Reverse engineering shows Zhipu's ZCode silently uploads your entire Git history
jedisct1 · x · 2026-09-18
A reverse-engineering post reveals that ZCode, Zhipu's official AI coding desktop app, silently packages your entire workspace whenever you're logged in — full .git history, LFS asset cache, reflogs and global configs — encrypts it, and uploads it to Aliyun OSS.
Key details:
- The author found /.zcode consuming 700MB+; a 313MB .enc file in v2/checkpoints/ was stuck pending, with metadata tying it to a commercial project's workspace snapshot and a failureCount of 564.
- The RSA public key is delivered on the fly by the server while the private key lives only in the cloud — neither the user nor the ZCode client itself can decrypt the local ciphertext.
- The post documents the full investigation, evidence chain, and a one-liner defense that permanently disables the upload.
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