The member security baseline

This page is the handful of security choices worth knowing about in your first session, written for a member rather than for the person administering your organisation. Your organisation's own controls — the ones an administrator sets for everyone — are covered separately in the administrator security baseline.

Approving what a bot does

Every action a bot needs your sign-off for arrives as an approval card with fixed choices — Allow once, Always allow and Deny — that the bot itself never authors, renames, reorders or adds to. Some actions never offer Always allow: sending mail outside your organisation, most commands on a computer, and anything a saved rule may never cover. Once you have chosen Always allow for an action, later matching actions run without asking you again — no card appears, and the release is recorded. Every decision is signed, so a copy of your earlier approval history cannot be replayed to grant a new run something you never approved.

Sharing access with a plugin

When you connect a plugin to an account — Gmail, a calendar, anything else behind OAuth — Botseon asks that provider for the smallest set of scopes the plugin's capability needs, keeps the resulting token in the key store rather than in the bot's own memory, and shows you the scopes at the moment you authorise them. A connection is always in one of three states — needs authorisation, connected, or expired — and you can revoke it at the provider at any time; an expired or unauthorised connection is never silently retried with a stale grant.

Keeping secrets out of what you send us

The feedback form's details field warns you before you send it: "Do not paste a secret, a password or a token." Anything shaped like a key or a token is stripped out of that field before it leaves your browser, and the form tells you how many values it removed.

Self-hosted deployments

If your organisation runs Botseon on its own hardware rather than the hosted edition, the deployment binds to its own machine by default — every published port listens on loopback unless an administrator has explicitly opted out — and the component that runs a bot's computer is never itself published to the network. None of this is something you configure as a member; it is worth knowing it is there.