Security audit of Reticulum+LXMF

[cannon-c]

I'm organizing a security audit of Reticulum+LXMF.

I am in contact with a company called Trail of Bits whom has expertise in conducting security audits of software, protocols, cryptography. Before proceeding, it would be good to understand what the community feels would have the biggest impact from a third-party security review.

1. If we had a third party review by an expert group such as Trail of Bits, what would be the most valuable thing they could help with?

2. Where would people in the community feel like Trail of Bits could help enhance security or make the development processes more secure and efficient?

3. Is it automated testing tools, formal verification, or something else that the community would find most useful?

Any other thoughts or suggestions?

My personal thoughts initially were to request:

• Audit of the cryptography implementation of Reticulum and LXMF
• Software security review of Reticulum, LXMF, NomadNet (emphasis on security from remote code exploits)

After having this extra input and answers to these questions from others, Trail of Bits would be happy to setup a call with the broader community to discuss the security review considerations and get feedback.

[cannon-c]

Let's use this page for discussing this topic. Please feel free to link to this and make mention of this in other places such as Reddit, Matrix, wherever else appropriate and to forward and consolidate comments from such into here.

[LoongUser77]

Hi,
Maybe this helps, I have run Bandit ([https://github.com/PyCQA/bandit]) over nomadnet code:
Bandit_in_Nomadnet.txt

It won't text crypto security, but just the code. But it could help

[cannon-c]

I was not aware of this Bandit tool, this is neat. While not a replacement of course for a manual and professional audit; this is still helpful for finding at least some potential issues. Thank you for sharing these results! This is helpful.

[silveroranges]

The things I would love to see audited is essentially your first thought, Reticulum, LXMF and how it implements the cryptography.

I don't know if this is in the scope of what they do, but also potential flaws that could lead to a DoS attack would also be good to know, in case a well funded group or state tries to block the network. I think this would be a good avenue of investigation because while jamming may work on one specific frequency or even a range of frequencies, the nature of reticulum and how it is able to communicate over any medium would mean the attack of choice would be something against the network specifically and not the transport medium.

[cannon-c]

You have a good point, as you do point out, a Reticulum network can overlap across many different mediums making a DoS attack at the software/protocol layer more widespread as a result. Especially since Reticulum is desirable as a solution for sovereign decentralized networks, availability is of high importance.