Polynya

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Security policy

Supported versions

Security fixes are released for the current minor branch of the 1.x release.

Version Supported
1.0.x Yes

Reporting a vulnerability

Please do not report vulnerabilities in public GitHub Issues.

If you found a security problem (for example, privilege escalation, command injection through hooks, or crossing the session boundary in IPC), contact the author directly:

  • Telegram: @lyoraeth_art
  • Discord: @lyoraeth
  • Or use the private Report a vulnerability form on the Security tab of this GitHub repository.

Include the steps to reproduce and the build version (polynya help).

Polynya's security model (architecture notes)

To avoid false alarms during an audit, here are the project's isolation mechanisms and how it works with the system:

  1. No admin rights. The main polynya.exe process and the built-in modules are designed to run with regular user rights only.
  2. IPC isolation between users. The control pipe \\.\pipe\Polynya-<SessionId> is tied to the current user's Windows session id. With Fast User Switching, processes from another user's session never meet your pipe. A single pipe message is strictly limited to 64 KB.
  3. Why polynya notify-setup asks for UAC. The only place elevation is requested is the one-time registration of the unsigned Polynya.Notify sparse package when you enable the experimental Windows notifications module yourself (a Windows 11 requirement for accessing UserNotificationListener without a paid certificate; the error without admin rights is 0x80073D2B). After that the module process itself starts as a regular user through IApplicationActivationManager.
  4. Registry changes by the notify module. To suppress duplicate toasts the module changes only the per-user ShowBanner value under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Notifications\Settings\<AUMID> (no HKLM access), and creates a safety rollback entry in HKCU\...\RunOnce\PolynyaBanners in case the process ends abnormally.