Read 2026-10-23
rtk-ai/rtk: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in rtk-ai/rtk's code and history at 32b2ec4: 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 | adequate |
| Observability & Operations | not assessable |
| Fit with the Acquirer | not assessable |
What the repository says
- Releases are cut from another branch than the one surveyed
CONTRIBUTING.md:224: states a policy on AI-generated contributions
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
strongsrc/discover/registry.rs is 8,612 lines, 29× this codebase's median file
adequateThe median source file here is 288 lines. 10 files exceed 2,880 lines, the largest being 8,612. 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.
src/discover/registry.rs:1 — 8,612 lines (29× median) |
src/cmds/git/diff_cmd.rs:1 — 7,438 lines (25× median) |
src/cmds/git/git_cmd.rs:1 — 7,101 lines (24× median) |
src/lib.rs:1 — 6,002 lines (20× median) |
src/cmds/jvm/mvn_cmd.rs:1 — 5,726 lines (19× median) |
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
strongNo finding.
Product & Engineering Maturity
adequate14% of bug fixes add or change a test
adequateOf 1024 fixes in the last 24 months, 143 touched a test. A fix without the test that would have caught the bug can quietly come back, and the suite never learns from what went wrong.
| 143 of 1024 |
Releases are cut from another branch than the one surveyed
adequateThe newest release, v1.0.1, is not on the branch this survey read; the newest release on it is v0.49.0. The shipped product may differ from what this report describes. Survey the release branch too.
| tag v1.0.1 |
Security & Reliability Posture
adequate1 credential-shaped string in the tree 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.
| GitHub token, where fakes are usual |
The build runs third-party code it does not pin
adequate2 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.
.github/workflows/ci.yml:34 — action pinned by tag |
.github/workflows/ci.yml:48 — action pinned by tag |
install.sh:3 — download piped into a shell |
12 locked dependencies have published vulnerabilities
adequate12 of 467 locked dependencies match 20 published advisories in OSV. 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 — rustls 0.23.37: GHSA-2mjx-qc3c-rqvc (moderate), fixed in 0.23.45 |
Cargo.lock — lru 0.12.5: GHSA-rhfx-m35p-ff5j (low), fixed in 0.16.3 |
Cargo.lock — anyhow 1.0.102: RUSTSEC-2026-0190 (unrated), fixed in 1.0.103 |
3 advisories against this project in the last 24 months, 1 high or critical
adequateThe newest was published on 2026-06-23. 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 2 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 0.49.0. Answer lives in: the release you run, set against each fixed version. The record is incomplete: NVD: 5 records name rtk with nothing tying them to this repository (CVE-2018-25125, CVE-2019-19822, CVE-2019-19823, …).
| 2026-06-23: GHSA-fqgj-m2gp-mr3q (moderate): OpenClaw Rewrite Plugin Command Injection via execSync Template String |
| 2026-06-19: GHSA-7gxq-fvfc-g327 (high), fixed in >= 42.2: Permission-gate bypass in rtk rewrite auto-allow via unsplit shell separators |
| 2026-05-20: GHSA-fvvm-949w-qj4w (moderate), fixed in 0.32.0: RTK improperly trusts project-local filter configuration, allowing silent tampering of command output shown to LLM |
Observability & Operations
not assessableNot rated: only 4 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 rtk-ai/rtk: every dimension, the questions for the room, and the audit log.
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