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Security: System9ai/substrate-alignment

Security

SECURITY.md

Security Policy

substrate-alignment provides primitives used in safety-relevant agent code — the net-potential-gain gate, the halt-and-escalate protocol, drift-signal detection, audit-chain types. Defects in these primitives can have downstream safety consequences. Treat vulnerabilities accordingly and report them privately.

Supported versions

substrate-alignment is pre-1.0. Security fixes are applied to the latest minor release.

Version Supported
0.x Latest minor only

Once 1.0 ships, this table will list the actively maintained major / minor lines.

Reporting a vulnerability

Use one of the following private channels:

  • Preferred: GitHub Security Advisory. Drafts are private and let us collaborate on the fix.
  • Email: security@system9.ai.

Please include:

  • A description of the vulnerability.
  • A minimal reproduction (code snippet, failing test, or scenario).
  • The observed impact (incorrect gate outcome, missed halt condition, audit-chain divergence, unsafe defaults, etc.).
  • Whether public disclosure is acceptable, and any timing constraint on your side.

Please do not open public issues or pull requests describing vulnerabilities.

Response timeline

We aim for the following turnaround on private reports:

Stage Target
Acknowledge receipt 5 business days
Initial assessment 14 days
Fix or coordinated disclosure 90 days

For vulnerabilities that affect deployed safety-relevant primitives (NPG gate, halt-and-escalate protocol), we will prioritise the fix and may request a shorter coordinated-disclosure window with your agreement.

Scope

In scope:

  • The reference Python implementation under python/src/substrate/.
  • The specifications under spec/ — errors that allow a conforming implementation to violate stated invariants.
  • The conformance probes under conformance/probes/ — false positives or false negatives that mis-classify implementations.
  • GitHub Actions workflows in this repository.

Out of scope:

  • Vulnerabilities in third-party dependencies. Please report those upstream; we are happy to track and update.
  • Deprecated or unsupported versions.
  • Theoretical issues without a concrete reproduction.
  • Denial-of-service via pathological input on primitives explicitly documented as untrusted-input handlers (none, currently).

Acknowledgement

With your permission, we credit reporters in the release notes for the version containing the fix. If you prefer to remain anonymous, please say so in your report.

There aren't any published security advisories