Security

Reporting a vulnerability

Report vulnerabilities or security issues to the maintainer, via a GitHub Issue or a private GitHub Security Advisory on the repository, rather than broadcasting details publicly ahead of a fix.

Do not run on sensitive or untrusted folders

Sift’s stated security guidance is direct about this: do not run it on sensitive or untrusted folders. Sift organizes and can move or trash files based on its classification and rule logic — treat it the way you would any tool with filesystem write access, not as a sandboxed or content-aware security boundary.

Security-relevant defaults already in place

These are architectural guarantees documented elsewhere, repeated here because they’re directly relevant to running Sift safely:

• No --apply, no mutation — every organize/clean/folders command previews first. See Dry-run and –apply.
• No silent overwrite, no automatic directory merge — see Safety Model.
• install.sh never uses sudo, installs only to ~/.local/bin/sift, and verifies a SHA256 checksum against the downloaded release before installing anything.
• No cloud service and no AI are required for core organization — the only network call anywhere in Sift is the opt-out update-availability check, which never sends any file or path data, only checks GitHub’s public releases API. See CLI Commands → Update notices.
• Destination paths are validated against traversal — a rule’s Move destination can’t escape the target directory via .., an absolute path, or a symlink. See Rules.

Related

• Contributing — the general pull request path, for non-security issues.