bastion-agent/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to the bastion agent.

The version in bastion_agent/VERSION on main is the next release, not necessarily the one machines run. A merged change waits there until it is published. The published version is whatever https://privatae.ai/bastion-agent/version.json names at the moment, and it is the only version a bastion installs. When a second release is merged before the first is published, only the later one is published, and it carries the changes of both. This file does not record which versions were published.

Changes to the release tooling (publish.sh, build.py, verify_release.py) and to the documentation are listed under the version whose source first carried them, although they do not change what the .pyz does.

0.1.16

• Every search and read_range reply names its sanitize mode (sanitize_mode: flag or sterilize, the mode the sanitize stage recorded for the text in the reply; unknown when that record does not vouch for it; a search with no hits names the manifest's mode, or none), so the bastion and the Host can say what was done to the text. Switching the manifest's mode does not relabel text an earlier sweep wrote. In flag mode, the mode the bastion deploys, names, street addresses and dates of birth remain. The field is new; nothing else in either reply changes.
• Each GitHub release carries its files. Pushing a release tag starts .github/workflows/release.yml, which runs the release check against the published manifest, rebuilds the .pyz from the tag, and only when the sha256 matches attaches the .pyz, its .sha256, version.json and its signature to the release (making the release, with this file's section for it, when the tag has none). It can be run again by hand for the version the manifest names; older releases, whose manifest is no longer served, cannot be given their files afterwards. The manifest's notes now link to that GitHub release instead of the tag page on the forge.
• verify_release refuses a tag without its release record (an annotated tag with the line built from <built_from>, as every release tag from 0.1.14 on has), instead of building from any tag of that name. It gains --expect-version, which refuses a manifest naming another version, and --out DIR, which writes the rebuilt .pyz and .sha256, the manifest's exact bytes and its signature once everything matched.
• CI runs every test and pyflakes. The test job installs git too, so the release verifier's seven end-to-end tests, which were skipped in CI, now run, and a skipped test fails the job. pyflakes 4.0.3 runs on both forges; the 31 findings it had (unused imports and variables) are fixed, and the packages' re-exports are listed in __all__.
• The README says what it means. The agent is deployed from a grant and can also be run by hand; what crosses the tunnel is the catalog cards and sanitized excerpts; building and testing need PyYAML 6.0.3; the CI badge is the GitHub one.
• The rules pass finds more personal data on its own, which matters because it is all that flag mode, the mode the bastion deploys, runs. Newly found: international phone numbers (+44 7700 900123, +49 (0)30 1234567, no separators, dots or dashes), national numbers with a trunk 0 (07700 900123), a seven-digit local number after a word such as call or phone, IBANs written in lower case, card numbers written with dots, SSNs written with spaces, and nine-digit SSNs with no separators when SSN or social security comes just before them. A bare nine-digit number, a seven-digit number with no phone word before it (Order 555-0142), a number that fails its checksum and a date are still left alone; a reference number that starts with 0 (0123-456789) is now taken for a national phone number. An expiry date or security code beside a card is still not found.
• A dotted number right after a version word is no longer taken for an IP address (version 1.2.3.4), and SSNs that are never issued (group 00, serial 0000) are no longer masked.
• Every file is sanitized again once after this upgrade (SANITIZE_VERSION 3), so text kept by the older rules is redone.
• The docs say what the deployed mode leaves in. The README, SECURITY.md and the sanitize, serve and PII docs say plainly that flag mode does not find names, street addresses or dates of birth, and that sterilize mode adds a model that looks for them.
• The PII service listens on 127.0.0.1 by default instead of every interface; PII_BIND still chooses another address. Its container image runs as uid 10001 instead of root, so a volume mounted on /data must be writable by that user, and a container that should be reachable needs PII_BIND set.
• CI also runs on GitHub (.github/workflows/ci.yml): the same jobs, the same pinned images.
• The README's license paragraph and SECURITY.md name each kind of Host (docs only) instead of only Privatae's platform: a C-Series Host runs on your own machine and is open source (Privatae/cseries, AGPL-3.0-only), C-Series Cloud and a network membership are optional and paid, and a Host on Privatae's own platform is the case where the Host's software is not open source.
• Security reports go to security@privatae.ai, the address privatae.ai/.well-known/security.txt names, and SECURITY.md links the bastion's policy on GitHub, where anyone can read it.
• How this repository is published. From this release on, GitHub receives each change merged since the last release as its own commit, titled as the change was, instead of one commit per release, and the README says so.
• The personal-data check reads what it used to miss. A listed term written right after a backslash escape (\n, \t, \u00e9) is found, and so is any value inside a run of base64 or base64url that decodes to text. The reserved entity ids are read from /etc/privatae/reserved-entity-ids (one per line, RESERVED_ENTITY_IDS_FILE to point elsewhere) instead of being written in the script; where that file is absent, as in public CI, the entity-id check is skipped and the run prints a NOTE, as the term check already does without its key. A file that holds no id, or a line that is not one, fails the run.

0.1.15

• No change to what the agent does. The README says how this repository is published (one tagged snapshot per release, the same on GitHub) and that issues and pull requests are welcome on GitHub, and it links the bastion's SECURITY.md on GitHub.

0.1.14

• Rollout order: upgrade any running PII service before publishing this agent. The sanitize stage now asks the service to escape every placeholder-shaped string in a document and stops, fail closed, when the service does not confirm it (stats.escape_held_literals). An older service does not, so a sterilize manifest pointed at one stops at its first file.
• Anyone can check a release. python3 -m bastion_agent.verify_release fetches the published manifest and its signature, checks the ed25519 signature against the release keys the bastion pins, checks out the tag v<version> (or the manifest's built_from commit where it exists), rebuilds the .pyz with that version's build.py, and compares its sha256 with every .pyz the manifest lists. It needs Python, git and PyYAML at the pinned version, nothing else; the signature check is ed25519 in pure Python, tested against RFC 8032's vectors and the vector the bastion's signing tool and the bastion share. build.py leaves it out of the .pyz.
• SECURITY.md (how to report a problem in the agent, and what is in scope), CONTRIBUTING.md (the checks a change must pass and the rules it must keep) and this changelog.
• The documents under docs/ describe the program as it is. Test commands are the real ones (python3 -m unittest …), and the status lines, dates, live measurements from the development machine and lists of work that is now done are gone. Descriptions that no longer matched the code are corrected, among them: the built-in PDF reader, the Office limits, the default output directory of each command, the /catalog paging and --port-file of serve, which environment variables the PII service reads, and when a chunk keeps its vector.
• Comments and help text follow the same rule: the --out help names the real default, and no comment names a machine, a model deployment or a file that is not in this repository. No change in behaviour.
• pii/verify-live.sh takes the service's address as an argument (default 127.0.0.1:8091, where pii.service binds) and the key from PII_API_KEY, instead of reading a file outside this repository.
• sweep without --out now uses <root>/.agent, the same folder as serve.
• PII: overlapping matches, including a value that overlaps itself, become one placeholder; no match may split an existing placeholder; placeholder-looking text in a document always survives a round trip (through the service, only text the vault does not hold; escape_held_literals: true asks for all of it), and a chunk is never cut inside a placeholder; a phone number, IPv4 or MAC address at the end of a sentence is now detected, and one followed by .txt-style text is not.
• The residual_tokenized and verify_tokenized stats count what was actually replaced. There is a new stat, literal_tokens_escaped, and /sterilize echoes stats.escape_held_literals.
• The sanitize stage re-sanitizes every file once after this upgrade (SANITIZE_VERSION 2): output written by older code is not reused.
• The legacy address privatae.ai/freeagent/ is retired, so this release is published under the new file name only (publish.sh finds the route gone on every edge and the public 404 by itself). A bastion older than 0.20.0 keeps the agent it has.

0.1.13

• No change in what the agent does. The README describes it as it is: the stages and their order, how the bastion runs the agent, what serve returns, verifying a release, and reporting a security problem.
• Release manifests are signed. 0.1.13 is the first release published with a signature; none is served for the 0.1.12 manifest. publish.sh builds the release, prints the command for the key holder to sign it on their own computer (the release key never comes to the publishing machine), and publishes only once the signature verifies against the keys the bastion pins, both in the release being prepared and in the one machines run now. The signature is published beside the manifest as version.json.<first 16 hex of its sha256>.sig, and old signature files are never removed.
• The build is reproducible on any machine. build.py vendors PyYAML only at the pinned version (PYYAML_VERSION) and refuses any other, so two machines build the same bytes from the same source.
• publish.sh writes the legacy freeagent-<version>.pyz file name only while some edge still serves the legacy /freeagent/ address, judged per edge from the configuration its web server has loaded; docs/packaging.md has the steps to retire that address.

0.1.12

• No change in behaviour: comments no longer carry ticket numbers or name machines, so the source can be published as it is.

0.1.11

• The manifest gate needs no openssl. Reading the certificate, checking its chain to FREEAGENT_CA_ROOT and verifying the ECDSA P-256 signature are done in the standard library (x509gate.py), with strict DER parsing, so the agent runs on machines without openssl, Windows included. sign --value records a signature made elsewhere (the bastion signs with its own key); sign --key still uses openssl. doctor no longer lists openssl as required.
• The built-in PDF reader reads real PDFs (pdftext.py): object streams, compressed streams, the page tree, fonts' /ToUnicode maps (so browser-printed PDFs read), simple font encodings, glyph widths for spacing, and form XObjects. Without poppler it used to find text only in old PDFs. It reads on a budget per document (time, decoded bytes, operators, tokens, CMap entries) and never raises; encrypted files are refused. Cached PDF verdicts are redone (EXTRACT_VERSION 2).
• Office files are read on a budget. DOCX, XLSX, PPTX and OpenDocument files are parsed as a stream, each finished paragraph or row dropped once read, with caps on XML size, text size, time and parts per paragraph or row; reaching a cap keeps the text read so far and says so. A DTD is refused, and UTF-16 documents are read.

0.1.10

• Licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later, in place of PolyForm Internal Use. The LICENSE file is also inside the .pyz.

0.1.9

• No change to the agent. Test fixtures use generic addresses, and publish.sh takes its backup directory from the environment and refuses one inside the web root.

0.1.8

• Licensed under PolyForm Internal Use 1.0.0 in place of PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0, which had forbidden running the agent for work.
• publish.sh names no publishing target of its own: the edges, key and web root come from its environment, and it stops when one is missing. Documents no longer cite files outside the repository, and test fixtures use invented people. No change in behaviour.

0.1.7

• The program is named the bastion agent. The package is bastion_agent, the artifact bastion-agent-<version>.pyz, the command bastion-agent, and the address privatae.ai/bastion-agent/. The manifest's freeagent: 1 field, the FREEAGENT_* environment variables, the freeagent stamp in output records and the build/freeagent/ output directory keep the old word: bastions write and set them, and output already on disk uses them. Every publish lists the artifact under both file names, with the same bytes.
• The agent and the PII sterilizer became a repository of their own, licensed under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0.

0.1.6

• serve's /catalog and /catalog/dirs are paged: prefix, offset and limit, answered with total and next_offset.

0.1.5

• serve answers /catalog/dirs: the directory cards, the map a host plans from.

0.1.4

• .agent is excluded in any letter case on every OS (a case-insensitive Mac volume has only one .Agent).
• The documents say plainly that the extract store in .agent is the plaintext of every file in scope, and that a folder should be served from one machine.

0.1.3

• An agent lives with its folder. For a manifest with one root, the output directory defaults to <root>/.agent, and the walk always excludes .agent.
• FREEAGENT_VAULT_DIR keeps the PII vault out of the folder, which may be synced elsewhere.

0.1.2

• serve --port-file writes the port it bound, so a supervisor can bind port 0 and learn it.
• publish.sh: the agent is published at privatae.ai/freeagent/.

0.1.1

• Each TLS handshake in serve runs in its connection's own thread with a timeout, and an idle connection is closed after 60 s, so a client that says nothing cannot hold up the others.
• The manifest gate requires FREEAGENT_CA_ROOT and a signing certificate with exactly one CN, and a refused manifest is recorded in the run log.
• Every segment of a path is masked in the catalog, not only the file name.
• The sweep lock is never taken from a live process; chunk and catalog require the sanitize stage; a malformed CSV is an error record instead of a crash.

0.1.0

The first version with a number: the whole pipeline in one file.

• The job manifest, its loader and validator.
• The stages: walk, extract, sanitize (the PII sterilizer, in process or as a service, with rules, a recall model and a local vault), chunk, embed (a local model, vectors in SQLite) and search, catalog, and seal (an age envelope to the owner and named recipients).
• sweep, the scheduler with the manifest signature gate and a lock, and a systemd user unit.
• serve, the mutual-TLS query endpoint, with grants read from the signed manifest on each request.
• Packaging: a reproducible single-file zipapp, the doctor preflight, and installers for sh and PowerShell.