Critical Security Issues

[Breadarr5]

Hi, I looked through the repo and found a few security issues that seem important to fix.

I did not find obvious malicious behavior like persistence, hidden process launching, credential theft, registry autoruns, or injection. The app appears to do what it says: hotkey hook, screen capture, mic capture, overlay, and cloud traffic.

That said, I found some issues that seem serious:

Medium

• Some logs appear to include sensitive runtime information such as:

  • transcripts
  • point targets
  • part of the AssemblyAI token

I also checked the worker dependencies with npm audit --omit=dev and did not see production dependency vulnerabilities from that check. I could not fully check .NET package vulnerabilities because I did not have the .NET SDK available in the environment I used.

Suggested fixes:

• Require authentication or signed requests on the worker, or remove the public proxy pattern entirely
• Never return raw provider API keys to the client
• Remove or reduce sensitive logging in production
• Re-evaluate whether admin privileges are actually required
• Consider documenting the security model clearly in the README

I’m sharing this because I think these are worth fixing, not to pile on. If you want, I can also open a PR suggestion or help summarize safer alternatives.

[arefxp]

I saw that it runs on sonnet and opus; the model is optional to choose for the user. I'm very curious to know who is paying for this (since the app is open sourced) and how the data is being sent. Is it just getting the user voice and the screenshot sent to Claude to process that and answer back?

[tekram]

Thanks for the thorough audit. These are all valid concerns for the original macOS Clicky architecture.

For the Windows version (tekram/clicky-windows), we addressed most of these by design:

1. Public unauthenticated proxy — Not applicable. We use BYOK (Bring Your Own Keys) — users enter their own API keys, which go directly to providers (Anthropic/OpenAI/OpenRouter). No proxy by default.

2. Raw API keys returned to client — Not applicable. Keys stay in local settings.json, never sent to an intermediary.

3. Admin privileges — We run as asInvoker (standard user). No elevation requested.

4. Sensitive logging — Fixed. We removed transcript content, token fragments, and API keys from all console output. Only metadata (transcript length, provider name) is logged. See commit: https://github.com/tekram/clicky-windows

5. Security model documentation — Added SECURITY.md documenting our architecture, data flow, what we don't do (no telemetry, no proxy, no persistent data), and HIPAA mode: https://github.com/tekram/clicky-windows/blob/master/SECURITY.md

The original macOS version's Cloudflare Worker issues (public proxy, key exposure) are real concerns that would need to be addressed upstream by @farzaa.