🛡️ Sentinel: [MEDIUM] Fix integer coercion vulnerability in interactive prompts

.jules/sentinel.md

@@ -2,3 +2,8 @@
 **Vulnerability:** Unvalidated inputs passed to `if()` statements can cause process crashes (`condition has length > 1`) or unexpected coercion vulnerabilities.
 **Learning:** In R, optional boolean parameters that default to `NULL` should be validated using explicit runtime type validation (e.g., `if (!is.null(flag) && (!is.logical(flag) || length(flag) != 1 || is.na(flag)))`).
 **Prevention:** Always implement explicit runtime type validation for optional boolean parameters.
+
+## 2024-07-28 - Integer coercion vulnerabilities with unvalidated `readline()` outputs
+**Vulnerability:** Interactive prompts taking user input (like `readline()`) without strict length or value limits can be bypassed with excessively large numbers (e.g. `"999999999999999999"`). If only checked with a generic numeric regex `^[0-9]+$`, `as.integer()` will coerce them to `NA`, causing an unhandled `NAs introduced by coercion to integer range` condition that crashes the application process on downstream evaluations.
+**Learning:** `as.integer()` evaluates to `NA` when given values exceeding integer bounds, even if the value string contains only digits.
+**Prevention:** Strictly validate `readline()` numeric inputs against exact expected values (e.g., `^[12]$`) instead of unbounded digits (`^[0-9]+$`) to prevent overflow coercion to `NA` and DoS risk.

R/aFIPC.R

@@ -141,7 +141,7 @@ autoFIPC <-
       }
       for (attempt in seq_len(3)) {
         n <- readline(prompt = "Is it correct? (1: Yes 2: No) : ")
-        if (grepl("^[0-9]+$", n)) {
+        if (grepl("^[12]$", n)) {
           return(as.integer(n))
         }
       }
@@ -171,7 +171,7 @@ autoFIPC <-
               readline(
                 prompt = "Do you want to use default BILOG-MG priors for oldform Data? (1: Yes 2: No) : "
               )
-            if (grepl("^[0-9]+$", n)) {
+            if (grepl("^[12]$", n)) {
               return(as.integer(n))
             }
           }
@@ -390,7 +390,7 @@ autoFIPC <-
               readline(
                 prompt = "Do you want to use default BILOG-MG priors for newform Data? (1: Yes 2: No) : "
               )
-            if (grepl("^[0-9]+$", n)) {
+            if (grepl("^[12]$", n)) {
               return(as.integer(n))
             }
           }