AntHocNet is a research routing protocol for simulation (NS-3; the NS-2 adapter shipped through v1.9.0). This document records its security posture honestly rather than promising guarantees the protocol does not provide.

core::codec::deserialize is the only parser of untrusted bytes (an ant frame arriving from the network). It is:

• over-read safe — every length-prefixed section is bounds-checked against the remaining buffer before it is read or allocated;
• bound-enforcing — declared element counts (visited, history, helloDests) are rejected if they exceed the protocol caps (kMaxVisitedOnWire / kMaxHistoryOnWire / kMaxHelloOnWire), so a peer cannot push 16-bit-max counts past the algorithm's invariants;
• version- and enum-validating — a frame whose offset-0 wire-version byte does not match kWireVersion, or whose type/direction byte is not a known enum value, is rejected in O(1) before any further parsing.

In scope for the implementation to guarantee: a single malformed packet cannot crash, over-read, over-allocate, or violate the bounded-structure invariants.

These are inherent to vanilla AntHocNet, not implementation bugs:

• Ants are unauthenticated. A malicious node can inject false pheromone (blackhole / greyhole), advertise bogus hello destinations, or mount wormhole attacks. Mitigations (signed control messages, trust / reputation systems) are research extensions, not protocol fixes.
• Limited replay protection. Replays are suppressed only by the bounded (src, seq) dedup history; once an entry is evicted, a replay is possible.

This is a research / educational codebase. If you find a memory-safety or resource-exhaustion issue in the parser (the in-scope surface above), please open an issue describing the malformed input and the observed behaviour. Where enabled, GitHub's private vulnerability reporting (Security → Report a vulnerability on the repo) is the preferred channel; the open-issue route remains available.

Every release from v2.3.0 on can be checked three ways (#614). The release workflow runs each check itself before it publishes, so a release whose signatures do not verify never goes out.

1. Integrity: the checksum. It is published twice, in the release body and as the .sha256 asset.

sha256sum -c anthocnet-X.Y.Z.zip.sha256

2. Origin: signed build provenance. The install bundle and the drop-in ns-3 module tarball carry SLSA build provenance. It is signed keylessly (Sigstore) with the identity of release.yml in this repository, and it is stored in GitHub's attestation store. With the GitHub CLI:

gh attestation verify anthocnet-X.Y.Z.zip --repo danieljoppi/AntHocNet
gh attestation verify anthocnet-ns3-modules-X.Y.Z.tar.gz --repo danieljoppi/AntHocNet

The same Sigstore bundle is attached to the release as anthocnet-X.Y.Z.provenance.sigstore.json, for offline checking or for tools other than gh, such as cosign verify-blob-attestation.

3. Contents: the SBOM. anthocnet-X.Y.Z.spdx.json is an SPDX software bill of materials of the unpacked bundle. It is attested against the zip, so you can check that the SBOM belongs to the file you downloaded:

gh attestation verify anthocnet-X.Y.Z.zip --repo danieljoppi/AntHocNet \
  --predicate-type https://spdx.dev/Document/v2.3

Container images. ghcr.io/danieljoppi/anthocnet-ns3 and ghcr.io/danieljoppi/ns3 are signed with cosign (keyless) by digest, so every tag of an image is covered. The AntHocNet image also carries build provenance in the registry.

cosign verify ghcr.io/danieljoppi/anthocnet-ns3:3.48 \
  --certificate-identity-regexp '^https://github.com/danieljoppi/AntHocNet/\.github/workflows/(images|release)\.yml@' \
  --certificate-oidc-issuer https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com
gh attestation verify oci://ghcr.io/danieljoppi/anthocnet-ns3:3.48 --repo danieljoppi/AntHocNet

Releases before v2.3.0 have only the checksum.