GoKawiilZhipu's ZCode desktop app found silently uploading users' full Git repos to Aliyun cloud
A developer investigating unexpected disk usage discovered that Zhipu's ZCode AI coding app compresses and encrypts entire project workspaces—including .git history, LFS caches, reflogs and configs—and uploads them to Aliyun OSS without visible user consent. The encryption uses a server-issued RSA public key while the private key stays server-side, meaning neither the user nor the local client can ever decrypt the archives sitting on the user's own disk. In the investigated case, a 313MB encrypted baseline snapshot of a commercial project had failed to upload 564 times and remained queued locally.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
This behavior means sensitive commercial source code and version history can leave a developer's machine without clear disclosure or a way to verify what was sent, raising serious data-privacy and IP-exposure concerns for anyone using ZCode on proprietary codebases. The one-way encryption design—where only the vendor holds decryption keys—removes any user ability to audit or control what's actually being transmitted, undermining trust in AI coding tools that claim to operate on local files.
- ZCode silently uploads full workspace snapshots, including Git history and LFS data, to Aliyun OSS while a user is logged in.
- Encryption keys are structured so only Zhipu's servers can decrypt the uploaded archives, not the user or the local app.
- The investigator found evidence of large encrypted snapshots and hundreds of failed upload attempts stored locally, exposing the covert sync behavior.
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Published there as: “Inside ZCode: Silently uploading your Git history to the cloud”
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