xete security & safety

Public, audited record of how xete protects users and their funds: security practices, audit history, and the safety posture of the code and infrastructure. This is the "front of the curtain" — everything here has been reviewed for public release before it's added; nothing internal, unresolved, or sensitive goes here.

For internal architecture and reasoning docs, see the private companion repo (not public — invite-only).

Contents

• threat-model.md — what xete defends against and what it doesn't, broken out by adversary class (malicious/compromised server operator, network observer, compromised client device, compelled legal disclosure), with concrete, currently-true claims for each.
• program-verification.md — independent-verification walkthrough for the on-chain payment program: exact commands to check the program ID, upgrade authority, and treasury balance yourself against live mainnet, with no need to take xete's word for any of it.
• crypto.md — the actual cryptographic primitives xete uses today (Ed25519, X25519, AES-256-GCM, HMAC-SHA256), plus an honest accounting of the E2E messaging key lifecycle, including that it is static with no rotation mechanism.
• testing-and-assurance.md — results of an adversarial test suite run against the on-chain payment contract, and an equally direct list of what assurance work (fuzzing, CI-gated tests) hasn't happened yet.
• disclosure-policy.md — how to report a security vulnerability, our response-time commitment, safe-harbor terms for good-faith researchers, and scope.
• incident-history.md — public record of past incidents (none to date), with a standing commitment to log future ones here and never edit away a past entry.
• known-limitations.md — open, tracked gaps that aren't incidents (nothing has been exploited) but aren't fixed yet either — currently: the xete-mcp reference client has no client-side cap on server-quoted payment amounts.

Status: content is live and reviewed for public release; each entry is kept in sync with claims made in the main protocol repository repo (notably SECURITY.md) and updated as the underlying system changes.