The radicle.garden service is not run by the Radicle project. That is run by a few members of the wider Radicle community, but not by the Radicle project itself. It’s quite likely that the folks running radicle.garden were as knowledgeable about the issue as I was (read: not at all knowledgeable) when that article was written.

The folks at radicle.garden thus have no bearing on this issue.

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Their migration to iroh has been in the works for quite a while now. It’s simply not ready. Rome wasn’t built in a day. This vulnerability has given them all the more motivation to migrate away from Noise towards iroh. They’re now pouring more resources in that direction. And I’m glad they publicly acknowledged the issue, even if their announcement left some questions in my mind.

I’m going to choose to encourage them to learn from this as they migrate to iroh. I’ve provided some constructive feedback to the Radicle development team. I’m hoping to help guide them towards a successful and complete migration. I do also plan to do some traffic analysis between two private nodes as their migration work continues. I should caveat that with the fact that I’m not a cryptographer, so I can only attest to “do things look like a garbled mess on the wire?”

So, they’re working on it. However, we, as members of the community, can only encourage them to move in a certain direction. We cannot impose our own arbitrary timelines on others, especially in open source. The developers are going through a rough time right now, given that this is a pretty junior mistake (I’m in no way trying to diminish the seriousness of the issue–I actually think the cleartext traffic vulnerability might be more serious than initially postured, but I haven’t formalized those thoughts just yet. I might need to develop a PoC, but ENOTIME as it would be pretty complex.)

Anyways, we’re humans. We make mistakes. Lets encourage improvements, and hope the migration to iroh proves fruitful and goes smoothly. (I’m concerned about how migrating to iroh might change how I structure some Tor Onion Service endpoints.) But, if we’re not going to contribute patches, the least we can contribute is encouragement in the right direction.

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It’s tough with this requiring a fix that breaks the existing on-wire communications protocol. The Radicle network has grown pretty substantially over the past few months, so it takes a bit of juggling to get all the right pieces in all the right places for all the right people.

I do think during early development, it would have been good to have caught this with a simple tcpdump. But we’re all humans and make mistakes. I, too, naively trusted that all of Radicle’s comms were encrypted as described in their documentation. I, too, could have run tcpdump and noticed the obvious.

I would hope that as they work on migrating to iroh, they learn from this and perform testing to ensure encrypted comms. But that migration, as discussed in the disclosure, is a comms-breaking change. The entire Radicle world will need to migrate (at around the same time? I’m not sure.)

score 1 · canonical