ory/keto: technical due diligence, read from its repository

33% of commit subjects are exact repeats of another subject, and subject length varies by only 17.7 characters. A log written by someone explaining their reasoning to a future reader does not look like this. The log is therefore weak evidence of intent, whatever the code is like.

The median source file here is 1 lines. 1 file exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 1,068. 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.

10 files were marked deprecated over two years ago and still are, the oldest since Mar 2022. A deprecation is a promise to remove. Ask what still depends on these, and whether removing them is scheduled.

20 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; 4 steps pipe a download straight into a shell. 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.

2 places in product code build SQL by formatting or joining strings rather than passing parameters. In each, what the code shows going in is a table or column name, a constant, or something the line does not show, not a request's value. Ask whether any value reaches these strings, rather than a parameter.

The newest was published on 2026-03-20. A project that publishes advisories is telling its users about its fixes, and the count and pace say how much security work it carries. None of them affects the surveyed version. The record is incomplete: NVD: 1 record names keto with nothing tying it to this repository (CVE-2025-61117).

Nothing 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.