arkade-firstsats is a teaching tool. It is built to make the Arkade protocol legible, not to protect funds, and it makes two deliberate trade-offs that disqualify it from production use:

1. Seeds are stored unencrypted. firstsats init writes a BIP-39 mnemonic in cleartext to .firstsats/<name>.wallet.json (mode 0600). Anyone who can read that file — or a backup, or a synced folder containing it — can spend every coin the wallet holds.
2. firstsats init prints the mnemonic to stdout. That means it lands in your shell history buffer, your terminal scrollback, and any CI log that ever runs it.

Both are safe only because the defaults point at Bitcoin signet, where coins have no value. Do not repoint this at mainnet.

For a real wallet you would encrypt the seed at rest, keep it out of stdout, and use a persistent repository (SQLiteWalletRepository or the IndexedDB ones) so unilateral-exit data survives a restart.

Please do not open a public issue for a security problem.

Report privately, in order of preference:

1. GitHub private vulnerability reporting — on the repository, go to the Security tab → Report a vulnerability. This opens a private advisory visible only to the maintainer. It is the preferred channel because it keeps the report, the fix and the eventual disclosure in one place.
2. Direct contact with the maintainer — @satcat21.

Please include:

• what the issue is and which file or command it affects,
• the steps to reproduce it,
• what an attacker gains,
• the version or commit you tested,
• and whether you would like to be credited in the advisory.

This is a single-maintainer educational project, not a funded product. Those targets are honest intentions rather than a contractual SLA.

Please give a reasonable window for a fix before disclosing publicly. Reporters who follow this process are credited in the advisory unless they ask not to be.

• Anything that could expose or exfiltrate a seed beyond the two documented behaviours above.
• Path traversal or arbitrary file write through wallet names or the data directory.
• Incorrect validation in src/account.ts that would let a payment go somewhere the user did not intend.
• Dependency vulnerabilities reachable from this code — see below.
• CI configuration that could leak a secret or publish an unreviewed artifact.

• The two documented demo trade-offs at the top of this file. They are known, intentional, and the reason this is signet-only.
• Vulnerabilities in @arkade-os/sdk or in the Arkade server itself. Report those to Ark Labs — though we would appreciate a heads-up so this project can pin around them.
• Anything requiring an attacker who already has read access to your filesystem or shell history. See trade-off 1.
• Denial of service against public signet infrastructure.

• npm audit --audit-level=high --omit=dev gates every CI run on both GitLab and GitHub, so a high-severity advisory in the shipped dependency tree fails the build.
• Dev-dependency advisories are reported but non-fatal — they never reach a user.
• Dependabot opens pull requests for security and version updates (.github/dependabot.yml).
• CodeQL scans this repository's own code weekly and on every pull request (.github/workflows/codeql.yml).