Basis CLI

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 4/5 ●

  • General

    Note that other projects may use the same name.

    Basis CLI is the command-line client for Basis Network. This repository — and this badge entry — is what distributes and verifies it: the download script that checks every binary against a SHA-256 committed to git, the checksums themselves, the release workflow that verifies each published asset and then signs it with Sigstore in keyless mode, the test suite covering all of that, and the documentation. The compiled basis binary is built from basis-core, which is not public yet. Everything in this repository is Apache-2.0 with its source, and every file carries its copyright and licence, checked in CI against version 3.3 of the REUSE Specification.

    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


    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.

    Two. Both maintainers have identical repository and organisation access and either can release on their own, which is what the criterion measures. Being exact about what that buys is worth more than the number: it removes the single point of failure for access, for releases and for a vulnerability report going unread. It does not yet mean every change gets a second pair of eyes — that is two_person_review at gold level, and this project does not claim it. GOVERNANCE.md says both of those things in the same paragraph. https://github.com/basis-network/basis-cli/blob/main/GOVERNANCE.md#who-decides


    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.

    The criterion asks for two unassociated significant contributors, and defines significant as non-trivial contributions in the past year — its own examples are 1,000 lines of code, 50 commits, or 20 pages of documentation. This repository has one: sebastian-quintero-osorio, with 17 commits. The second maintainer holds equal access and is an owner of the organisation, which is what makes access_continuity and bus_factor true, but has not yet contributed code or documentation, so counting him here would be counting the wrong thing. The remaining commits are Dependabot's. This is answered Unmet rather than optimistically, because it is checkable in one request against https://api.github.com/repos/basis-network/basis-cli/contributors — and because the honest version is more useful to a reader than a claim that does not survive that check.


  • Other


    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.

    Same mechanism, same enforcement: every file carries SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0, inline where there is a comment syntax and through REUSE.toml where there is not. LICENSES/Apache-2.0.txt holds the licence text in the location REUSE expects. reuse lint reports the project as compliant and is a required check on main, so this cannot drift.


 Change Control 3/4 ●

  • Public version-controlled source repository


    Unknown required information, not 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.

    git.

    Warning: Requires lengthier justification.


    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.

    Two ways in, both real. CONTRIBUTING.md has a "Good first tasks" section listing five kinds of contribution sized for someone new — covering a statement make coverage reports as missed, trying the script on a platform the project does not have, correcting documentation, improving an error message, and independently checking a published checksum by hand. And there are open issues labelled good first issue, each one a genuine defect or gap rather than invented busywork: download.sh not checking for curl before using it, testing the macOS shasum fallback on an actual Mac, documenting the three BASIS_CLI_* environment variables, and a test case for a checksum file with CRLF line endings. Each issue says what the task is, why it matters, and which file to start in. https://github.com/basis-network/basis-cli/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22


    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]

    Two-factor authentication is required for every member of the basis-network GitHub organisation, enforced by the organisation setting rather than by asking people nicely — a member without 2FA is removed from the organisation by GitHub, so it cannot quietly lapse. That covers both things the criterion names, because both go through the same account: write access to this repository, and the private security advisory queue where vulnerability reports arrive. It is publicly verifiable: https://api.github.com/orgs/basis-network reports "two_factor_requirement_enabled": true.


    Barely 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.

    The organisation requires 2FA but does not currently restrict which second factor a member may use, and GitHub still permits SMS as one option. Since the criterion asks specifically for cryptographic mechanisms, and it cannot be asserted from the outside which factor each maintainer has enrolled, the honest answer today is Unmet rather than a claim that happens to be probable. The fix is small and is on the list: both maintainers enrolling a security key or TOTP and dropping SMS, after which this becomes Met with no further work.


 Quality 6/7 ●

  • 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.

    CONTRIBUTING.md has a "How changes are reviewed" section stating how review is conducted and what must be checked, in order: is it correct and does the suite still pass; does it change behaviour without a test, which is a blocking comment; does it weaken a refusal, in which case it is read line by line against the assurance case and "looks fine" is explicitly not an acceptable review; do workflow changes keep least-privilege permissions and SHA-pinned actions; does every new file carry its SPDX header, decided by reuse lint rather than by opinion; and is the documentation still true afterwards. It also states the acceptance condition — all CI checks passing plus approval from a maintainer other than the author — and then states plainly that with one active maintainer this is not always possible today, rather than describing a process the project does not follow. https://github.com/basis-network/basis-cli/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#how-changes-are-reviewed


    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]

    The criterion asks that at least 50% of proposed modifications be reviewed before release by someone other than their author. Of the human pull requests merged here so far, none has an approving review by a second person: the author merged them once the required CI checks passed. The project does not hide this — GOVERNANCE.md states that with two people, requiring each to review the other would stall the project the first time either is away, so a second review happens when it can rather than being promised and skipped; CONTRIBUTING.md's review section says the same; and the assurance case names single-maintainer review as the project's dominant residual risk. It becomes Met when the second maintainer reviews and approves changes until more than half of proposed modifications carry an author-independent review, which is a change in practice rather than in configuration. https://github.com/basis-network/basis-cli/blob/main/docs/ASSURANCE-CASE.md


  • Working build system


    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.

    No building occurs. This is a scripting-language project: download.sh and the test suite are read by the interpreter as they are, and the Makefile has no build target — only check, coverage and lint. There is no generated artefact whose bit-for-bit reproduction could be compared. Reproducibility of the compiled basis binary is a property of basis-core, which is not public and is outside this entry's declared scope; the assurance case lists the Windows build's missing provenance as a known gap rather than claiming otherwise.


  • 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).

    make check. Shell has no de facto standard test runner, so the Makefile provides the conventional entry point; test/run.sh also runs directly, and make lint is its counterpart for shellcheck and reuse. https://github.com/basis-network/basis-cli/blob/main/Makefile


    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.

    .github/workflows/test.yml runs make check on every push to main and every pull request, alongside shellcheck, reuse lint, a checksum-format check and CodeQL. All five are required status checks on main, so nothing merges without them. https://github.com/basis-network/basis-cli/actions/workflows/test.yml


    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]

    98.1% statement coverage of download.sh, 52 of 53 statements, measured with bashcov rather than estimated. make coverage produces the figure and CI runs it as its own job on every push and every pull request, failing below a hard floor of 90%. The single statement reported uncovered is the done that carries the download loop's redirection, which bash attributes to the while; every case that downloads anything executes it. It is left in the report rather than special-cased, because a coverage tool taught to lie about one line stops being evidence about the others.


    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]

    There is no FLOSS tool that measures branch coverage for shell, which is the condition the criterion attaches. The two coverage tools that work on bash — bashcov and kcov — both measure statements only; bashcov's branch-coverage support comes from SimpleCov and applies to Ruby, not to the bash it traces. Statement coverage is measured and enforced instead, at 98.1% against a 90% floor. If a branch-coverage tool for shell appears, adding it is on the roadmap and would go into CI the same way.


 Security 4/5 ●

  • 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]

    All network communication is HTTPS. download.sh fetches from https://github.com/<repo>/releases/download by default, and curl verifies the certificate chain by default with no flag anywhere in this project disabling it — there is no --insecure, no -k and no GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY-style escape hatch. The base URL can be overridden by BASIS_CLI_BASE_URL, which exists so the test suite can point at a local directory over file:// without touching the network; that is an explicit action by the user, which is exactly the condition the criterion allows. Nothing insecure is enabled by default and no plaintext protocol is used at all.


    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]

    TLS is used through the system's curl and its TLS library, so the project supports whatever they do, which on any currently supported platform is TLS 1.2 and 1.3. The script pins no version, disables nothing and offers no option to downgrade, so a system hardened to 1.2-or-better stays that way. GitHub, the only host contacted by default, requires TLS 1.2 as a minimum on its side.


  • 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.

    The project's website, repository and download site are all GitHub — the entry's homepage URL is the repository itself, and releases are served from the same host — and GitHub serves all four key hardening headers with non-permissive values. Verified directly rather than assumed: content-security-policy: default-src 'none'; base-uri 'self'; ..., strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000; includeSubdomains; preload, x-content-type-options: nosniff, and x-frame-options: deny. Anyone can reproduce that with curl -I https://github.com/basis-network/basis-cli.


  • 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.

    A security review was performed on 2026-08-24 and is recorded in docs/ASSURANCE-CASE.md section 7, which states what it consisted of rather than just that it happened. It considered both things the criterion requires: the security requirements, which are stated in SECURITY.md as five guarantees and four explicit non-guarantees, and the security boundary, which is the four trust regions in the assurance case. The threat model was re-derived from the current code rather than inherited; all nine test cases were read against the claims they are cited for; coverage was measured rather than assumed; and every workflow was re-read for permission scope and action pinning. Tool support came from shellcheck, CodeQL over the workflows, OpenSSF Scorecard and the suite itself, but the two findings — single-maintainer review as the dominant residual risk, and the Windows build's missing provenance — came from human reading, which is what the criterion's details ask for. Both are written down as limits rather than resolved on paper. https://github.com/basis-network/basis-cli/blob/main/docs/ASSURANCE-CASE.md


    Unknown required information, not 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).

    The hardening available to a shell script is applied. set -euo pipefail is the first executable line: an unset variable, a failing command or a failing pipeline stage aborts rather than continuing with a wrong value — the failure mode that turns a shell defect into a security problem. Every expansion is quoted and shellcheck enforces it in CI as a required check. The script asks for no privilege and writes only under its own bin/ directory, touching no system location. On the CI side, which is the part of this project with credentials: permissions: read-all at workflow level with elevation per job only where genuinely needed, persist-credentials: false on every checkout, and every action pinned to a commit SHA rather than a mutable tag. The project sites are GitHub, which serves Content-Security-Policy, HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options and X-Frame-Options.

    Warning: URL required, but no URL found.


 Analysis 1/2 ●

  • Dynamic code analysis


    Not 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.

    No fuzzer or scanner is run. The test suite does execute download.sh with varied inputs, two of them adversarial, but it does not generate inputs and we do not measure branch coverage, so claiming it as dynamic analysis would be a stretch. There is also little surface to point a tool at: download.sh runs on the user's machine, takes one argument and three environment variables, and there is no service here to scan.


    Barely 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.

    bash has no assertion mechanism to enable. Both scripts run under set -u, and the script under test under set -euo pipefail, which is the nearest equivalent the language offers, but calling that "many assertions" would be generous.



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Project badge entry owned by: Sebastian.
Entry created on 2026-08-24 15:57:55 UTC, last updated on 2026-08-26 02:10:48 UTC. Last achieved passing badge on 2026-08-24 16:56:42 UTC.