Simard is an autonomous engineer that drives agentic coding systems. Because it builds, signs, and self-deploys software, supply-chain integrity is a first-class concern. This document describes how to report a vulnerability and summarizes the guardrails that protect Simard's build and release pipeline.

Please do not open a public issue for security vulnerabilities.

Report privately via GitHub's private vulnerability reporting ("Report a vulnerability" on the repository's Security tab). Include:

• A description of the issue and its impact.
• Steps to reproduce (or a proof-of-concept), where applicable.
• The affected version (simard --version) and platform.

We aim to acknowledge a report within a few business days, agree on a disclosure timeline, and credit reporters who wish to be named once a fix has shipped.

Simard ships from main and releases frequently. Security fixes land on the latest release; older tagged releases do not receive backports. Always run the latest release — the binary performs a non-blocking update check on launch and can update itself via simard self-update.

Simard's dependency, build, and release pipeline is hardened by several CI-enforced guardrails. Full reference documentation:

• Supply-chain audit & guardrails — deny.toml policy (advisories, licenses, bans, sources), the cargo-deny CI gate, and a standing audit of every transitive crate that runs code at build time (build.rs scripts and proc-macros).
• Dependency trust policy — cargo-vet certification of transitive dependencies, trusted-crate and exemption criteria, and the advisory-resolution workflow.
• Release integrity — CycloneDX SBOM generation, cosign keyless signing of release binaries, and build reproducibility.

These run as separate, lockfile-only CI jobs (cargo-audit, cargo-deny, cargo-vet) that never compile the crate and never gain token write scope.

We track RUSTSEC advisories via cargo audit and cargo deny check advisories. The standing policy is no remaining unmitigated advisories. A vulnerability always fails the check and is mitigated only by a fix (update to a patched version) or an explicit, justified, tracked exemption — currently a single one, rsa / RUSTSEC-2023-0071, which has no upstream fix. Unmaintained and unsound advisories that reach the graph only transitively are surfaced but non-failing under the cargo-deny workspace scope, and tracked for an upstream bump rather than exempted per-ID. Exemptions are recorded — with their justification and an upstream tracking link — in .cargo/audit.toml and deny.toml. See advisory resolution.

Every release is signed with cosign (keyless) and ships a CycloneDX SBOM. Before trusting a downloaded binary, verify both the checksum and the signature:

cosign verify-blob \
  --certificate        simard-linux-x86_64.tar.gz.pem \
  --signature          simard-linux-x86_64.tar.gz.sig \
  --certificate-identity-regexp \
      '^https://github\.com/rysweet/Simard/\.github/workflows/release\.yml@refs/heads/main$' \
  --certificate-oidc-issuer 'https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com' \
  simard-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

sha256sum -c simard-linux-x86_64.tar.gz.sha256

Full instructions, including SBOM inspection and build reproduction, are in Release integrity.