gstack-learnings-search cross-project trust gate fails open for rows missing the trusted field #1745

severity: security (defense-in-depth)

Observed problem

bin/gstack-learnings-search --cross-project is meant to be an allowlist: per the inline comment, cross-project learnings are "only loaded if trusted (user-stated)" to prevent prompt injection from one project's AI-generated learnings silently influencing reviews in another project.

The gate is implemented as a denylist instead:

if (isCrossProject && e.trusted === false) continue;

Any cross-project row where trusted is missing/undefined (not literally false) is admitted, because undefined === false is false. So legacy rows written before the trusted field existed, hand-edited rows, and rows produced by other tools all bypass the gate.

The trusted field was added in the security wave 3 (#988, 2026-04-13), while gstack-learnings-search shipped earlier (#622, 2026-03-29). Any learnings.jsonl written in that window — or by anything that does not set the field — has rows with no trusted key. Those rows leak across projects today.

Current behavior on upstream main (a6fb317)

A foreign project row with no trusted field and source: observed is loaded and shown as [cross-project]:

$ # foreign learnings.jsonl row, no trusted field:
$ # {"ts":"2026-05-09T00:00:00Z","type":"pattern","key":"foreign-legacy","insight":"INJECTED legacy guidance with no trusted field","source":"observed"}
$ gstack-learnings-search --cross-project --query INJECTED
LEARNINGS: 1 loaded (1 pattern)

## Patterns
- [foreign-legacy] (confidence: 5/10, observed, 2026-05-09) [cross-project]
  INJECTED legacy guidance with no trusted field

Expected behavior

The gate should fail closed: a cross-project row is admitted only when trusted === true. Rows missing the field are treated as untrusted. Current-format rows are unaffected (user-stated rows carry trusted: true and still load; everything else carries trusted: false and is still excluded).

Duplicate searches performed

• Open PRs touching bin/gstack-learnings-search / bin/gstack-learnings-log: none target the trust-gate semantics. fix: normalize legacy learnings schema (GXG-872) #940 (stale, 2026-04-09) normalizes legacy category/summary/detail field names, not the trust allowlist; feat: make learnings search limits configurable via gstack-config #1514 is about configurable search limits.
• Issues mentioning learnings trust / cross-project: gstack-learnings-search --cross-project hides current project observed learnings #1618 (closed, the cross-project tagging bug, shipped via v1.43.2.0) — different bug.

Candidate fix shape

Change the cross-project trust check from a denylist (e.trusted === false) to an allowlist (e.trusted !== true), and add a regression test for a foreign row with no trusted field.