Answers 'how can the weekly run produce counts like the hand count?' — by doing
exactly what the hand count did, deterministically. Two changes:
1. PAGINATION. The scanner requested per_page=100 and stopped. This endpoint caps at
100 AND ignores ?page= (it re-returns the same rows — which is how a manual count
first produced exact triplicates and a bogus 300). Busy projects were silently
truncated: discourse has 286 advisories, so a single page could not see the window
at all. Now follows the Link rel=next cursor to exhaustion.
2. DATE-BASED FALLBACK. Version strings cannot be ordered across a scheme change
(discourse semver 3.5.3 -> calver 2026.7.1), which is why the scan first reported a
false 133, then correctly refused. Release DATES always order. When the version path
refuses, the scan now resolves both versions to their git tag dates on the primary
repo and counts advisories PUBLISHED in that window, labelling the method in the
output. The version path is still preferred when usable — it is exact rather than
temporal.
Verified: discourse 3.5.3 -> 2026.7.1 now reports 123, matching the hand count
(1 critical, 16 high, 91 medium, 16 low; window 2025-12-30 -> 2026-07-31); gitea
1.27.0 -> 1.27.1 still reports 2 via the version path.
Operator: 'the scanner should not say 0 when it was not able to scan.' Correct — the
previous patch still led with '0 identified' and relegated the caveat to a footnote,
so the headline number was wrong even though the prose was right. A 0 in a security
column is an assertion of safety; it must never be emitted for an undetermined result.
Now: cve_count_fixed is null (not 0) in JSON, a count_known flag distinguishes
'counted zero' from 'could not count', and the markdown headline reads
'CVEs fixed by this upgrade: UNKNOWN — the scan could NOT determine a count' with an
explicit 'This is NOT zero' and instructions to render '?'.
Verified: discourse 3.5.3 -> 2026.7.1 (semver->calver) now reports UNKNOWN; gitea
1.27.0 -> 1.27.1 still reports 2.
Operator disbelieved discourse's '133 CVEs fixed' — correctly. Two defects made it
confidently wrong:
1. ONE WINDOW APPLIED TO EVERY IMAGE. The scan queries all source repos in the
recipe's registry (app + redis/postgres/nginx sidecars) but judged them all with
the APP's version window. 34 of the 133 were redis advisories, including
CVE-2021-21309 — patched in redis 6.0.11 back in 2021 — scored as 'fixed by this
upgrade' purely because 6.0.11 sits numerically inside discourse's 3.5.3 ->
2026.7.1 range. Only the PRIMARY app repo is now classified; other sources are
reported as unclassified so they stay visible without inflating the count.
2. VERSION-SCHEME CHANGES BREAK ORDERING. discourse moved semver -> calver
(3.5.3 -> 2026.7.1), so 2025.12.2 compares 'newer' than 3.5.3 while shipping
earlier. Numeric comparison cannot order that. The scan now detects a leading-
component jump >= 100, refuses to classify, and says so in the block: the count
is '0 by refusal, not by evidence — read the vendor's release notes'.
Refusing to answer beats answering wrongly: a fabricated 133 in a public security
report is worse than an explicit 'cannot determine'.
Verified after the fix: discourse 133 -> 0 (with the refusal caveat), gitea still
exactly 2 (both criticals, patched 1.27.1), keycloak 7 all genuinely from
keycloak/keycloak patched in 26.7.1, plausible 1. No other count changed.
The 2026-08-07 regeneration rendered '?' for 5 of 21 recipes. '?' is meant to be a
rare 'we tried and could not tell'; at that rate it is indistinguishable from noise
and hides the real unknowns. Three causes, none of them genuine uncertainty:
1. URL EXTRACTION BUG (mine). The registry is markdown, so urls appear inside
`backticks` and 'quotes'. The extractor captured the trailing punctuation, so
it fetched https://docs.n8n.io/release-notes/` and https://git.autonomic.zone'`
— both 404 on the malformed url, both 200 when clean. Trailing markdown
punctuation is now stripped. Fixed immich + n8n.
2. STALE REGISTRY URL. mattermost-lts pointed at
docs.mattermost.com/about/mattermost-changelog.html, which 404s; the page moved
to /deploy/. Corrected (same class as the pgautoupgrade fix).
3. WRONG SEMANTICS FOR 'NO UPGRADE'. lasuite-docs and custom-html-tiny were
up-to-date this run, so no scan block existed and the report fell back to '?'.
But a recipe with no upgrade has nothing an upgrade could have fixed — that is
0, not unknown. The report skill now says so explicitly, restricts '?' to scans
that RAN and reported genuinely failed sources, states that benign notes
(no-advisories-published / template URL) never trigger '?', and instructs that
many '?' is itself a bug to raise in the Addendum.
Result across all 16 scanned recipes of that run: 0 failed sources (was 5).
Counts also improved with the classifier fix: discourse 130->133, keycloak ->7.
Exposed by asking whether the scan catches the n8n CVEs (CVE-2026-42231/42232). It
did not — the advisories were fetched correctly but both misclassified as
out-of-window. Two bugs:
1. Only vulnerabilities[0] was read. An advisory carries ONE ENTRY PER PATCHED
RELEASE LINE: n8n patches three (1.123.32, 2.17.4, 2.18.1), so whichever line
the deployment is actually on was silently dropped. gitea passed only because it
patches a single line. Now all entries are kept.
2. patched_versions is a RANGE EXPRESSION ('>= 2.18.1'), not a bare version. Naive
parsing produced (18,1) instead of (2,18,1), so no comparison could ever match.
Version tokens are now extracted with a regex and the advisory counts as
fixed-by-this-upgrade if ANY patched line falls in (from, to].
Verified: n8n 2.17.0 -> 2.18.1 now reports 12 CVEs including both criticals
(CVE-2026-42231 GHSA-q5f4-99jv-pgg5, CVE-2026-42232); gitea 1.27.0 -> 1.27.1 still
reports exactly 2. Note our deployed n8n (2.27.2+) is already past all three patched
lines, so these were never outstanding for us — the bug was in detection, not
exposure.
Two refinements found by running the scan across all 14 recipes of the 2026-08-07 run:
1. A repo with no advisory feed returns HTTP 404 on /security-advisories (e.g. the
pgautoupgrade sidecar image). That is a BENIGN ABSENCE, not a failed check.
Likewise registry entries that are TEMPLATE urls for humans
(…/changelog/v<VERSION>/, …/<vX.Y.Z>/…) are documentation, not fetchable.
Counting either as a failure pushed most recipes to '?', which would make the
unknown-vs-clean distinction meaningless again — the exact signal the ? exists to
preserve. Both are now recorded in sources_benign; only genuine errors (rate
limit, network, 5xx, wrong URL) land in sources_failed.
2. upstream/*.md pointed at github.com/pgautoupgrade/pgautoupgrade, which 404s —
the repo is pgautoupgrade/docker-pgautoupgrade. Corrected in n8n, lasuite-docs,
lasuite-drive, lasuite-meet. A 404ing registry URL means we were not scanning a
source we believed we were.
Effect on the 2026-08-07 data: recipes with genuine failed sources 5 -> 3 (the
remainder are really unreachable vendor pages). CVE counts unchanged where they
were already sound: discourse 130, gitea 2, plausible 1.
Anonymous GitHub API is 60 req/hr — a full weekly sweep across ~20 recipes exhausts
it and the scan then reports sources as failed (visible, but degraded coverage). A
token lifts it to 5000/hr.
_github_token(): GITHUB_TOKEN env wins, else GITHUB_TOKEN_FILE (default
/srv/cc-ci/.github-token, 0600, gitignored). Reading PUBLIC advisories needs NO
scopes — a classic PAT with nothing ticked, or fine-grained limited to 'Public
repositories: read'. The tool only ever GETs advisories; do not grant write scopes.
A missing token is not an error: the scan runs anonymously and surfaces failures.
Also gitignores .github-token and .hcloud-token.
Why: gitea 1.27.1 fixed CVE-2026-60004 + CVE-2026-59774 (both CVSS 9.8). The
2026-08-03 report printed gitea's CVE count as '1', the 2026-08-07 report as
'none'. Cause chain: the upgrade subagent read the GitHub release notes, which
name NEITHER cve (they are announced only in the vendor blog's security section),
so it recorded one unrelated minor item; the report then derived security content
from those notes plus model knowledge, and the model's training predates the CVEs.
Nothing in the pipeline ever queried an advisory source.
cc-ci-plan/advisory-scan.py — deterministic, per recipe, per upgrade window:
1. GitHub Security Advisories API for every source repo in the upstream registry.
PRIMARY: CVE + GHSA + severity + vulnerable/patched ranges, so 'fixed by THIS
upgrade' is computed. Needs no new per-recipe config (134 registry URLs are
already github.com).
2. Vendor release/security pages — every registry URL, fetched + regex-scanned.
This is the source that actually had the gitea CVEs.
3. OSV where a package mapping exists — supplementary.
Each source reports its own status so 'checked, none found' is never confused with
'not checked'. Source selection was measured, not assumed: for these two CVEs OSV
404'd and NVD's API had them by neither CPE, id, nor keyword — advisory DBs lag the
vendor, hence 1+2 lead.
Wiring is strictly ADDITIVE:
- /recipe-upgrade gains step 2a: run the scan, paste the block into the per-recipe
log, and report the UNION of it and the existing release-note reading. The scan
may never lower a count established by reading.
- /recipe-report treats the block as a FURTHER source, prefers its advisory ids /
severities / fixed-in versions for citation, and must render '?' (not 'none')
when a scan is absent or has failed sources — the false-clean 'none' is exactly
what happened on 2026-08-07.
- upstream/gitea.md records blog.gitea.com as the security-announcement URL.
Verified on the real regression: 1.27.0 -> 1.27.1 now yields exactly the 2 missed
criticals with their GHSA ids; the wider 1.26.2 -> 1.27.1 window yields 62.
autonomic-bot