Ferrite is alpha software. After the first tagged release, only the latest published 0.x release is supported for security fixes. Before that point, the latest main branch is the only supported version.

Maintainers aim to acknowledge a complete private report within seven calendar days. Acknowledgement is not a promise of a fix timeline. Severity, exploitability, and a reliable reproduction determine the remediation plan.

Do not open a public issue for a suspected vulnerability. Use GitHub's private security advisory form and include:

• affected commit or version;
• architecture and operating system;
• minimal reproduction;
• impact and attacker prerequisites;
• whether malformed models, network requests, or local configuration are involved;
• any suggested mitigation.

Remove API keys, prompts, proprietary model data, and unrelated personal information from the report.

Maintainers will acknowledge a complete report, reproduce it when possible, assess severity, prepare a fix and regression test, and coordinate disclosure. Timelines depend on impact and reproduction quality.

When a report is confirmed, maintainers will use a private GitHub Security Advisory while a fix is prepared. Public disclosure includes the affected versions, mitigation, fixed version, and upgrade path. A compromised release also requires credential rotation and a new immutable patch release. Existing release assets are not replaced or silently removed.

Security-sensitive areas include GGUF parsing, size arithmetic, unsafe SIMD kernels, authentication ordering, request limits, cancellation, cache isolation, concurrency, dependency advisories, and accidental data disclosure.

Operational hardening such as TLS, internet-facing rate limiting, sandboxing, and durable audit logs belongs in the deployment boundary and is not currently provided by Ferrite itself.

Official artifacts are published only through the repository's tag-driven release workflow. Consumers can verify a release asset with gh release verify-asset and its build provenance with gh attestation verify. The official OCI image is ghcr.io/vicotrbb/ferrite; production deployments should pin an immutable digest rather than a moving tag.

Ferrite does not distribute model weights. Verify a GGUF model's publisher, license, revision, and checksum independently of the Ferrite artifact.