shellhist-forensic is designed to parse untrusted shell command-history
files — including those acquired from compromised or actively hostile systems.
Hostile input is the expected case, not an edge case. Robustness against crafted
history files, malformed records, and garbled encodings is a core design goal, and
we take reports of crashes, hangs, or memory-safety issues seriously.
| Version | Supported |
|---|---|
| 0.1.x | ✅ — current release line, receives security fixes |
| < 0.1 | ❌ — pre-release, unsupported |
Security fixes are released against the latest published 0.1.x line.
Do not open a public GitHub issue for a security vulnerability.
Report privately, by either:
- GitHub Security Advisories — open a private advisory on the
shellhist-forensicrepository, or - Email — albert@securityronin.com.
Please include:
- the affected version and target triple,
- a minimal reproducing history file or byte buffer (a fuzz corpus entry is ideal),
- the observed behaviour (panic, hang, excessive allocation, mis-parse) and the expected behaviour.
We aim to acknowledge a report within a few business days and to coordinate disclosure once a fix is available.
shellhist-forensic is hardened against adversarial input by construction:
#![forbid(unsafe_code)]across both crates — nounsafe, no C bindings, no FFI, anywhere.- No panics on malicious input — parsing is lenient (lossy UTF-8) and bounds-checked; a truncated or garbled file degrades to plain lines rather than crashing. Arithmetic is checked or saturating.
- Bounded reads — line and record scanning is bounded; the reader refuses to spin on a non-terminating record.
- Fail loud where it matters — a genuine error surfaces with context rather than as a silent default or a silently-wrong parse.
Continuous fuzzing with cargo-fuzz
backs the hardening above. Five targets cover the parsers that consume
attacker-controlled bytes:
| Target | Surface |
|---|---|
bash |
bash history: plain, #<epoch> timestamps, multi-line commands |
zsh |
zsh EXTENDED_HISTORY records + backslash continuation |
fish |
fish nearly-YAML record parsing + unescape |
powershell |
PowerShell PSReadLine backtick continuation |
forensic |
the full parse → audit pipeline |
Panics found by fuzzing are fixed and pinned as regression tests.
For how to run the targets yourself, see CONTRIBUTING.md.