Bastion Vault is a cryptographic tool. Reports about its security are welcome and taken seriously. Please read this page before reporting.

Bastion Vault's format and implementation were designed and reviewed carefully, and are tested against the RFC vectors, a tamper matrix and fuzzing (see docs/FORMAT.md and docs/THREAT-MODEL.md). They have not been independently audited by a third party. Argon2id and BLAKE2b are own implementations. Treat Bastion Vault accordingly: suitable for personal use, not a substitute for an audited product where lives or livelihoods depend on it.

Vault files written by any 1.x release open in every later 1.x release.

1. Do not open a public issue for a security problem.
2. Use GitHub's private vulnerability reporting on this repository (Security → Report a vulnerability). This keeps the report between you and the maintainer until a fix is available.
3. If private reporting is not available to you, open a public issue that says only "security contact requested" with no details; the maintainer will reply with a channel.

Please include: the Bastion Vault version, the exact steps or a crafted file that shows the problem, what an attacker gains, and whether you have shared the finding elsewhere.

• Acknowledgement within 7 days.
• An assessment and a planned fix date within 30 days for confirmed issues.
• Target of 90 days from report to public fix. Coordinated disclosure after the fix is released; you will be credited unless you prefer not to be.
• Security fixes do not wait for the next regular release: they go through a hotfix/* branch directly into main and ship as a patch release (v1.0.x), then flow into dev.

• The vault format (docs/FORMAT.md): any way to read plaintext, learn metadata beyond what docs/THREAT-MODEL.md concedes, or alter a vault without detection.
• The cryptographic implementation (src/BastionVault.Core/Crypto), key handling and zeroing.
• The reader's robustness against crafted vaults (crashes, hangs, unbounded allocation, path traversal on export).
• Plaintext or metadata left on disk by the application.

Anything listed under "Explicitly out of scope" in docs/THREAT-MODEL.md: malware on the machine while a vault is open, secure deletion on SSDs, side channels beyond constant-time tag comparison, deniability, and concurrent editing from two machines.