Quantum Tunneler

An experimental Rust IPsec protocol-hardening foundation. This is not a working VPN or a production-ready quantum-safe stack.

The forensic audit found simulated cryptography, XOR-based ESP, authentication bypasses and secret serialization. Those implementations have been removed. The supported executable core is now an AES-256-GCM ESP packet primitive with externally provisioned, in-memory, directional SAs; bounded IKE structural parsing; experimental HKDF provisioning; and an opt-in PSK IKE handshake with single-peer UDP transport and one subsequent CREATE_CHILD_SA exchange.

Implemented

• ESP AES-256-GCM-16 framing, deterministic salt/counter nonces, encrypted padding/trailer and mandatory tags.
• 64-packet replay window, authenticate-before-commit, hard lifetime/packet/byte limits, checked counters and generation replacement.
• Secret wrappers with zeroization on drop, redacted Debug and no secret serialization or Clone.
• Bounded IKE parsing and a fixed X25519/PSK/AES-256-GCM childless handshake with pinned ID_KEY_ID identities, authenticated transcripts and cached retransmissions.
• One negotiated ESP pair for exact IPv4 inner hosts; RFC IKE KEYMAT, atomic pair installation and selector enforcement before inbound replay commit.
• ike-handshake CLI authenticates two UDP peers and optionally negotiates a CHILD_SA, with bounded timeouts/retransmissions and PSK input via stdin; see usage.
• Security property tests, known-answer fixtures, fuzz targets and reproducible ESP benchmarks.

Unavailable

CHILD_SA rekey/multiple children, general traffic-selector negotiation, real ML-KEM/ML-DSA providers, hybrid exchanges, QKD, live tunnel routing, TUN/TAP and a daemon. connect, file-based encrypt/decrypt and monitor fail explicitly. status reports no connected runtime; it does not invent tunnel statistics. AH and ChaCha20-Poly1305 are not supported.

This workspace requires std. The misleading no_std feature was removed. A future allocator-capable core/platform split is planned, not implemented.

Build and verification

cargo build --workspace --locked
cargo test --workspace --locked
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets --locked -- -D warnings
cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo run -p quantum-ipsec-cli -- init
cargo run -p quantum-ipsec-cli -- status --json
cargo run --release -p quantum-ipsec-cli -- benchmark --duration 1 --payload-size 1400
cargo bench -p quantum_ipsec --bench esp

The binary is named quantum-ipsec. init creates configuration only, refuses overwrite, and creates no private key file. Benchmarking uses synthetic laboratory provisioning, not IKE or physical QKD. See fuzzing instructions.

Engineering status

Phase 6.5 is partially completed: unsafe active paths are contained and packet/parser foundations are tested, but independent IKE interoperability, multi-peer admission controls and a persistent routed data plane remain release gates. QKD implementation is deliberately deferred until these gates pass. No complete RFC, FIPS validation or ETSI interoperability claim is made.

• Forensic audit
• Hardening report
• Final implementation status
• Architecture, roadmap
• Threat model, standards inventory
• Protocol limitations, QKD design

Licensed under MIT OR Apache-2.0 as declared in the workspace manifest.