Security and assurance

Last reviewed: September 25, 2026.

clearproof is pre-production, pilot-stage software. Independent circuit and contract audits have not been completed. Current proving artifacts use a development-only trusted setup. Testnet deployment and passing tests do not establish production safety.

Current boundaries

• A cryptographically valid proof is not an accepted transfer. In the pilot, the authorization service checks current roots, revocation, policy and signed facts before consuming an authorization in PostgreSQL. Pairing alone checks none of these.
• Credential, holder, jurisdiction and transfer binding are enforced by the pilot-transfer-v3 statement and the authorization service, tested locally. They rely on trusted issuers, root publishers and a trusted registry publisher; the contract cannot detect a publisher that lies about private records.
• Recipient HPKE envelopes are the default; the legacy shared-key AES-256-GCM mode is only used when an operator selects it. Key rotation and altered-envelope rejection are tested locally. Live key discovery between institutions is not yet validated.
• Current proofs publish eight values (commitments, roots, a nullifier, times and the chain and registry binding) but no amount, tier, jurisdiction or review flag. Those values can still be correlated with other records. The legacy 16-signal demo profile publishes more, including a review flag.
• Domain, expiry, root and replay checks depend on correct configuration of the authorization service and registry. The site does not claim that replay is universally impossible.
• Tenant-scoped encrypted storage, restart recovery and retry isolation are tested locally with PostgreSQL. They have not been independently reviewed.

Controls to evaluate

Use synthetic records and testnet funds. Check approved issuer/root/artifact provenance, recipient identity, key purpose, freshness, revocation, transfer binding and duplicate handling. Confirm that sensitive inputs remain inside authorized encrypted data flows and do not appear in logs or exports.

PII_MASTER_KEY startup validation checks accepted encoding and minimum length. It cannot establish that a supplied value has adequate randomness. Generate secrets securely and manage retention, backup and rotation deliberately.

Vulnerability reporting

Report privately through GitHub  (preferred) or email security@clearproof.dev. Share reproduction steps and impact privately; do not post sensitive exploit details or personal information in a public issue. See report an issue. This documentation does not promise a response-time SLA.

No active paid bug-bounty program is announced here. See project status for the implementation and assurance work that remains.