The input-path duty `8deca93` scoped. All 83 lexicon patterns measured arm by
arm; two are quadratic, same shape 0.3.2 fixed -- a run in front of a required
literal that may cross the pattern's own opening anchor. Exponent 1.98 over five
points, so quadratic, not exponential.
markdown:link-anchor-injection `[` 1.91s @8k ~8.3h at the cap
markdown:link-anchor-injection `[system](` 0.006s @8k ~89s at the cap
markdown:link-ref-comment `[//]: # (` 0.22s @8k ~1.0h at the cap
Not input-path-only: `scan_lexicon` runs on the output path, so `scan_output("["
* 100_000)` took 334.7s. 0.3.2's "last quadratic site on the output path" was
false when written -- its sweep drove `[` only through `scan_active_content`.
Fix is anchor exclusion, not bounding (bounding attacker-controlled content is a
one-line bypass). The excluded char is `(`, not the obvious `[`: excluding `[`
drops `[//]: # (see [x] then ignore this)`, which no other pattern catches. The
anchors contain `(` too, so it telescopes at zero measured recall cost.
N is per row deliberately. The URL arm ran 0.9s UNFIXED at N=100_000 -- under the
2.0s bound, so that row could not have failed. Measured at N=300_000 instead,
where crafted (8.10s) and legitimate (0.926s) separate 8.8x.
The output gate claimed LLM10 self-safety on the grounds that its patterns have
no nested quantifiers. True, and irrelevant: nesting is not what makes these
blow up. A run in front of a REQUIRED literal, reachable from a short anchor, is
enough -- crafted input repeats the anchor and never supplies the literal, so
every start position rescans the tail. Quadratic, not exponential, and the
max_scan_chars cap does not help: it bounds the input, and quadratic work on a
bounded input is still hours.
Measured, not argued. `<a:` x 100_000 took 23.4s in AUTOLINK_RE alone; the
composed gate on that payload took 458.7s, extrapolating to ~5.7 hours at the
1_000_000-char input the gate itself accepts. Size-matched ordinary prose runs
0.31s, so the separation is 18x-660x -- unlike the blob in the neighbouring
test, which is the *faster* side of prose and never exercised backtracking.
Two fixes, chosen per pattern rather than uniformly:
- active_content + lexicon JSON (15 runs): exclude the character that opens the
pattern's own anchor (`[` for markdown, `<` for tags), so a run cannot reach
past the next start position and the per-start costs telescope. Verified to
cost no recall: long URLs, long alt text, and `<` inside a quoted attribute
all still match. Bounding instead would have been linear too but wrong here --
the content is attacker-controlled, so padding past a bound would be a
one-line bypass of the EchoLeak class this table exists to catch.
- connstr egress (4 runs): bound the password at MAX_CONNSTR_VALUE. The
exclusion fix is unavailable -- the anchor character is `/` and passwords
containing `/` are the common case (measured: they match today). The residual
miss is a credential over 256 chars; a token that long is still caught by
egress:jwt-token.
hybrid-xss:script-tag had neither option: its run is the script BODY, which may
legitimately contain `<`. It now matches the opening tag and drops the
`</script>` requirement. That also closes a fail-open -- `<script>alert(1)`
unclosed was silently missed -- at the cost of flagging prose that merely
mentions `<script>`, now documented.
Found by the composed-gate test staying red after every individual scanner was
already linear: the lexicon's six html-obfuscation patterns were the remaining
813x. A per-scanner test alone would have shipped that.
662 passed (was 642), and faster than before the fix.
Build order step 4 — the load-bearing port from the llm-security seed
(injection-patterns.mjs + string-utils.mjs), stdlib-only.
- injection_lexicon.json: 83 patterns (CRITICAL/HIGH/HYBRID/MEDIUM) as the
single source of truth (regex + id + severity + owasp + desc), compiled once
by a thin loader. Decoupled from the engine for a future TS port.
- scan_lexicon(text, source, max_scan_chars) -> Report: matches every pattern
against a deduped variant set (raw / normalized / homoglyph-folded / rot13),
plus unicode-tag presence signal and the cognitive-load trap.
- normalize_for_scan chain ported: unicode-tags -> bidi -> HTML-entities ->
unicode/hex/URL escapes -> whole-string base64 (reuses entropy.try_decode_base64)
-> collapse letter-spacing; plus fold_homoglyphs / rot13.
- Self-safety (OWASP LLM10): input-size cap (scan prefix + flag oversize) and
ReDoS-safe port — the two nested-.*? sub-agent patterns bounded to
(?:\S+\s+){0,N}?; verified true positives still fire.
- Non-Latin data (homoglyph map, BIDI block) built from explicit code points;
JSON non-ASCII kept as \uXXXX escapes.
24 tests; 55 green total.
[skip-docs]: README positioning + honest-limitations is a deliberate build-order
step-11 deliverable (steps 1-3 likewise left README frozen). README status line
("pre-implementation") is stale and flagged for the step-11 refresh.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01K8GmKRCdsPjWYAKWsNgeQS
