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Security

EchOS is designed with a security-first mindset. It runs locally or on your own server, only calls the APIs you configure, and enforces strict input validation and content sanitization throughout. This page documents the security guarantees, authentication model, and defensive measures built into the system.

What EchOS Does NOT Do

These are hard guarantees about what EchOS will never do to your system:

Authentication

The Web API also binds to 127.0.0.1 and enforces localhost-only CORS, so it is not reachable from the network even if the firewall is misconfigured.

SSRF Prevention

All URL fetching goes through validateUrl() which:
  • Only allows http: and https: protocols
  • Blocks private IP ranges (10.x, 172.16-31.x, 192.168.x, 127.x)
  • Blocks link-local (169.254.x.x) — covers AWS/Azure/GCP instance metadata service (IMDS)
  • Blocks Azure platform endpoint (168.63.129.16)
  • Blocks CGNAT range (100.64.0.0/10, RFC 6598)
  • Blocks IPv6 ULA, link-local, loopback, and unspecified addresses
  • Blocks localhost, instance-data, and cloud metadata hostnames
  • Applied before any fetch operation

Content Sanitization

  • HTML content sanitized with DOMPurify before processing
  • sanitizeHtml() strips all tags and re-escapes entities
  • escapeXml() for XML context escaping
  • AI output treated as untrusted data

Content Size Limits

All external text content is validated against a maximum size before reaching the AI or storage layer, preventing oversized-payload attacks:
Default limits (overridable per call):
  • Text: 500 000 characters
  • Binary: 10 MiB

Rate Limiting

  • Token bucket algorithm (20 tokens, 1 token/second refill)
  • Per-user tracking
  • Bounded to 10 000 distinct keys — evicts the oldest entry when at capacity, preventing memory exhaustion from many unique callers
  • Applied at middleware level in all interfaces

Timing-safe Token Comparison

The Web API bearer-token check uses timingSafeStringEqual() (backed by crypto.timingSafeEqual after SHA-256 hashing) instead of ===. This prevents timing side-channel attacks where an attacker could measure response latency to guess the token character-by-character.

Secret Management

  • Pino configured with an expanded set of redaction paths covering common secret field names: apiKey, token, password, secret, authorization, cookie, key, credential, credentials, privateKey, clientSecret, accessToken, refreshToken, bearer, and nested variants
  • HTTP headers Authorization and Cookie are also redacted
  • Secrets never included in error messages
  • .env files gitignored

Audit Logging

  • Separate audit logger instance
  • Structured events with timestamps and user IDs
  • Security-relevant events logged: auth failures, content access, mutations

Input Validation

  • All configuration validated with Zod schemas
  • Tool parameters validated with TypeBox + AJV (via pi-agent-core)
  • User input sanitized before storage