Skip to content

Security Policy

Supported versions

Version Supported
main branch
Latest release
Older releases

Reporting a vulnerability

Please do not open a public GitHub issue for security vulnerabilities.

Report security issues via GitHub's private security advisory feature, or email the maintainer directly (see the GitHub profile).

Please include:

  • A description of the vulnerability
  • Steps to reproduce
  • Potential impact
  • Suggested fix (if any)

We aim to acknowledge reports within 48 hours and provide a fix or mitigation within 7 days for critical issues.


Security design

NOVA is built with the following security properties:

Property Implementation
No shell injection All exec.Command calls use structured argument slices — never sh -c with user input
Input validation All IPs, CIDRs, port numbers, and file paths are validated and rejected if malformed
Output sanitisation All external data (SSID names, hostnames, service banners) has control characters stripped before display
No privilege escalation NOVA never calls sudo internally; it informs the user and exits gracefully
No telemetry Zero data collection; no network calls except the scans the user explicitly triggers
No stealth mode All scans are user-initiated; no background or automatic scanning
Resource limiting All scans use context.WithTimeout; goroutine counts are bounded

Threat model

NOVA interacts with potentially hostile data from:

  • Untrusted WiFi networks (malicious SSID names, rogue APs)
  • Unknown LAN devices (crafted hostnames, unusual MAC addresses)
  • nmap and nmcli output (treated as untrusted)

Mitigations in place:

  • Terminal escape injection prevention (control character stripping)
  • Length limits on all displayed strings
  • No eval or dynamic code execution
  • XML output parsed structurally, not with string matching