg/parser/antlr/FqlParser.g4:1 — 1,434 lines (19× median) |
pkg/formatter/internal/statement.go:1 — 1,219 lines (16× median) |
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
adequate22% of recent commits change more than 2,000 lines
adequate97 of 432 commits in the last 24 months changed over 2,000 lines of code, not counting reformatting, renames, vendored or generated code. A change that size is rarely reviewed line by line. Ask how they were reviewed, and what made them that large.
| 97 commits over 2,000 lines |
Product & Engineering Maturity
strongReleases are cut from another branch than the one surveyed
adequateThe newest release, v1.0.0, is not on the branch this survey read; the newest release on it is v0.18.0. The shipped product may differ from what this report describes. Survey the release branch too.
| tag v1.0.0 |
Security & Reliability Posture
strong1 credential-shaped string added in the history sit in tests, examples, documentation or local development settings
adequateStrings shaped like credentials appear only where fakes are usual: test fixtures, examples, documentation, placeholders and local stacks. They are almost always fakes. Ask someone to confirm that none of them works anywhere, because a real key in a development file is still a real key.
| Google API key, where fakes are usual |
2 advisories against this project in the last 24 months, 2 high or critical
adequateThe newest was published on 2026-07-24. 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 0.18.0. Answer lives in: the release you run, set against each fixed version. GHSA-j6v5-g24h-vg4j (high) is fixed in the surveyed commit; which release carries it cannot be told from this history, which does not place the release users run. Answer lives in: the version you run.
| 2026-07-24: GHSA-ch6m-68q4-4q4g (high), fixed in >= v2.0.0-alpha.34: SSRF via Insecure Default HTTP Policy in MontFerret/ferret |
| 2026-03-31: GHSA-j6v5-g24h-vg4j (high), fixed in 2.0.0-alpha.4: Ferret: Path Traversal in IO::FS::WRITE allows arbitrary file write when scraping malicious websites |
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.
Read more, or read your own
The full report on montferret/ferret: every dimension, the questions for the room, and the audit log.
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