qeli is censorship-circumvention software. People may rely on it in settings where a failure has real consequences, so we take security reports seriously.

qeli is pre-1.0 and ships a single, unified version across all components (the Rust daemon and the Windows / macOS / Android clients). Only the latest released version receives security fixes. There are no long-term support branches yet. See CHANGELOG.md for the current version.

Please do not open a public issue for security problems.

Report privately through GitHub Private Vulnerability Reporting: the Security tab of the repository → Report a vulnerability. This opens a private advisory visible only to the maintainers and to you.

If that is unavailable to you, open a regular issue titled "security contact request" with no technical detail and we will arrange a private channel.

When reporting, please include:

• affected component(s) and version (qeli --version, client build);
• the wire mode in play (plain / fake-tls / obfs / reality / reality-tls / UDP);
• a description of the issue and its impact, ideally with a reproduction or PoC;
• whether the issue is already public anywhere.

• Acknowledgement: within 7 days.
• Initial assessment: within 14 days (severity + whether we can reproduce).
• Fix / disclosure: coordinated. We aim to ship a fix and publish an advisory within 90 days of acknowledgement; for an actively-exploited issue we move faster. We will credit you in the advisory unless you prefer to stay anonymous.

This is a small, volunteer-maintained project — timelines are best-effort, not contractual.

In scope (please report):

• Cryptographic flaws in the handshake, key derivation, AEAD framing, or replay protection (qeli/src/crypto/*, qeli/src/protocol/packet.rs).
• Memory-safety or panic-on-untrusted-input bugs in the parsers that face a hostile network: the fake-TLS / realtls ClientHello parsing (qeli/src/protocol/realtls/*, qeli/src/protocol/tls.rs) and the packet codec.
• Authentication bypasses (tunnel auth, server-identity proof, or the web panel).
• Traffic-confirmation / fingerprinting weaknesses that let a network observer positively identify a qeli flow (distinct from the documented residual metadata leaks — see the threat model).
• Local privilege-escalation via qeli's privileged components (TUN setup, nftables kill-switch, resolv.conf handling, the control socket).

Out of scope:

• The documented residual leaks and non-goals in the threat model (e.g. DNS metadata on the physical link while the kill-switch allows port 53, or traffic-volume/timing correlation by a global passive adversary).
• Findings that require an already-root local attacker, or physical access.
• Denial of service that requires an on-path attacker who could simply drop the connection anyway.
• Reports from automated scanners without a demonstrated, qeli-specific impact.

qeli intentionally implements a hand-rolled TLS 1.3 record/handshake layer (qeli/src/protocol/realtls/*) so it can control its wire fingerprint (JA3/JA4) byte-for-byte and cross-compile without ring/aws-lc-rs. This is the largest single attack surface and has not yet had an independent external audit. Reports against this code are especially welcome. See the threat model for the current assurance status.