Use GitHub private vulnerability reporting. Do not open a public issue or include credentials, private holdouts, miner BYOK, exploit payloads, or wallet material in logs.

Include the affected component, commit SHA or release tag, impact, and a minimal reproduction. State whether the issue is already public.

The gateway, validator, Proof service, challenge supervisor and proxy, RLM, Firecracker host, miner CLI, deployment definitions, signature formats, and sealed-weight path are in scope. Third-party model/GPU providers and miner artifacts remain untrusted external boundaries, but failures in Cortex's validation of them are in scope.

Compatibility names such as BASE_* and base-*-v1 are deliberate protocol and deployment pins; see docs/NAMING.md.

Security fixes land on main and ship from annotated v*.*.* tags. Production deployments use exact image digests.