Datum is the real-time coordination layer for teams whose engineers each run AI coding agents against the same repo. This document covers which versions receive security fixes, how to report a vulnerability, and the security-relevant facts you should understand before deploying it.
| Version | Supported |
|---|---|
| 0.2.x | Yes |
| < 0.2 | No |
Security fixes land on the latest 0.2.x release. Older versions do not receive backports; upgrade to a supported release to stay covered.
Please report security issues privately so we can investigate and ship a fix before any public disclosure.
The primary channel is GitHub's private vulnerability reporting (Security Advisories) on the suraj-phanindra/datum repository:
- Open the repository's Security tab.
- Choose Report a vulnerability to open a private advisory.
- Include the affected version, reproduction steps, and the impact you observed.
Reports stay private to the maintainers and you until a fix is published. Maintainers aim to acknowledge new reports within a few business days. Please do not open a public issue for a suspected vulnerability, and please do not include secrets (API keys, tokens) in your report.
Datum is a coordination aid for AI coding agents, not a security boundary. A few design facts are security-relevant, and we state them plainly so you can deploy it correctly.
The PreToolUse fence denies a stale write before it executes and feeds the agent a reason so it self-corrects. When the coordination bus is unreachable, the fence fails open: the write proceeds with a warning rather than blocking the agent. This is a deliberate availability-over-enforcement tradeoff so Datum never bricks an agent or stalls a team when the bus is down. Treat the fence as a coordination aid that prevents drift between cooperating teammates, not as an access control or a defense against a hostile actor. It will not stop someone who is trying to bypass it.
The self-hosted bus (datumctl serve) has no login and trusts every client that can reach it; identity comes from each engineer's git config, which clients assert rather than prove. Run the bus on a trusted network only: bind it to localhost and front it with a tunnel or VPN, or keep it inside a private network. Do not expose it on the open internet. Datum Cloud is the path for teams that need authenticated, multi-tenant access with SSO.
The arbiter calls the Anthropic API with a bring-your-own key. That key must live in a gitignored .env file (or your environment) and must never be committed. Anyone with the key can spend against your account, so rotate it immediately if it is ever exposed, and prefer per-environment keys with the minimum scope you need.