Blackout Kit is a censorship circumvention toolkit. Its security directly protects users in high-risk environments — we take this seriously.

Only the latest minor release receives full updates. Critical patches are backported to the previous minor for 30 days.

Blackout Kit assumes the following adversary capabilities:

We do NOT protect against:

• A state actor with physical device access
• Targeted malware/keylogger on the user's machine
• Traffic correlation via timing analysis at scale
• Compromise of upstream proxy/VPN servers

DO NOT open a public issue. Vulnerabilities in circumvention tools can put users at risk if disclosed before a fix is available.

Use GitHub's private vulnerability reporting. GitHub handles the encrypted channel end-to-end.

PGP key:  https://github.com/kiacoder.gpg
Email:    Encrypt the armored output and send to the address
          associated with your GitHub account's PGP key.

If you don't have a PGP key, use the GitHub private reporting above.

• Acknowledgment: within 48 hours
• Status update: every 5 days until resolved
• Fix timeline: critical (7 days), high (14 days), medium (30 days)
• Credit: you'll be credited in the advisory (or remain anonymous if you prefer)
• CVE: we will request a CVE ID for confirmed vulnerabilities

We follow a 90-day coordinated disclosure window:

1. Report received — we acknowledge within 48h
2. Fix developed — we aim for a patch within the fix timeline above
3. Patch released — a new version is published with a security advisory
4. Public disclosure — 90 days after the fix release, we publish details

We appreciate reporters who respect this window.

• All dependencies are pinned via go.sum in engine/ and engine/warp/
• Dependabot runs daily and creates PRs for any vulnerable transitive dep
• We do not use replace directives unless absolutely required
• Upstream forks (utls, quic-go) are reviewed before updating

• All release artifacts are built from the tagged commit in CI
• The GitHub release page includes SHA-256 checksums
• Build from source to verify: cd engine && go build ... (see below)

• go mod verify is run before every release
• govulncheck is run periodically to catch known CVEs
• We prioritize upgrading golang.org/x/crypto (the primary attack surface, a transitive dep of xray-core, sing-box, and warp-plus)

• Kill switch rewritten: old localport-based rules never matched proxy outbound traffic (proxy uses random source ports). Now uses per-process firewall rules via PowerShell. Run blackout killswitch test to verify.
• Download integrity: all downloaded binaries verified for valid PE headers (MZ + PE signature) before install. Corrupt/tampered files rejected.
• Watchdog cleanup: if the daemon is End-Tasked while kill switch is on, internet is no longer permanently blocked.
• DLL crash detection: engines that crash silently (segfault, deadlock) are now detected via TCP port probes and auto-restarted by the daemon.
• Config isolation: each engine writes to a unique temp directory instead of shared bins/, preventing cross-instance corruption.

All engine binaries are built from source in engine/. To verify:

# Build from source and compare hashes
cd engine
go build -buildmode=c-shared -o ../bins/blackout_core.dll .
cd warp
go build -buildmode=c-shared -o ../../bins/blackout_warp.dll .

Pre-built release binaries are the same artifacts produced by these commands on a clean Go 1.26+ toolchain. Compare the SHA-256 hash of the downloaded artifact against go tool objdump output to ensure reproducibility.

Blackout Kit does not:

• Collect usage analytics or telemetry
• Log destination IPs, domains, or visited URLs
• Phone home or ping external servers (except for updates when you run blackout update)
• Store connection metadata beyond the current session

The only persistent data is:

• settings.json (your config — encrypted if you run blackout config encrypt)
• Engine binary cache in bins/

This tool intentionally trades some security for circumvention effectiveness:

• allowInsecure = true (SPEED/PRIVATE modes) — trusts self-signed certs to bypass DPI. Use LEGEND mode for strict cert validation.
• Config encryption is per-machine, not portable — prevents at-rest discovery but not offline brute-force.
• Kill switch uses Windows Firewall — a kernel-level adversary can bypass it. Defense in depth recommended.
• Plaintext credentials — IKEv2/SoftEther passwords are stored as plaintext in settings.json. Encrypt with blackout config encrypt or use Legend mode.
• Transitive dep vulns — Dependabot may flag CVEs in transitive Go deps (e.g. golang.org/x/crypto, cloudflare/circl). These are pinned by upstream forks (Psiphon, xray-core, sing-box) and cannot be independently upgraded. The vulnerable code paths (SSH server, FIDO2) are not exercised by our tunneling engine. We accept this risk and update when upstream does.

We maintain a list of researchers who have responsibly disclosed vulnerabilities. Thank you for helping protect users worldwide.

To be added, simply submit a valid report through the channels above and let us know if you'd like to be credited.