Please report security issues privately through GitHub Security Advisories rather than opening a public issue.

Include what you were doing, what happened, and the platform and Pulse version. Expect an initial response within a week.

Pulse is a monitor, but it is not read-only. Knowing what it can do is part of using it safely.

It can change system state. Pulse can terminate processes, change their priority, and start, stop, or restart Docker containers. Every one of these actions names its exact target and requires an explicit confirmation first.

It refuses to touch critical processes. Pulse itself, its parent shell, PID 1 and the session leader on POSIX, and the reserved Windows system PIDs are rejected outright, with no confirmation offered.

It never escalates privileges on its own. If an action is denied, Pulse reports the denial. A force kill is offered as a separate, explicitly confirmed step; it is never attempted automatically.

It runs with your privileges, and no more. Pulse does not request elevation. Running it as root or administrator gives it the power to kill anything on the machine — do that only if you need it.

Docker access is opt-in. The Docker socket is root-equivalent on the host, so container support ships as a separate extra (pip install "pulse-monitor[docker]"), is not installed by default, and does not connect until you open the Docker panel.

It reads files you point it at. The storage browser opens files with your own permissions. It refuses anything that is not a regular file — symlinks, FIFOs, sockets, and device files — and caps the size it will read.

It sends nothing anywhere. Pulse has no network client, no telemetry, and no auto-update. Its only writes are the config file in your user config directory.