Do not open a public issue for a suspected vulnerability. Use GitHub's private Report a vulnerability workflow. If that workflow is unavailable, contact the repository owner privately using the address on the maintainer's GitHub profile. Include the affected version or commit, host distribution, a minimal reproduction using files you may lawfully share, and sanitised logs.

You should receive an acknowledgement within five working days. Disclosure timing will be coordinated with the reporter. These are response targets, not a service-level agreement.

Reports are especially useful for command or argument injection through a chip or file name, unsafe image parsing, path traversal, unintended host-file access, a write or erase that happens without confirmation, a voltage or chip selected without the user's action, and vulnerable dependencies.

Use blank or disposable chips for research. This project does not operate a bug bounty.

• It runs minipro as a child process, with arguments passed as a list and never through a shell. A chip name or file name cannot become a command.
• It reads the files you open and writes only where you choose: the image from a read, the parts of a ROM set, and a private temporary folder that is removed when the window closes. A Kickstart decrypted with your rom.key is held in memory and in that folder only. The encrypted file and the key are never changed, and neither is sent anywhere.
• It uses the network for one thing, and only when you ask: Check for Application Updates sends a request to api.github.com, and an update you accept is downloaded from GitHub, checked against the SHA256SUMS published with the release, and installed by apt after the system asks for your password. A package that does not match is deleted. Nothing is sent when the application starts, and no ROM image is ever downloaded or uploaded. See Installing an update, below, for how the package is protected on its way in.
• It needs no privileges of its own. Installing an update is done by pkexec apt-get, which asks for your password each time. Access to the programmer comes from a udev rule that grants it to the user logged in at the machine. Do not run it with sudo.

ROM images, keys and minipro's output are treated as untrusted input.

• Image identification reads fixed offsets with bounds checks and never executes or unpacks anything. Only a regular file is opened. A FIFO or a device, which reports no size and never stops giving bytes, is refused, and every read stops at a limit of its own instead of trusting the size the file system reported: 64 MB for an image and 64 KB for a key. The Kickstart checksum and decryption are attempted only on files of 2 MB or less.
• minipro is given the path of the image and reads the file itself. If the file has changed since it was opened, the application reads it again and does not write, so what is burned is what was identified and confirmed.
• minipro's output is parsed with string operations and with regular expressions that cannot backtrack badly, and each line is cut at 2 KB. A listing is taken from standard output alone and only when minipro succeeds, so an error message cannot become the name of a chip.
• The worker that runs minipro never raises. Whatever happens, the window is told that the operation is over, so it cannot be left refusing every command.

T48_PROGRAMMER_MINIPRO names the program that will be run with your privileges and access to the programmer. Anyone who can set your environment can already run programs as you, so it grants nothing new, but do not point it at a binary you did not build or install.

The Debian package compiles minipro from a release archive pinned by SHA-256 in packaging/minipro-source.sha256. A changed archive fails the build.

The package is downloaded to your cache folder and checked against the release's SHA256SUMS. That check is made as you, in a folder you can write to, and the password prompt can then stay open for any length of time. A program running as you could replace the file in that gap, and its maintainer scripts would run as root on the strength of a password given for something else.

So the check that counts is made as root. pkexec runs /usr/lib/t48-programmer/bin/install-update, which the package installs and only root can change, with the package's path and the checksum it must have. The helper copies the package into a folder only root can write to, hashes the copy, refuses it if the checksum differs, and gives the copy to apt. The file that was checked is the file that is installed.

The simulator used by the demonstration mode keeps its imaginary chips in a private folder under your runtime directory, and refuses a folder that is not yours, so that another user of the machine cannot leave a link there for a write to follow.

A wrong chip selection can apply a programming voltage that destroys the chip. The application selects a chip only by your action: from the search, from the chip you picked in the guided ROM burn, or from the button offered after an SPI flash detection that matched exactly one part. It never sets a voltage other than minipro's default unless you select it.