Fail-Closed Security Hygiene

Security gates and cleanup must be fail-closed and boundary-proven.

Apply these rules when implementing/adjusting secure workflows:

1) Authorization must not degrade

• Treat every principal that can spend execution/budget as part of the gate (e.g., both the PR author whose code runs and the commenter who triggers the workflow slot).
• Ensure command routing/case normalization can’t accidentally fall through to weaker paths.
• Regression tests should execute the gate and assert the same outcome for differently cased commands.

2) Re-sweep after PR-controlled lifecycle scripts

• If the workflow runs npm ci/build (or any PR-controlled lifecycle hooks), assume they may plant artifacts into runner temp/upload staging.
• Immediately before agent/proxy start (and before uploads), do rm -rf then mkdir -p in the same step, and keep ordering stable (rm → mkdir → proxy/agent).

3) Prove the auth boundary with real requests

• Don’t “test” authorization by asserting proxy configuration/nonce alone.
• Start the real proxy and send HTTP requests:
  • no Authorization header → 401
  • wrong token → 401
  • correct token → 200
  • wrong route → 403

4) Make security tests hermetic (no global/system config influence)

• For filesystem/git cleanup/symlink-escape tests, neutralize global/system git settings (e.g., set GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL=/dev/null and GIT_CONFIG_SYSTEM=/dev/null).
• Re-run the same exploit scenario with a deliberately planted risky setting (e.g., global core.hooksPath) so failures can’t be masked by developer machines.

Example (authorization routing + fail-closed execution):

# In the shell gate script
body_lc="${COMMENT_BODY,,}"
case "$body_lc" in
  *@qwen-code /verify*)
    # FAIL CLOSED: require BOTH principals to have permission
    # (e.g., should_run=false unless author_has_write && commenter_has_write)
    ;;
  *@qwen-code /tmux*)
    # Keep existing narrower gate
    ;;
  *)
    should_run=false
    ;;
esac

Example (post-PR lifecycle hygiene):

# In the agent step, immediately before upload/agent start
rm -rf "$RUNNER_TEMP/verify-results"
mkdir -p "$RUNNER_TEMP/verify-results"
start_openai_proxy