hardware-rust-crypto is a cryptographic library. We take security reports seriously and appreciate responsible disclosure.

Please do not report security issues through public GitHub issues, pull requests, or discussions.

Report privately through GitHub's private vulnerability reporting:

1. Go to the repository's Security tab → Report a vulnerability (https://github.com/godaddy/hardware-rust-crypto/security/advisories/new).
2. Describe the issue, the affected version/commit, and a reproduction (a failing test or proof-of-concept is ideal).

If you cannot use GitHub's reporting flow, contact GoDaddy's security team via the program at https://www.godaddy.com/legal/agreements/security and reference this repository.

• Acknowledgement: within 3 business days.
• Triage and severity assessment: within 10 business days, using CVSS 3.1.
• Fix and coordinated disclosure: we aim to release a fix and a GitHub Security Advisory (with a CVE where warranted) within 90 days, sooner for actively exploited issues. We will credit reporters who wish to be named.

Please give us a reasonable window to remediate before any public disclosure.

In scope (please report):

• Incorrect AEAD behavior: authentication bypass, tag forgery, plaintext recovery, nonce-handling or counter defects, or any deviation from RFC/NIST test vectors.
• Memory-safety defects in the unsafe code (out-of-bounds, use-after-free, uninitialized reads, data races, aliasing/provenance violations).
• Key material not being zeroized as documented, or leaking through a public API.
• Secret-dependent timing or other side channels reachable through the public API on a supported target.
• Build configurations that silently weaken the hardware-only guarantee.

Out of scope:

• Misuse the API documents as the caller's responsibility, in particular nonce reuse under AES-256-GCM (use the generated-nonce APIs or AES-256-GCM-SIV) and exceeding per-key invocation limits.
• Physical, power, electromagnetic, fault-injection, and microarchitectural transient-execution (Spectre-class) attacks, which are out of the threat model (see docs/security-audit.md).
• Vulnerabilities in dependencies that do not affect this crate's use of them (report those upstream; we monitor advisories via cargo audit in CI).
• Behavior on targets without the required AES/carryless-multiply hardware, where construction fails by design with UnsupportedCpu.

This crate is pre-1.0. Security fixes are made against the latest released version on the default branch. Once 1.0 is published, this section will record the supported release lines.

This is an independent implementation that vendors and adapts audited RustCrypto backends; it has not itself received an independent third-party audit or NIST CAVP/CMVP validation (see docs/security-audit.md, HRC-2026-09). Correctness is backed by RFC 8452 / NIST SP 800-38D / NIST CAVP / Project Wycheproof known-answer vectors, differential testing against RustCrypto and ring, property-based and fuzz testing, Miri and Valgrind checks of the unsafe code, and dudect-style constant-time timing harnesses. Evaluate it for your threat model before production use.