Chaft is early-stage software for a local-first, peer-to-peer chat workspace. The codebase includes cryptography, signed event history, OpenMLS bootstrap paths, local secret storage, and untrusted peer/replica handling. Do not use it for sensitive production communication until production release criteria are explicitly met.

Please report security issues privately through GitHub Security Advisories for this repository. Do not open a public issue for vulnerabilities involving:

• plaintext leakage
• local key or passphrase exposure
• signature or authorization bypass
• acceptance of malformed peer data
• replica node plaintext access
• denial-of-service through unbounded local, wire, or UI work

If private advisories are unavailable, contact the repository owner out of band and include only minimal reproduction details until a private channel is agreed.

Chaft is designed around these invariants:

• No central server is authoritative.
• Local devices sign events with persistent device identities.
• Peers and replica nodes are untrusted.
• Replica nodes store encrypted, partial event/blob data.
• Materialization must reject missing authorization context and report missing history as gaps.
• Peer-supplied payloads, paths, strings, frame sizes, item counts, and report samples must remain bounded.

• Production desktop builds still need OS keychain or user-unlocked vault integration for identity and local secret handling.
• Public relay/discovery policy is intentionally default-deny while the native Iroh path matures.
• Cross-platform packaging, release metadata, SBOM, provenance, and verification tooling exists, but there is no published production release.
• Production signing credentials, macOS notarization, immutable release promotion, and an application update channel have not been activated.
• CI packages are development artifacts and must not be treated as supported public downloads.

• Prefer the CLI's hidden interactive prompt. Recovery export and import prompt by default; use --identity-passphrase-prompt when unlocking an identity.
• For controlled automation, use the CLI's standard-input passphrase mode and keep the producer, consumer, and logs isolated.
• On Unix, a passphrase file must be owner-only: create it under umask 077, keep mode 0600, and pass its path with --passphrase-file.
• Passphrases in command-line arguments or environment variables are not recommended because process listings, shell history, logs, or child processes can expose them.
• The environment-variable path remains a development startup fallback only, not a production secret-delivery mechanism.

Security fixes target the main branch until tagged releases exist.