arc53--docsgpt/.github/INCIDENT_RESPONSE.md

DocsGPT Incident Response Plan (IRP)

This playbook describes how maintainers respond to confirmed or suspected security incidents.

• Vulnerability reporting: SECURITY.md
• Non-security bugs/features: CONTRIBUTING.md

Severity

Severity	Definition	Typical examples
Critical	Active exploitation, supply-chain compromise, or confirmed data breach requiring immediate user action.	Compromised release artifact/image; remote execution.
High	Serious undisclosed vulnerability with no practical workaround, or CVSS >= 7.0.	key leakage; prompt injection enabling cross-tenant access.
Medium	Material impact but constrained by preconditions/scope, or a practical workaround exists.	Auth-required exploit; dependency CVE with limited reachability.
Low	Defense-in-depth or narrow availability impact with no confirmed data exposure.	Missing rate limiting; hardening gap without exploit evidence.

Response workflow

1) Triage (target: initial response within 48 hours)

1. Acknowledge report.
2. Validate on latest release and main.
3. Confirm in-scope security issue vs. hardening item (per SECURITY.md).
4. Assign severity and open a draft GitHub Security Advisory (GHSA) (no public issue).
5. Determine whether root cause is DocsGPT code or upstream dependency/provider.

2) Investigation

1. Identify affected components, versions, and deployment scope (self-hosted, cloud, or both).
2. For AI issues, explicitly evaluate prompt injection, document isolation, and output leakage.
3. Request a CVE through GHSA for Medium+ issues.

3) Containment, fix, and disclosure

1. Implement and test fix in private security workflow (GHSA private fork/branch).
2. Merge fix to main, cut patched release, and verify published artifacts/images.
3. Patch managed cloud deployment (app.docsgpt.cloud) and other deployments as soon as validated.
4. Publish GHSA with CVE (if assigned), affected/fixed versions, CVSS, mitigations, and upgrade guidance.
5. Critical/High: coordinate disclosure timing with reporter (goal: <= 90 days) and publish a notice.
6. Medium/Low: include in next scheduled release unless risk requires immediate out-of-band patching.

4) Post-incident

1. Monitor support channels (GitHub/Discord) for regressions or exploitation reports.
2. Run a short retrospective (root cause, detection, response gaps, prevention work).
3. Track follow-up hardening actions with owners/dates.
4. Update this IRP and related runbooks as needed.

Scenario playbooks

Supply-chain compromise

1. Freeze releases and investigate blast radius.
2. Rotate credentials in order: Docker Hub -> GitHub tokens -> LLM provider keys -> DB credentials -> JWT_SECRET_KEY -> ENCRYPTION_SECRET_KEY -> INTERNAL_KEY.
3. Replace compromised artifacts/tags with clean releases and revoke/remove bad tags where possible.
4. Publish advisory with exact affected versions and required user actions.

Data exposure

1. Determine scope (users, documents, keys, logs, time window).
2. Disable affected path or hotfix immediately for managed cloud.
3. Notify affected users with concrete remediation steps (for example, rotate keys).
4. Continue through standard fix/disclosure workflow.

Critical regression with security impact

1. Identify introducing change (git bisect if needed).
2. Publish workaround within 24 hours (for example, pin to known-good version).
3. Ship patch release with regression test and close incident with public summary.

AI-specific guidance

Treat confirmed AI-specific abuse as security incidents:

• Prompt injection causing sensitive data exfiltration (from tools that don't belong to the agent) -> High
• Cross-tenant retrieval/isolation failure -> High
• API key disclosure in output -> High

Secret rotation quick reference

Secret	Standard rotation action
Docker Hub credentials	Revoke/replace in Docker Hub; update CI/CD secrets
GitHub tokens/PATs	Revoke/replace in GitHub; update automation secrets
LLM provider API keys	Rotate in provider console; update runtime/deploy secrets
Database credentials	Rotate in DB platform; redeploy with new secrets
JWT_SECRET_KEY	Rotate and redeploy (invalidates all active user sessions/tokens)
ENCRYPTION_SECRET_KEY	Rotate and redeploy (re-encrypt stored data if possible; existing encrypted data may become inaccessible)
INTERNAL_KEY	Rotate and redeploy (invalidates worker-to-backend authentication)

Maintenance

Review this document:

• after every Critical/High incident, and
• at least annually.

Changes should be proposed via pull request to main.