boost

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 3/5 ●

  • General

    Note that other projects may use the same name.

    Package manager for AI coding skills — search, install, and sync SKILL.md skills across Claude Code, Windsurf, and Cursor

    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.

    https://github.com/jonnyeclectic/boost/blob/main/MAINTAINERS.md documents this directly. Answered honestly: boost has one maintainer today, so the bus factor is 1 rather than 2 or more, and MAINTAINERS.md says so in its own words - 'boost is a single-maintainer project today... it is the single largest risk to the project' - rather than implying a team that does not exist.

    What exists instead of a second maintainer, from https://github.com/jonnyeclectic/boost/blob/main/GOVERNANCE.md and the Continuity section of MAINTAINERS.md: the project is GPL-3.0 with full public history, so anyone may fork it; every published release remains available and nothing expires if no one logs in; every artifact is reproducible from a public tag and carries a SLSA build-provenance attestation; and the release path is a GitHub OIDC identity bound to the repository rather than a personal token, so there is no private credential that would have to be recovered or handed over. Continuity therefore does not depend on reaching one person.

    MAINTAINERS.md also documents the route to appointing a second maintainer - track record, public review before the grant, least privilege at the grant, and the file updated in the same change - and explicitly invites it. This will be re-answered as Met when a second maintainer is appointed.


    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.

    boost has one maintainer, so significant contributions come from one person and there cannot be two contributors from unassociated employers. MAINTAINERS.md states this plainly rather than implying a committee: https://github.com/jonnyeclectic/boost/blob/main/MAINTAINERS.md — same single fact as bus_factor and two_person_review. It is a recruiting problem, not a configuration one.


  • 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.

    The next line of each of those 314 files is # SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-only. -only rather than -or-later because nothing in the repository — LICENSE, pyproject.toml, README or any source file — grants "or any later version", and SPDX renders a stated GPLv3 with no later-version clause as -only. A test asserts LICENSE still contains no such grant, so the expression cannot quietly become wrong. https://github.com/jonnyeclectic/boost/blob/main/scripts/add_spdx_headers.py


 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.

    CONTRIBUTING.md § Good first tasks names five standing starter tasks, each with the exact file to edit: add a registry to the catalog (scripts/build_registries.py), add a query to the retrieval golden set (tests/eval/golden.jsonl), teach the prose linter a word (.vale accept.txt), sharpen a command summary (COMMANDS in boost_cli/cli.py), and cover a branch nothing tests. They are standing rather than one-off on purpose, so a newcomer can start without waiting for an issue to be triaged; specific one-off tasks carry the good first issue label. https://github.com/jonnyeclectic/boost/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#good-first-tasks


    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]

    GitHub requires 2FA as of March 2023. [osps_ac_01_01]


    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 maintainer's second factor is a passkey — FIDO2/WebAuthn. The authenticator signs a challenge bound to the origin, so there is no shared secret to phish, replay or intercept, and it is not a plaintext channel the way SMS is. That is the strongest of the mechanisms this criterion accepts. Recorded in https://github.com/jonnyeclectic/boost/blob/main/docs/openssf-badge.md — which also notes that this answer was obtained by asking the maintainer rather than inferred from GitHub's 2FA mandate, since that mandate is satisfied by SMS.


 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.

    https://github.com/jonnyeclectic/boost/blob/main/docs/code-review.md documents how review is conducted (the gate runs first, read the description as release notes, read the diff against the claim, look for the test that would have caught it, comment rather than silently fix), a table of what must be checked (layering, stdlib-only runtime, blast radius on $HOME, sparse checkouts, generated files, claims, security surface, tests, sign-off), and the six conditions that make a change acceptable. It opens by stating the single-maintainer shape rather than describing a review process the project does not have.


    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]

    boost has one maintainer (MAINTAINERS.md states this plainly rather than implying a committee), so there is no non-author human who could approve a change. The main branch ruleset requires a pull request and requires 21 named status checks to pass before merging, but it cannot require an approval that nobody is available to give. This is the same single fact behind the OpenSSF passing-level two_person_review, bus_factor and contributors_unassociated criteria, all also answered Unmet. It is a recruiting problem rather than a configuration one, and configuring a second account to supply the approval would defeat the criterion rather than satisfy it. https://github.com/jonnyeclectic/boost/blob/main/docs/code-review.md [osps_qa_07_01]


  • 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.

    Measured rather than assumed. With SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH set, two builds of one commit produce a bit-identical wheel but a differing source distribution: setuptools writes each tar member's real mtime plus the builder's uid, gid and user name into the sdist, so 54 members differ between builds two seconds apart, and the gzip header carries its own timestamp. Two things are missing — the release workflow installs its build tooling unpinned, and the sdist needs its timestamps and ownership normalised. Full measurement and the commands to reproduce it: https://github.com/jonnyeclectic/boost/blob/main/docs/verifying-releases.md#can-you-rebuild-it-yourself-partly--the-measurement — N/A would be wrong, since boost ships wheels.


  • Automated test suite


    Unknown required information, not 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 test'. Alternatively 'nox', which reproduces the exact CI gate in isolated venvs across every supported interpreter, so green locally and green in CI mean the same thing.

    Warning: URL required, but no URL found.


    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 Actions runs the full gate on every push and every pull request: https://github.com/jonnyeclectic/boost/actions/workflows/ci.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]

    95.2% statement coverage of boost_cli, measured on the unit and functional suites alone — no smoke suite, no BDD suite — so the real figure is higher. It is enforced, not merely asserted: fail_under in pyproject.toml was raised from 80 to 90 in the same change, and coverage.py's blended statement+branch figure at that point was 94.04%. Green on ubuntu, macOS and Windows across Python 3.12, 3.13 and 3.14. https://github.com/jonnyeclectic/boost/blob/main/pyproject.toml


    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]

    90.8% branch coverage, from that same run. branch = true is now set in [tool.coverage.run], which is what makes the number exist at all — before this change branch coverage had never been measured, so the figure could not be checked by anyone including the project. https://github.com/jonnyeclectic/boost/blob/main/pyproject.toml


 Security 3/5 ●

  • 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]

    boost implements no network protocol of its own. Its network access is delegated entirely to git (for cloning tapped registries, over HTTPS or SSH) and to pip (for installation, over HTTPS); both use secure protocols by default and boost neither configures nor weakens them. No insecure protocol is supported or enabled anywhere, because no protocol is implemented 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]

    boost does not implement or configure TLS. TLS is provided by git and by pip, which negotiate it themselves; boost passes no TLS options and cannot downgrade a version. The optional boost serve command binds a plain local HTTP listener for development on a trusted network and is documented as such rather than presented as a secure server.


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


    Not 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.

    Required security hardening headers missing: https://jonnyeclectic.github.io/boost: content-security-policy, strict-transport-security, x-content-type-options, x-frame-options


  • 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.

    https://github.com/jonnyeclectic/boost/blob/main/docs/security-design.md is that assessment. It identifies the most likely and impactful problems for a CLI that clones third-party repositories and writes files into the directories an AI agent reads - path traversal via attacker-controlled frontmatter, command injection through skill and tap names, archive extraction escapes, link following, untrusted deserialization, supply-chain and CI-action compromise - and pairs each with the mitigation in the codebase. It also states the residual risks plainly, including the most important one: boost can give provenance, integrity and a diff, but cannot vet what a skill instructs an agent to do. [osps_sa_03_01]


    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).

    Hardening mechanisms appropriate to a Python CLI are used. The largest is structural: the runtime imports no third-party package at all, enforced by import-linter, so there is no dependency tree in which a defect could become a vulnerability. Beyond that: no shell is ever invoked (shell=True appears nowhere; every subprocess call is an argument vector), tap clones are sparse and cone-limited so a registry's non-Markdown payload is never even fetched, installed content carries a sha256 tripwire that can be promoted from advisory to binding (core/integrity.py), and boost never requests elevated privileges. In CI, every workflow declares a read-only default token with write scopes granted per job, actions are pinned to commit SHAs, and step-security/harden-runner audits egress. The docs site is static with no scripts requiring a relaxed policy.

    Warning: URL required, but no URL found.


 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.

    https://github.com/jonnyeclectic/boost/blob/main/.github/workflows/fuzz.yml runs atheris (libFuzzer for Python) against the parsers over a target matrix, uploading any crashing input as an artifact. Beyond fuzzing, tests/smoke.sh drives the real binary end to end through 170 checks and the functional suite executes the CLI against a throwaway HOME.


    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 test suites are assertion-driven and run with assertions enabled (never with -O), and pytest promotes DeprecationWarning raised inside boost_cli to a hard error, so a latent deprecation fails a run rather than scrolling past in the log.



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 Jonathan Reyes and the OpenSSF Best Practices badge contributors.

Project badge entry owned by: Jonathan Reyes.
Entry created on 2026-08-28 13:39:22 UTC, last updated on 2026-08-29 02:20:11 UTC. Last achieved passing badge on 2026-08-28 14:27:12 UTC.