Satisfies #4653 DW1 and DW9, which were the phase's outstanding acceptance
criteria: every other implementation must be deleted or route its containment
DECISION through the canonical predicate, and no surviving wrapper may decide
WHETHER a path is contained.
Three implementations were being retained with their own comparisons, on the
argument that each needs LEXICAL resolution — a realpath-based predicate is the
wrong tool wherever a symlink must be preserved rather than resolved. That
argument is correct about RESOLUTION and was being used to justify owning the
DECISION too. Those are separable, and separating them is what closes the
criteria honestly rather than by reinterpretation.
isContainedIn(resolvedTarget, resolvedRoot, pathImpl?) module-internal
is now the single place this repo decides containment. It is separator-aware, so
a sibling merely sharing a prefix (`<root>-evil` against `<root>`) is still
rejected. Two exported families sit on it and differ ONLY in how a candidate is
resolved before the decision:
assertWithinRoot / tryWithinRoot realpath-resolving
assertWithinRootLexical / tryWithinRootLexical path.resolve only, no I/O
The lexical pair carries `opts.pathImpl`, so win32 separator semantics stay
testable off Windows — that seam already existed in isPathConfined and would
have been lost by a naive collapse.
The three call sites now take their decision from the predicate and keep only
what is genuinely theirs:
external-descriptor-trust isPathConfined delegates outright; pathImpl forwarded
installer-migrations ensureInsideConfig delegates; keeps its own message and
its LEXICAL fullPath, which callers
consume for existsSync and journal rows
gsd-tools.cjs isInsideDir delegates; keeps its own `target !==
root` condition, and the separate
symlink refusal above it stands
DW5 is not weakened by this. That criterion binds the symlink oracle and the
ancestor canonicalization; both are untouched. The only change inside
validatePath is three comparison lines becoming one call, and the rejection
string `Path escapes allowed directory: <resolved> is outside <base>` stays
byte-identical because it is an observable CLI contract.
What this does NOT do, stated plainly: the lexical family still cannot see a
symlink. That is a property of lexical resolution, not a gap in the seam, and
the three callers that need it are the three that must pair it with their own
symlink refusal — which is exactly what the fix earlier in this phase added at
the install sites. The doc comment says so at the definition, and CONTEXT.md and
docs/explanation/security-model.md are corrected: they previously described
these three as deliberately NOT routed through the predicate, which is no longer
true.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>