Two safe-by-default flips, both opt-out via explicit acknowledgement.
1. --insecure / ZDDC_INSECURE=1: zddc-server now refuses to start when
no <ZDDC_ROOT>/.zddc exists. With no .zddc anywhere in the chain,
AllowedWithChain falls through to "HasAnyFile=false → allow" and
the tree is publicly accessible to anonymous callers — almost never
what an operator wants on a fresh deployment, and previously a
silent footgun. The flag is the escape hatch for deliberately-
public archives (no .zddc anywhere by design).
2. ZDDC_CORS_ORIGIN now defaults to empty (CORS disabled) instead of
the canonical "https://zddc.varasys.io". The embedded-tools install
path serves tools and data same-origin, so the default never needed
to permit cross-origin XHRs from a third-party host. Every deployment
was implicitly trusting zddc.varasys.io to make authenticated XHRs
on behalf of every logged-in user; if that origin were ever
compromised, the blast radius extended to every customer server.
Operators who deliberately use the CDN-bootstrap pattern or self-
hosted tools at a different host now set the value explicitly.
Helm chart values updated accordingly: prod default is empty; dev
keeps localhost:8000 for tool-iteration workflows. Existing deployments
that depended on the old defaults will need to either set the value
explicitly or pass --insecure.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
ZDDC
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