Read 2026-11-03
steel-dev/steel-browser: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in steel-dev/steel-browser's code and history at a76b3b4: 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 | strong |
| Fit with the Acquirer | not assessable |
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
strongapi/src/services/cdp/cdp.service.ts is 1,869 lines, 20× this codebase's median file
adequateThe median source file here is 90 lines. 2 files exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 1,869. 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.
api/src/services/cdp/cdp.service.ts:1 — 1,869 lines (20× median) |
api/src/services/commands/snapshot.ts:1 — 1,074 lines (11× median) |
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
strongNo finding.
Product & Engineering Maturity
adequate17% of bug fixes add or change a test
adequateOf 136 fixes in the last 24 months, 23 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.
| 23 of 136 |
Security & Reliability Posture
adequate3 Dockerfiles run 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 |
api/Dockerfile — runs as root |
ui/Dockerfile — runs as root |
The 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/auto-assign.yml:13 — action pinned by tag |
.github/workflows/build-docker.yml:18 — action pinned by tag |
16 locked dependencies have published vulnerabilities, 8 high or critical in what ships
adequate16 of 502 locked dependencies match 29 published advisories in OSV, 8 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.
package-lock.json — extract-zip 2.0.1: GHSA-7pqw-9j4j-h8q3 (high) |
package-lock.json — follow-redirects 1.16.0: GHSA-8r9p-f939-6h3c (high), fixed in 1.16.1 |
package-lock.json — zod 3.23.8: GHSA-mrhx-c7xc-m3w5 (high), fixed in 4.6.6 |
Observability & Operations
strongNo 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 |
2 of 2 deployed images carry no version, or `latest`
adequate2 images in the deployment configuration are named without a version or as `latest`. A redeploy can change the software without a commit, a rollback has nothing to roll back to, and nobody can say from the repository what is running.
docker-compose.yml:3 — image without a version |
docker-compose.yml:25 — image without a version |
Fit with the Acquirer
not assessableNot rated: structurally not assessable from a repository.
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The full report on steel-dev/steel-browser: every dimension, the questions for the room, and the audit log.
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