The product binary embedded nine complete shebang'd shell scripts, their
PowerShell/.cmd twins, and two node:child_process client-adapter modules as C
string literals, and wrote them into agent config dirs at 0755 on install. A
block of script-shaped bytes inside a large unsigned executable is exactly the
surface Microsoft Defender's ML scored Trojan:Script/Wacatac.B!ml — the
detection that has recurred across the last several release attempts, on the
Linux ELF and darwin-arm64 standard binaries while every UI and Windows variant
stayed clean.
This moves every integration template out of the binary into a single shipped
data file, assets/cbm-integrations.json (compact: one asset, because each
shipped file is itself scanned). The binary now carries only the templates'
identity — one embedded SHA-256, generated at build time from the JSON so it
can never drift — plus the code to load, verify, and render them.
Why a hash and not just a loose file: content compiled into the binary was
tamper-evident with the binary. Moving it to disk must not turn it into
unauthenticated code the installer blindly executes. install verifies the asset
against the embedded SHA-256 and fails closed on mismatch ("integration assets
missing or modified - reinstall from the release archive") before writing
anything. Verified end to end: a one-byte edit to the asset makes install
refuse.
Ownership, for safe upgrade/removal: the verified copy is published to
~/.cbm/assets/<version>/ — a sibling of the DB cache, never inside it, so
clearing the cache cannot strip a user's hooks. A deployed integration file is
ours to remove only if it matches a template rendered from that stored copy;
foreign files and user-edited files at the reserved paths are preserved. The
historical template bodies travel in the JSON's released[] arrays so files
written by older versions are still recognised and cleaned up on uninstall.
Removed from src/: cmm_gate/session/subagent script-prefix and suffix
constants, cbm_build_released_gate_script, the shell/PowerShell/.cmd bodies in
cli.c, and the JS/TS generators in client_adapter.c. Confirmed on the built
standard binary: 0 occurrences of '#!/usr/bin/env bash', '#!/bin/sh',
'node:child_process', and 'ExecutionPolicy' (was non-zero for each).
test_no_embedded_scripts_contract.sh makes the removal a build property, not a
reachability assumption: no production C source may contain a shebang or
node:child_process literal, and the built binary is scanned directly. It strips
comments first (a contract a comment can satisfy is a false guard), and is
revert-checked — reintroducing one shebang literal makes it fail naming the
file:line. check-binary-composition.sh (A6) enforces the same needles on every
release artifact post-strip.
This does not, by itself, prove the detection is cured: the clean UI binary is a
strict superset of the flagged standard one, so no single passage is a
deterministic trigger. It removes the most coherent malware-shaped composite
from every shipped binary, aligns with how gh/starship/zoxide externalise
integration material, and makes the templates maintainable as data rather than
escaped C literals. Causal confirmation still needs a VirusTotal ablation.
Signed-off-by: Martin Vogel <martin.vogel.tech@gmail.com>
Martin Vogel
a6f132bc85