OpenPortal is under active development. Only the most recent release receives security fixes. Older releases are not backported. We recommend always running the latest version.

Once we have a stable release (designated as 1.0.0), we will maintain a security support policy for older versions, which will be documented here.

Please do not open a public GitHub issue for security vulnerabilities.

Report security issues by email to:

Christopher Woods — Christopher.Woods@bristol.ac.uk

You can also use GitHub's private vulnerability reporting if you prefer not to use email.

Please include as much of the following as you can:

• A description of the vulnerability and its potential impact
• The affected component(s) and version(s)
• Steps to reproduce or a proof-of-concept (if available)
• Any suggested mitigations

We aim to acknowledge reports within 2 working days and to provide an initial assessment within 5 working days. We will keep you informed as we work on a fix and will credit you in the release notes unless you ask to remain anonymous.

OpenPortal uses a distributed, no-god-key security architecture. Each pair of agents shares independent 32-byte symmetric key pairs. Connections are authenticated through a four-layer sequence: IP allowlist, cryptographic handshake, zone verification, and name verification. All inter-agent communication is double-encrypted using XChaCha20-Poly1305 with per-message HKDF-SHA512 derived keys.

For a full description of the security model see docs/specifications/security-model.md.

Issues that are in scope include:

• Cryptographic weaknesses in the paddington wire protocol or key management
• Authentication or authorisation bypass between agents
• Privilege escalation within the agent hierarchy
• Command or instruction injection via the instruction parser
• HMAC bypass or replay attacks on the bridge HTTP API
• Information leakage between agents or zones
• Denial-of-service vulnerabilities in the core agent communication path

Issues that are out of scope:

• Vulnerabilities in third-party dependencies (please report these upstream; we will update dependencies promptly when fixes are available)
• Issues requiring physical access to the host running an agent
• Social engineering attacks
• Vulnerabilities in portal software that integrates with OpenPortal (e.g. Waldur) rather than in OpenPortal itself