Residual Risks

No tool provides absolute security. shadowforge raises the cost and complexity of adversary actions but has known limitations:

Pre-Audit Status

shadowforge-rs has not undergone a formal security audit. Undiscovered vulnerabilities may exist in the cryptographic implementation, steganographic algorithms, or memory handling.

Specific Limitations

1. Time-lock puzzles provide practical delay, not cryptographic guarantees. Hardware advances (especially ASICs) could reduce effective delay times.

2. Deniable steganography is defeated if the adversary obtains both the primary and decoy keys. Key management discipline is essential.

3. Stylometric scrubbing is statistical and partial. Authors with highly distinctive styles may retain identifiable residual patterns.

4. Corpus steganography effectiveness scales with corpus size. A small corpus may not contain a sufficiently close match.

5. Amnesiac mode protects against disk forensics but not against cold-boot attacks or hardware memory forensics.

6. Compression-survivable embedding is calibrated to current platform recompression settings. Platform changes may break payload recovery.

7. Side channels beyond software scope (power analysis, electromagnetic emanation, acoustic cryptanalysis) are not addressed.

Complementary Tools

shadowforge should be used alongside, not instead of:

• Signal — end-to-end encrypted messaging
• Tor / Tails — network anonymity
• VeraCrypt — full-disk/volume encryption
• Qubes OS — compartmentalised computing

Responsible Disclosure

If you discover a vulnerability, see the Security Policy for reporting instructions.