WhitePact

Projects that follow the best practices below can voluntarily self-certify and show that they've achieved an Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) best practices badge.

There is no set of practices that can guarantee that software will never have defects or vulnerabilities; even formal methods can fail if the specifications or assumptions are wrong. Nor is there any set of practices that can guarantee that a project will sustain a healthy and well-functioning development community. However, following best practices can help improve the results of projects. For example, some practices enable multi-person review before release, which can both help find otherwise hard-to-find technical vulnerabilities and help build trust and a desire for repeated interaction among developers from different companies. To earn a badge, all MUST and MUST NOT criteria must be met, all SHOULD criteria must be met OR be unmet with justification, and all SUGGESTED criteria must be met OR unmet (we want them considered at least). If you want to enter justification text as a generic comment, instead of being a rationale that the situation is acceptable, start the text block with '//' followed by a space. Feedback is welcome via the GitHub site as issues or pull requests There is also a mailing list for general discussion.

We gladly provide the information in several locales, however, if there is any conflict or inconsistency between the translations, the English version is the authoritative version.
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These are the Gold level criteria. You can also view the Passing or Silver level criteria.

Baseline Series: Baseline Level 1 Baseline Level 2 Baseline Level 3

        

 Basics 1/5 ●

  • General

    Note that other projects may use the same name.

    WhitePact is an open-source runtime authority, governance, and assurance layer for autonomous systems. It provides deterministic five-way authorization decisions (ALLOW, ALLOW_WITH_REDACTION, REQUIRE_APPROVAL, DENY, QUARANTINE), policy and risk enforcement, human approval workflows, tamper-evident evidence, MCP governance, trust controls, guardrails, and enterprise integration tooling.

    Please use SPDX license expression format; examples include "Apache-2.0", "BSD-2-Clause", "BSD-3-Clause", "GPL-2.0+", "LGPL-3.0+", "MIT", and "(BSD-2-Clause OR Ruby)". Do not include single quotes or double quotes.
    If there is more than one language, list them as comma-separated values (spaces optional) and sort them from most to least used. If there is a long list, please list at least the first three most common ones. If there is no language (e.g., this is a documentation-only or test-only project), use the single character "-". Please use a conventional capitalization for each language, e.g., "JavaScript".
    The Common Platform Enumeration (CPE) is a structured naming scheme for information technology systems, software, and packages. It is used in a number of systems and databases when reporting vulnerabilities.

  • Prerequisites


    Enough for a badge!

    The project MUST achieve a silver level badge. [achieve_silver]

  • Project oversight


    Not enough for a badge.

    The project MUST have a "bus factor" of 2 or more. (URL required) [bus_factor]
    A "bus factor" (aka "truck factor") is the minimum number of project members that have to suddenly disappear from a project ("hit by a bus") before the project stalls due to lack of knowledgeable or competent personnel. The truck-factor tool can estimate this for projects on GitHub. For more information, see Assessing the Bus Factor of Git Repositories by Cosentino et al.

    Unmet. The complete repository history contains commits under one contributor identity, and the repository governance documents identify WhitePact as founder-led with one maintainer. A second maintainer with equivalent project knowledge is not established.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/GOVERNANCE.md


    Not enough for a badge.

    The project MUST have at least two unassociated significant contributors. (URL required) [contributors_unassociated]
    Contributors are associated if they are paid to work by the same organization (as an employee or contractor) and the organization stands to benefit from the project's results. Financial grants do not count as being from the same organization if they pass through other organizations (e.g., science grants paid to different organizations from a common government or NGO source do not cause contributors to be associated). Someone is a significant contributor if they have made non-trivial contributions to the project in the past year. Examples of good indicators of a significant contributor are: written at least 1,000 lines of code, contributed 50 commits, or contributed at least 20 pages of documentation.

    Unmet. The public repository history does not show two unassociated significant contributors; commits are attributed to Guruprasath Annadurai under multiple email addresses, and CODEOWNERS lists only the repository owner.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/graphs/contributors
    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/.github/CODEOWNERS


  • Other


    Not enough for a badge.

    The project MUST include a license statement in each source file. This MAY be done by including the following inside a comment near the beginning of each file: SPDX-License-Identifier: [SPDX license expression for project]. [license_per_file]
    This MAY also be done by including a statement in natural language identifying the license. The project MAY also include a stable URL pointing to the license text, or the full license text. Note that the criterion license_location requires the project license be in a standard location. See this SPDX tutorial for more information about SPDX license expressions. Note the relationship with copyright_per_file, whose content would typically precede the license information.

    Unmet. The current source files do not include per-file license or SPDX-License-Identifier statements. The root MIT LICENSE file does not satisfy this per-file Gold criterion.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/LICENSE


 Change Control 4/4 ●

  • Public version-controlled source repository


    Enough for a badge!

    The project's source repository MUST use a common distributed version control software (e.g., git or mercurial). [repo_distributed]
    Git is not specifically required and projects can use centralized version control software (such as subversion) with justification.

    WhitePact's public source repository is hosted on GitHub and uses Git, a distributed version-control system.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact


    Enough for a badge!

    The project MUST clearly identify small tasks that can be performed by new or casual contributors. (URL required) [small_tasks]
    This identification is typically done by marking selected issues in an issue tracker with one or more tags the project uses for the purpose, e.g., up-for-grabs, first-timers-only, "Small fix", microtask, or IdealFirstBug. These new tasks need not involve adding functionality; they can be improving documentation, adding test cases, or anything else that aids the project and helps the contributor understand more about the project.

    STATUS: MET
    EVIDENCE: WhitePact issue #53 defines a bounded starter task to add focused unit tests for the OpenSSF action-pin policy checker, including explicit scope, constraints, and acceptance criteria. The issue is open and requires no runtime behavior change.
    JUSTIFICATION: This is a concrete small task suitable for a new or casual contributor; it is not a fabricated contributor or meaningless compliance issue.
    URL: https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/issues/53


    Enough for a badge!

    The project MUST require two-factor authentication (2FA) for developers for changing a central repository or accessing sensitive data (such as private vulnerability reports). This 2FA mechanism MAY use mechanisms without cryptographic mechanisms such as SMS, though that is not recommended. [require_2FA]

    STATUS: MET
    EVIDENCE: On 2026-08-29, the authenticated GitHub owner security page showed two-factor authentication enabled and required for the sole account able to change the central repository and access private vulnerability reports.
    JUSTIFICATION: WhitePact currently has one write-capable maintainer; GitHub requires that account to use 2FA. No additional maintainer or developer access was claimed.
    URL: https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact


    Enough for a badge!

    The project's two-factor authentication (2FA) SHOULD use cryptographic mechanisms to prevent impersonation. Short Message Service (SMS) based 2FA, by itself, does NOT meet this criterion, since it is not encrypted. [secure_2FA]
    A 2FA mechanism that meets this criterion would be a Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP) application that automatically generates an authentication code that changes after a certain period of time. Note that GitHub supports TOTP.

    STATUS: MET
    EVIDENCE: On 2026-08-29, the authenticated GitHub owner security page showed a configured passkey, an authenticator app, and passkeys selected as the preferred 2FA method.
    JUSTIFICATION: The sole write-capable maintainer uses cryptographic 2FA; this answer does not rely on SMS-only authentication and does not claim any additional maintainers.
    URL: https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact


 Quality 4/7 ●

  • Coding standards


    Enough for a badge!

    The project MUST document its code review requirements, including how code review is conducted, what must be checked, and what is required to be acceptable. (URL required) [code_review_standards]
    See also two_person_review and contribution_requirements.

    The repository documents its pull-request acceptance requirements, mandatory tests and CI, code style, coverage expectations, security checks, and vulnerability classes reviewers should check. The pull-request template provides the concrete review checklist. This documents the standard; it does not claim that independent review currently occurs.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#pull-request-guidelines
    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md


    Not enough for a badge.

    The project MUST have at least 50% of all proposed modifications reviewed before release by a person other than the author, to determine if it is a worthwhile modification and free of known issues which would argue against its inclusion [two_person_review]

    Unmet. The repository's own branch-protection evidence records required_approving_review_count: 0 because WhitePact has one maintainer. The merged pull requests inspected do not provide evidence that at least 50% of released modifications were reviewed by a person other than the author. PR and CI gates are not substitutes for independent human review.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/compliance/OSPS_BASELINE_BRANCH_PROTECTION.md


  • Working build system


    Not enough for a badge.

    The project MUST have a reproducible build. If no building occurs (e.g., scripting languages where the source code is used directly instead of being compiled), select "not applicable" (N/A). (URL required) [build_reproducible]
    A reproducible build means that multiple parties can independently redo the process of generating information from source files and get exactly the same bit-for-bit result. In some cases, this can be resolved by forcing some sort order. JavaScript developers may consider using npm shrinkwrap and webpack OccurrenceOrderPlugin. GCC and clang users may find the -frandom-seed option useful. The build environment (including the toolset) can often be defined for external parties by specifying the cryptographic hash of a specific container or virtual machine that they can use for rebuilding. The reproducible builds project has documentation on how to do this.

    Unmet. The repository builds wheel and source distributions in CI, but it does not publish a byte-for-byte reproducible-build procedure or independent rebuild comparison demonstrating identical artifacts from the same source. Build success and provenance are not the same as reproducibility.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/.github/workflows/ci.yml


  • Automated test suite


    Enough for a badge!

    A test suite MUST be invocable in a standard way for that language. (URL required) [test_invocation]
    For example, "make check", "mvn test", or "rake test" (Ruby).

    The automated suite uses pytest and is invoked with the standard command pytest. CONTRIBUTING.md documents local invocation, and CI invokes pytest against the public tests directory.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#running-tests
    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/.github/workflows/ci.yml


    Enough for a badge!

    The project MUST implement continuous integration, where new or changed code is frequently integrated into a central code repository and automated tests are run on the result. (URL required) [test_continuous_integration]
    In most cases this means that each developer who works full-time on the project integrates at least daily.

    WhitePact uses GitHub Actions CI on pushes to main/develop and pull requests to main. The workflow runs linting, formatting, type checking, dependency auditing, tests with coverage, a pure branch-coverage gate, distribution builds, and Helm validation.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/.github/workflows/ci.yml


    Unknown required information, not enough for a badge.

    The project MUST have FLOSS automated test suite(s) that provide at least 90% statement coverage if there is at least one FLOSS tool that can measure this criterion in the selected language. [test_statement_coverage90]

    Unknown. The repository does not publish a current, separately calculated statement-coverage result proving at least 90%. Its CI threshold is 80% for coverage.py's blended metric, which is not sufficient evidence for this distinct Gold criterion.


    Enough for a badge!

    The project MUST have FLOSS automated test suite(s) that provide at least 80% branch coverage if there is at least one FLOSS tool that can measure this criterion in the selected language. [test_branch_coverage80]

    The repository records a measured pure branch-coverage result of 80.19% (1469/1832 branches). CI generates coverage.json and runs scripts/check_branch_coverage.py --threshold 80 --fail, making pure branch coverage a hard gate.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/compliance/OPENSSF_DYNAMIC_ANALYSIS.md
    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/.github/workflows/ci.yml


 Security 5/5 ●

  • Use basic good cryptographic practices

    Note that some software does not need to use cryptographic mechanisms. If your project produces software that (1) includes, activates, or enables encryption functionality, and (2) might be released from the United States (US) to outside the US or to a non-US-citizen, you may be legally required to take a few extra steps. Typically this just involves sending an email. For more information, see the encryption section of Understanding Open Source Technology & US Export Controls.

    Enough for a badge!

    The software produced by the project MUST support secure protocols for all of its network communications, such as SSHv2 or later, TLS1.2 or later (HTTPS), IPsec, SFTP, and SNMPv3. Insecure protocols such as FTP, HTTP, telnet, SSLv3 or earlier, and SSHv1 MUST be disabled by default, and only enabled if the user specifically configures it. If the software produced by the project does not support network communications, select "not applicable" (N/A). [crypto_used_network]

    WhitePact supports secure network communication through HTTPS/TLS for production deployments.

    TLS is terminated by the deployment's trusted reverse proxy, load balancer, ingress, or managed cloud edge. The documented production nginx configuration enables TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3 with modern authenticated cipher suites.

    Plain HTTP is used for local/internal application transport and development, while public production endpoints are expected to be exposed through TLS.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/DEPLOYMENT.md


    Enough for a badge!

    The software produced by the project MUST, if it supports or uses TLS, support at least TLS version 1.2. Note that the predecessor of TLS was called SSL. If the software does not use TLS, select "not applicable" (N/A). [crypto_tls12]

    WhitePact supports TLS 1.2 or later for production network communication.

    The documented production reverse-proxy configuration explicitly enables TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. The WhitePact reference deployment has also been verified to negotiate TLS 1.3.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/DEPLOYMENT.md


  • Secured delivery against man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks


    Enough for a badge!

    The project website, repository (if accessible via the web), and download site (if separate) MUST include key hardening headers with nonpermissive values. (URL required) [hardened_site]
    Note that GitHub and GitLab are known to meet this. Sites such as https://securityheaders.com/ can quickly check this. The key hardening headers are: Content Security Policy (CSP), HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), X-Content-Type-Options (as "nosniff"), and X-Frame-Options. Fully static web sites with no ability to log in via the web pages could omit some hardening headers with less risk, but there's no reliable way to detect such sites, so we require these headers even if they are fully static sites.

    STATUS: MET
    EVIDENCE: Live HTTP responses tested on 2026-08-29. http://whitepact.com redirects to HTTPS. The canonical https://whitepact.com response includes HSTS (max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains), CSP with default-src self, object-src none and frame-ancestors none, X-Content-Type-Options nosniff, X-Frame-Options DENY, Referrer-Policy strict-origin-when-cross-origin, and Permissions-Policy disabling geolocation, microphone, and camera. No Set-Cookie header was emitted by the public homepage. http://www.whitepact.com redirects through HTTPS to the canonical apex. GitHub hosts the repository and release downloads over HTTPS with platform hardening.
    JUSTIFICATION: The project website, public repository, and release/download endpoints use HTTPS; the canonical project site supplies nonpermissive browser hardening headers verified from the actual production response.
    URL: https://whitepact.com https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact


  • Other security issues


    Enough for a badge!

    The project MUST have performed a security review within the last 5 years. This review MUST consider the security requirements and security boundary. [security_review]
    This MAY be done by the project members and/or an independent evaluation. This evaluation MAY be supported by static and dynamic analysis tools, but there also must be human review to identify problems (particularly in design) that tools cannot detect.

    WhitePact performed and documented an internal security review on 2026-07-23 using Bandit, pip-audit, and manual review of authentication, authorization, SQL construction, outbound requests, and dangerous functions. It found and fixed SQL-injection-shaped and SSRF issues with regression tests. The review is explicitly self-review, not an independent pentest. The Security Assurance Case and threat model identify security requirements and trust boundaries.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/compliance/INTERNAL_SECURITY_REVIEW.md
    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/SECURITY_ASSURANCE_CASE.md
    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/THREAT_MODEL.md


    Enough for a badge!

    Hardening mechanisms MUST be used in the software produced by the project so that software defects are less likely to result in security vulnerabilities. (URL required) [hardening]
    Hardening mechanisms may include HTTP headers like Content Security Policy (CSP), compiler flags to mitigate attacks (such as -fstack-protector), or compiler flags to eliminate undefined behavior. For our purposes least privilege is not considered a hardening mechanism (least privilege is important, but separate).

    WhitePact uses defense-in-depth hardening mechanisms to reduce the impact of software defects.

    The dashboard applies security response headers including Content-Security-Policy, Strict-Transport-Security, X-Content-Type-Options, X-Frame-Options, Referrer-Policy, Cache-Control, and Permissions-Policy.

    Additional hardening includes request rate limiting, RBAC, tenant isolation, SSRF defenses, strong secret generation, minimum cryptographic key-strength checks, secure error responses, automated SAST, dependency auditing, and security regression tests.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/src/responsibleai/dashboard/middleware.py


 Analysis 2/2 ●

  • Dynamic code analysis


    Enough for a badge!

    The project MUST apply at least one dynamic analysis tool to any proposed major production release of the software produced by the project before its release. [dynamic_analysis]
    A dynamic analysis tool examines the software by executing it with specific inputs. For example, the project MAY use a fuzzing tool (e.g., American Fuzzy Lop) or a web application scanner (e.g., OWASP ZAP or w3af). In some cases the OSS-Fuzz project may be willing to apply fuzz testing to your project. For purposes of this criterion the dynamic analysis tool needs to vary the inputs in some way to look for various kinds of problems or be an automated test suite with at least 80% branch coverage. The Wikipedia page on dynamic analysis and the OWASP page on fuzzing identify some dynamic analysis tools. The analysis tool(s) MAY be focused on looking for security vulnerabilities, but this is not required.

    WhitePact applies dynamic analysis through its automated pytest suite. Repository evidence records 80.19% pure branch coverage (1469/1832), and CI enforces that threshold with scripts/check_branch_coverage.py --threshold 80 --fail before release.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/compliance/OPENSSF_DYNAMIC_ANALYSIS.md
    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/.github/workflows/ci.yml


    Enough for a badge!

    The project SHOULD include many run-time assertions in the software it produces and check those assertions during dynamic analysis. [dynamic_analysis_enable_assertions]
    This criterion does not suggest enabling assertions during production; that is entirely up to the project and its users to decide. This criterion's focus is instead to improve fault detection during dynamic analysis before deployment. Enabling assertions in production use is completely different from enabling assertions during dynamic analysis (such as testing). In some cases enabling assertions in production use is extremely unwise (especially in high-integrity components). There are many arguments against enabling assertions in production, e.g., libraries should not crash callers, their presence may cause rejection by app stores, and/or activating an assertion in production may expose private data such as private keys. Beware that in many Linux distributions NDEBUG is not defined, so C/C++ assert() will by default be enabled for production in those environments. It may be important to use a different assertion mechanism or defining NDEBUG for production in those environments.

    The public pytest suite contains runtime assertions across governance, authorization, security, API, MCP, persistence, and integration behavior, and CI executes those assertions on every qualifying push and pull request.

    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/tree/main/tests
    https://github.com/Guruprasath-Annadurai/Whitepact/blob/main/.github/workflows/ci.yml



You can use tools and AI systems to propose changes via a simple URL, such as https://www.bestpractices.dev/en/projects/14112/choose/edit?osps_ac_01_01_status=Met&osps_ac_01_01_justification=GitHub+enforced. See our automation proposals system for how to do that. This data is available under the Community Data License Agreement – Permissive, Version 2.0 (CDLA-Permissive-2.0). This means that a Data Recipient may share the Data, with or without modifications, so long as the Data Recipient makes available the text of this agreement with the shared Data. Please credit Guruprasath Annadurai and the OpenSSF Best Practices badge contributors.

Project badge entry owned by: Guruprasath Annadurai.
Entry created on 2026-08-17 09:21:34 UTC, last updated on 2026-08-29 04:45:45 UTC. Last achieved passing badge on 2026-08-17 11:38:17 UTC.