Quantum Nematode is research software: a local simulation and analysis toolkit with no network service of its own. Its security-relevant surface is small, but it exists. This page says how to report a problem and what to be careful with.

Please do not open a public issue for a suspected vulnerability. Use GitHub's private vulnerability reporting — the Report a vulnerability button under the repository's Security tab — which opens an advisory visible only to the maintainer. The project has a single maintainer, so responses are best-effort: you should hear back within about a week, and confirmed issues are fixed on main and in the next tagged release. Reporters are credited in the release notes unless they ask otherwise.

Security fixes land on main and in the next tagged release. Only main and the latest tagged release receive fixes; there are no maintenance branches for earlier tags.

• Checkpoints and substrates deserialise arbitrary objects. Evolution checkpoints (evolution_results/**/checkpoint.pkl) are pickle files, and the transgenerational-memory substrate (*.tei.pt) is loaded with torch.load(weights_only=False). Loading such a file from an untrusted source can execute code. Only load checkpoints and substrates you produced yourself. Brain weights (weights/final.pt) are loaded with weights_only=True.
• Credentials live in .env. IBM Quantum and Q-CTRL keys are read from the git-ignored .env (see .env.template). Never commit them; if a key is pushed by mistake, rotate it immediately.
• Configs are trusted input. Scenario and evolution YAML is parsed with yaml.safe_load and validated by Pydantic, so it cannot execute code, but the paths in it (weights to load, output directories) are used as given.
• Dependencies. The lock file is audited with pip-audit before each release and Dependabot proposes updates weekly. A vulnerable dependency that affects a code path this project exercises is in scope for the private channel above.