Reference

Security

Every Pi-Bolt release is signed. The installers verify what they download before installing it, need no administrator rights, and change nothing outside your own folders.

Signed releases#

Each release publishes SHA256SUMS, the SHA-256 checksum of every file, and SHA256SUMS.sig, an Ed25519 signature of that file made with Pi-Bolt's release key. The public key is in the repository as keys/release.pub and inside the installers:

-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
MCowBQYDK2VwAyEAoLboJqtKaoISPqffk03vHZr+1sRBG3uIRIWeKOew+aY=
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----

The installers and pi-bolt update refuse a download whose checksum or signature does not verify. Checksums and signatures always come from the GitHub release, so a download from the npm registry's CDN is checked against them too.

Verify a download yourself#

$ sha256sum -c --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS
$ openssl pkeyutl -verify -pubin -inkey release.pub -rawin -in SHA256SUMS -sigfile SHA256SUMS.sig

The second command needs OpenSSL 3 or later; macOS's own openssl (LibreSSL) cannot check Ed25519, but Homebrew's openssl@3 can.

What the installer does#

Installs into your home folder (~/.pi-bolt, or %USERPROFILE%\.pi-bolt on Windows) and links one command. It needs no administrator rights and changes no security setting.
On Windows, asks before adding Pi-Bolt to your PATH.
Installs OpenSec's optional extensions only when you say yes, at the versions the release pins, and only if the registry's package matches the pinned integrity hash.
Does not touch your Pi installation. In ~/.pi/agent it only installs the extensions you accepted.

Running Pi safely#

Pi-Bolt runs Pi's tools with your permissions, as Pi does: the agent can read and write files and run commands in your project. Pi's Run Pi safely and Isolate Pi apply to Pi-Bolt.

Extensions run inside the Pi process with your permissions. Only install extensions from sources you trust.
A project's .env is not loaded into Pi-Bolt's environment. See .env files.
Crash reports contain an encoded stack trace and nothing else: no file names, paths or data of yours. See A crash.

Report a vulnerability#

Report security issues privately through GitHub's private vulnerability reporting, not in public issues. We acknowledge the report, investigate, and coordinate a fix and disclosure with you.

In scope: the Pi-Bolt runtime and engine changes, the release executables, and the scripts and installers in the repository. Vulnerabilities in Pi itself belong to Pi; vulnerabilities in Bun or JavaScriptCore that Pi-Bolt does not change belong to their projects.