Please report security issues privately by opening a GitHub Security Advisory on the repository. Do not file public issues for security bugs.

We will acknowledge receipt within 7 days and aim to ship a fix or mitigation within 30 days for high-severity issues.

Karvon is a single-user desktop app. It manages local OS processes and, optionally, remote processes over SSH. The trust boundary is the local user account: anything that can read the user's app-config directory or connect to the local HTTP API can execute arbitrary commands as the user.

The optional HTTP API is disabled by default. When enabled it:

• Binds to 127.0.0.1 by default. Changing the bind host to 0.0.0.0 exposes the API to every network the host is connected to. Do this only on trusted networks.
• Requires a Bearer token (32 random bytes, hex-encoded) on every protected endpoint. The token is persisted in the app config file and never logged in full (only a 6-character prefix appears in stdout for diagnostic purposes).
• Allows any origin via CORS but does not echo credentials, so cross-origin browser pages cannot send the Authorization header. CLI clients (curl, scripts) are unaffected.

The protected endpoints can execute arbitrary commands (process spawn, deploy scripts, SSH). Treat the API token like an SSH private key.

Remote execution uses the system ssh client. Host-key validation is set to accept-new (TOFU) — the first connection to an unseen host is accepted and pinned, subsequent connections require the same key. This is appropriate for desktop dev tooling on private networks. If you operate over hostile networks, pre-populate ~/.ssh/known_hosts before adding a machine to the orchestrator.

Release artifacts are signed with a minisign keypair. The public key is embedded in src-tauri/tauri.conf.json. Only artifacts signed with the matching private key (held by the project maintainers) will be installed by the in-app updater.

If you fork the project, generate your own keypair and replace both the public key in tauri.conf.json and the updater endpoint URL before shipping releases. See CONTRIBUTING.md.