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• tools/forwarder-relay/ — adapter contract
  • Prerequisites
  • What “a relay message” means
  • Today's adapters
    • Sub-skill consumers
  • Interface
    • detect(message) -> adapter_name | null
    • extract_credit(body) -> {name, kind, raw_string} | null
    • contact_handle (attribute)
    • preamble_match (attribute)
    • reporter_addressing_block(...) -> string
    • via_forwarder_question_mode (attribute)
  • Skills that consume this contract
  • ASF default — ASF Security forwarder
    • Why @raboof is the contact handle today
  • Configuration
  • Cross-references
  • What this contract does NOT cover

tools/forwarder-relay/ — adapter contract

Capability: contract:report-relay

Kind: interface

Vendor: agnostic

A forwarder-relay adapter is a pluggable seam that teaches the security skills how to recognise an inbound report that arrived through a relay (someone else forwarded the original reporter's message to the project), how to extract the original-reporter credit from the relayed body, and how to route reporter-facing drafts back through the same relay channel. This file defines what the skills expect from an adapter, what the single shipping adapter (ASF Security relay) does today, and how adopters declare which adapters are enabled in <project-config>/project.md.

The framework default is the ASF Security relay adapter, which is the only one shipping in the tree today. The contract exists so that adopters whose security inbox sits behind huntr.com, HackerOne, GitHub Security Advisories, an internal SOC, or any other forwarding service can plug in an adapter without patching the skill bodies.

Prerequisites

• Runtime: None — this is a prose adapter contract; no executable ships in this directory. The interface is implemented by the security skills that dispatch through it.
• CLIs: None.
• Credentials / auth: None directly; consuming skills authenticate through the mail-source layer (e.g. Gmail) for inbound reads and drafts.
• Network: None directly — the contract performs no I/O. Mail fetch/draft happens in the tools/mail-source layer.

What “a relay message” means

Many security reports never reach the project's security inbox directly. The original reporter files with a third-party broker — the ASF Security team at security@apache.org, huntr.com, HackerOne, GHSA — and the broker forwards the report to the project. On the inbound thread, the broker is the visible correspondent; the actual reporter is one hop away, reachable only by asking the broker to relay messages back.

This matters for three skill behaviours:

1. Credit extraction. The From: header of a relay message names the broker, not the reporter. Per the bot/AI credit policy in tools/cve-tool-vulnogram/bot-credits-policy.md the tracker‘s Reporter credited as field must name the external reporter, so the skill has to pull the name from the message body (the broker’s preamble convention) instead of from the header.
2. Reply routing. Drafts intended for the reporter must go through the broker — but addressed to the broker, with the reporter-facing content folded inside as a paste-ready block the broker can copy verbatim into their reply to the reporter. See tools/gmail/asf-relay.md for the paste-ready-block convention introduced in PR #375.
3. Question batching. The project should not pester the broker with every workflow chatter event. The docs/security/forwarder-routing-policy.md policy doc — which consumes this contract — defines which milestones get relayed and which stay on the project side.

A forwarder-relay adapter is the seam that lets each skill ask the right adapter “is this a relay message? whose credit is in it? how do I draft back through it?” without hard-coding the ASF preamble or the @apache.org sender pattern.

Today's adapters

Only asf-security is wired in. The other rows are reserved contract slots: when an adopter needs huntr.com or HackerOne support, they implement an adapter directory under tools/forwarder-relay/<name>/ that satisfies the interface below, and add <name> to the forwarders.enabled list in their <project-config>/project.md.

The ASF-security adapter's preamble_match regex, credit_extraction_rule, contact_handle (the @raboof default, lifted into project.md forwarders.asf-security.contact_handle), and reporter_addressing_block convention all live in tools/gmail/asf-relay.md. This is the only forwarder adapter shipping today; the contract above describes the interface for additional adapters.

Sub-skill consumers

ASF adopters install the optional sub-skill security-issue-import-via-forwarder to enable forwarder-aware handling. The sub-skill consumes the forwarders.enabled config knob from <project-config>/project.md and runs after the main classification cascade in security-issue-import, security-issue-invalidate, and security-issue-sync. Generic skill bodies no longer carry the ASF-relay row inlined in their main classification tables — they reference the sub-skill as the “follow this if forwarder mode is enabled” extension instead.

Interface

A forwarder-relay adapter exposes the following operations. Skills dispatch through this interface; they do not import adapter internals directly.

detect(message) -> adapter_name | null

Given a fetched mail-source message (From, Subject, Body, Date, Message-ID, headers), return the adapter's own name if the message is a relay message handled by this adapter, or null if not.

Detection is the OR of two signals:

• Sender pattern. A regex or set-membership check against the From: address. ASF Security: security@apache.org OR any *@apache.org address. huntr: huntr.com‘s outbound notification address. HackerOne: HackerOne’s notification address.
• Preamble match. A regex against the first ~400 characters of the message body, anchored to the broker's standard forwarding header. ASF Security: “Dear PMC, The security vulnerability report has been received by the Apache Security Team …”.

Both signals are evaluated; either one matching is sufficient, but the adapter MAY require both for higher-confidence cases. The skill calls each enabled adapter's detect() in the order listed under forwarders.enabled; first non-null wins.

Lifecycle: called by security-issue-import Step 3 (classification), and by security-issue-sync Step 2b when re-reading an existing tracker's inbound thread for routing decisions.

extract_credit(body) -> {name, kind, raw_string} | null

Given the relay-message body, extract the original reporter's credit. Returns:

• name — the human-readable reporter name as it appears in the body. Used verbatim in the tracker's Reporter credited as field unless the reporter later requests a different rendering through a credit-preference exchange.
• kind — one of human (named individual), tool (automated scanner like bugbunny.ai, protectai/modelscan), service (a broker / VRP / SOC operating on someone else's behalf). Drives the bot-credit policy gate in tools/cve-tool-vulnogram/bot-credits-policy.md.
• raw_string — the exact substring lifted from the body (e.g. “This vulnerability was discovered and reported by bugbunny.ai”). Stored so a later sync can diff against the current tracker field and detect that the reporter has been manually overridden.

Returns null when the body does not contain a credit line in the adapter's expected shape. The skill then surfaces a “credit unknown — please confirm before drafting the receipt” prompt rather than guessing.

Lifecycle: called by security-issue-import Step 4 (field population for the new tracker body), and by security-issue-sync Step 2b when reconciling the tracker field against the latest read of the thread.

contact_handle (attribute)

The GitHub-style handle (or back-channel identifier) of the relay contact the skills should @mention when proposing a draft. For ASF Security this is currently @raboof (Arnout Engelen, the on-duty ASF Security liaison); for huntr the handle would be huntr's program-issued contact. Lifted into config now so the skill body never hard-codes a name.

The handle MAY be a list of fallbacks ([@raboof, @securityasf-rota]) for adapters whose contact rotates; the skill picks the first available one and surfaces the chosen handle in the proposal recap.

preamble_match (attribute)

The regex used by detect(). Exposed as a read-only attribute so that:

• security-issue-import can print the matched preamble in its Step 3 classification proposal (“detected as ASF Security relay because the body starts with <matched snippet>”), giving the human reviewer a one-line “yes this looks right” affordance;
• the test harness in tools/skill-and-tool-validator/ can replay sample bodies through the adapter and assert the detect outcome.

reporter_addressing_block(...) -> string

Render the paste-ready block convention introduced in tools/gmail/asf-relay.md — the fenced block addressed to the reporter in the project's voice, signed “ security team”, inside a wrapper addressed to the forwarder asking them to forward it verbatim. The adapter owns the exact wrapper wording; the inner reporter block is built by the calling skill and passed in.

Parameters:

• forwarder_first_name — for the “Hi ” salutation on the wrapper.
• reporter_first_name — for the “Hello ” salutation on the inner block, when known.
• links — list of (label, url) pairs (GHSA URL, CVE record URL, advisory URL) the wrapper prints near the top so the forwarder can one-click context-switch on their side.
• inner_body — the project's reporter-facing text. The adapter wraps it in the paste-ready block; it does not modify the inner content.

The adapter's responsibility is the wrapper shape: where the links go, how the inner block is fenced, how the signature attaches. The reason this is in the adapter rather than in the skill is that different brokers have different forwarding conventions — huntr.com expects the inner block to be a markdown comment that pastes back into their UI; ASF Security expects a ----fenced plaintext block. One skill body, many adapter renderings.

Lifecycle: called by security-issue-import Step 7 (receipt-of-confirmation draft), by security-cve-allocate Step 4 (CVE-allocation notification draft), by security-issue-sync Step 2b (status-update drafts), and by security-issue-invalidate Step 5d (invalidation notice draft).

via_forwarder_question_mode (attribute)

A boolean signalling how the adapter prefers credit-preference questions to be handled:

• true — fold the credit-preference question into the same receipt-of-confirmation draft, addressed to the reporter via the paste-ready block. The forwarder makes one forward-and-paste action total. This is the right default for adapters where the broker prefers not to be a question router (ASF Security: yes).
• false — send the credit-preference question on a separate draft, framed as a back-channel request to the forwarder (“please ask the reporter their credit preference”). This is appropriate for adapters where the broker actively reviews each exchange (some HackerOne programs).

The skill body branches on this attribute in security-issue-import Step 7 and security-cve-allocate Step 4 instead of carrying an if asf_relay: check inline.

Skills that consume this contract

ASF default — ASF Security forwarder

The ASF Security adapter is the one shipping today. Its parameter values, lifted out of skill bodies and into <project-config>/project.md, are:

forwarders:
  enabled:
    - asf-security
  asf-security:
    sender_pattern: '(security@apache\.org|.+@apache\.org)'
    preamble_match: 'Dear PMC,\s+The security vulnerability report has been received by the Apache Security Team'
    credit_extraction_rule:
      # The ASF forwarding template ends with a credit line in one of these shapes.
      patterns:
        - 'This vulnerability was discovered and reported by (?P<credit>.+?)\.'
        - 'Credit:\s+(?P<credit>.+?)$'
        - 'Reported by:\s+(?P<credit>.+?)$'
      kind_hints:
        # Substring matches on the extracted name to classify kind.
        tool: ['\.ai\b', 'bot\b', 'scanner\b']
        service: ['security team\b', 'soc\b']
        # default: human
    contact_handle: '@raboof'   # ASF Security on-duty liaison; lift to a rota when one exists
    via_forwarder_question_mode: true
    reporter_addressing_block:
      wrapper_salutation: 'Hi <forwarder-first-name>,'
      links_section: true        # GHSA / CVE / advisory URLs on their own lines near the top
      fence: '---'               # `---`-fenced plaintext block
      inner_salutation: 'Hello <reporter-first-name>,'
      inner_signature: '<project> security team'
      wrapper_signoff: 'Thanks,\n<sender>'

The exact shape of the paste-ready block is defined in tools/gmail/asf-relay.md under the “Reporter-facing content goes as a ready-to-paste block, not as a third-person ask” rule, with the worked GHSA / CVE example.

Why @raboof is the contact handle today

Arnout Engelen (@raboof, engelen@apache.org) is the ASF Security team member who currently triages relayed reports for the projects this framework's reference adopter belongs to. The handle is lifted into config rather than hard-coded so that:

• a future on-duty rota can declare a list ([@raboof, @next-on-duty, @asf-security-rota]) without touching skill bodies;
• adopters whose ASF Security liaison is a different individual declare their own handle locally;
• the handle is reviewable in one place during a security-team rotation hand-off instead of being scattered across draft templates.

Configuration

The adopter declares enabled adapters in <project-config>/project.md under the forwarders block:

forwarders:
  enabled:
    - asf-security           # default; ships with framework
    # - huntr-relay          # placeholder — uncomment when implemented
    # - hackerone-relay      # placeholder — uncomment when implemented
  asf-security:
    contact_handle: '@raboof'
    via_forwarder_question_mode: true
    # sender_pattern / preamble_match / credit_extraction_rule
    # inherit framework defaults unless the adopter overrides

The framework ships sensible defaults for every key under asf-security. An adopter typically only overrides contact_handle (their liaison) and possibly the sender_pattern (if they accept relays from a wider set of addresses than just *@apache.org).

Cross-references

• Policy — docs/security/forwarder-routing-policy.md defines when via-forwarder mode applies on a tracker and which milestones get relayed. The adapter contract here is the mechanism; that doc is the policy that drives it.
• Drafting convention — tools/gmail/asf-relay.md carries the prose explanation of the paste-ready block, the clickable external-reference URL rule, and the threading semantics for relay drafts. The contract surfaces those rules as an interface; the prose file remains the human-readable reference for the shipping adapter.
• Bot-credit gate — tools/cve-tool-vulnogram/bot-credits-policy.md reads the kind field returned by extract_credit() to decide whether a CVE record should list the credit as a tool / organisation rather than an individual.
• Mail-source layer — this contract sits on top of the abstract mail operations defined in tools/mail-source/contract.md; the forwarder-relay adapter consumes a message returned by the mail-source layer and produces routing metadata. It does not itself fetch or send mail.

What this contract does NOT cover

• Detection of GHSA / private-reporting trackers without an inbound relay message. Those are handled by the <!-- apache-magpie: routing-mode via-forwarder --> marker documented in docs/security/forwarder-routing-policy.md. The contract is for adapters that recognise a message; the marker is for trackers with no message at all.
• Send semantics. Drafts produced via reporter_addressing_block() are handed back to the mail-source layer's create_draft operation; this contract does not send mail. The framework rule remains draft, never send.
• Tracker field schema. The names of the tracker body fields (Reporter credited as, Security mailing list thread, etc.) are declared in <project-config>/project.md under the tracker.body_fields block. The adapter returns values; the tracker decides where to write them.
• Multi-thread reconciliation. When a tracker records both a direct reporter thread and a separate relay thread, the primary-vs-relay selection rule lives in tools/gmail/threading.md — Selecting the inbound thread when multiple are recorded. The adapter contract assumes one inbound message at a time and lets the threading layer decide which message to ask about.