yip is a VPN — its whole job is security — but it is pre-1.0 software with one maintainer and no external audit. Treat it accordingly. If you rely on it in a threat-model where compromise is dangerous, read the honest accounting below first.
Caution
Do not open a public issue for a security vulnerability.
Report privately via GitHub's private vulnerability reporting, or email the maintainer at the address in the repo profile. Include enough to reproduce (affected version/commit, config, and a description or PoC). We'll acknowledge, work a fix, and credit you unless you'd rather stay anonymous. There is no bounty program.
There are no releases yet; main is the only supported branch. Fixes land there.
- Confidentiality + integrity of tunneled traffic: ChaCha20-Poly1305 AEAD over a Noise-IK session, per-direction keys, a replay window, and ~120 s rekey. Keys are classical today.
- Identity: mesh membership requires a CA-signed certificate; handshake admission checks the peer's static key; a TAI64N timestamp closes an endpoint-hijack-via-replay vector; endpoint roaming follows only authenticated packets; rendezvous registration is signed on the UDP path.
- Content-DPI resistance: no fixed bytes or constant offsets (property-tested); nDPI
classifies obfuscated traffic as
Unknown; an Xray-REALITY transport parrots real TLS for hostile networks.
- Traffic analysis. There is no timing/padding (DAITA-style) defense yet. The FEC burst
shape, packet-size distribution, and constant-interval idle cover traffic are observable to
a statistical/flow classifier, and the high-entropy-UDP anomaly is not gated. Use the
REALITY/TLS transport, not plain
obf_psk, where the network is actively hostile. - The control plane has known hardening gaps — the TLS relay-front registration is not yet
signed, the resolver can be steered by an unauthenticated address, and a couple of
registration/handshake replay windows exist. These are tracked openly in the
issue tracker (search
security). - No independent audit. The crypto reuses audited primitives (
snow,ring), but the protocol composition and the control plane have not been externally reviewed.
If a documented limitation above matters to your threat model, that's a reason to wait, not a vulnerability to report — but a new way to break the stated guarantees is exactly what we want to hear about privately.