Do not open a public issue for a vulnerability.
Report privately via GitHub private vulnerability reporting — the Report a vulnerability button under this repository's Security tab. That channel reaches the maintainers without disclosing anything publicly, supports collaboration on a fix inside a draft advisory, and credits you when the advisory is published.
If you cannot use GitHub, email the maintainer: scott@squillo.com with
[APH SECURITY] in the subject line.
You can expect an acknowledgment within 72 hours. APH is pre-1.0 and pre-adoption, which cuts in your favor: a confirmed protocol defect is corrected in place in the current specification (see CONTRIBUTING.md, the pre-production exception) rather than queued behind a release train, and the fix lands as a dated revision entry the same way every other correction has.
In scope:
- The protocol specification (
spec/aph-0.1.mdand its companion documents) — anything that lets a conformant verifier accept what it should refuse, or refuse what it should accept: signature or canonicalization confusion, replay, downgrade, revocation bypass, discovery-order abuse, same-origin escapes. - The reference implementation and bindings (
interpreters/) — including divergence between implementations, since two conformant-claiming verifiers reaching opposite verdicts on the same bytes is itself a vulnerability. - The published examples and test vectors — a vector that teaches an unsafe practice is a defect in the place implementers actually look.
Before reporting, read the threat model in
spec/security-considerations.md: §2
lists what APH defends against, §3 what it deliberately does not. A report
that a §3 exclusion is excluded is working as designed — though a case that an
exclusion is wrongly drawn is absolutely in scope, and is the kind of report
we most want.
We ask for coordinated disclosure: give us the 72-hour acknowledgment window and a good-faith interval to ship a fix before publishing. We will not pursue or support legal action against good-faith security research conducted within this policy, and we credit reporters in the published advisory unless you ask otherwise.