qwashed 0.2.0a1

Free post-quantum hygiene for civil society: HNDL audit + hybrid-PQ vault.

Qwashed

Quash quantum threats. Keep your data clean.

Free post-quantum hygiene for civil society:

• qwashed audit — scans your communication surface for cryptography that will be broken by future quantum computers, scores your Harvest-Now-Decrypt-Later exposure under a civil-society threat profile, and produces a signed migration roadmap.
• qwashed vault — local-only, hybrid-encrypted, hybrid-signed vault for sensitive documents, source notes, and evidence. Combines NIST-standardized post-quantum cryptography (ML-KEM-768, ML-DSA-65) with classical algorithms (X25519, Ed25519) so an attacker has to break both.

Status: v0.1.0 (alpha). First public release. The cryptographic core, HNDL auditor, and hybrid PQ vault are all functional and tested. Treat v0.1.x as evaluation-grade software: suitable for pilot deployments by civil-society IT teams, not yet a substitute for an audited mature system. See QWASHED_BUILD_PLAN.txt for the full build plan and acceptance criteria, and THREAT_MODEL.md for in-scope / out-of-scope adversaries.

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Is this for you?

If you work somewhere that handles information people's safety depends on — a clinic, a newsroom, a legal-aid office, an organizing campaign, a community shelter, an immigrant-rights or reproductive-rights group, a public defender's office, an indigenous-rights organization — then probably yes.

Here's the situation in everyday terms:

• Powerful actors (foreign intelligence services, hostile state agencies, well-resourced adversaries) are already recording the encrypted internet traffic flowing in and out of organizations like yours. They cannot read it today.
• They are betting that within the next 5 to 15 years, a new kind of computer — a quantum computer — will be powerful enough to break the encryption protecting that recorded traffic. When that happens, everything they captured becomes readable, retroactively. This problem has a name: HNDL, short for Harvest Now, Decrypt Later.
• The same risk applies to encrypted files sitting on stolen, seized, or copied hard drives.
• The people most exposed are exactly the ones whose work most depends on long-term confidentiality: patients, asylum seekers, abortion-access clients, sources, undocumented neighbors, indigenous-rights organizers, union members, and public-defender clients.

Qwashed gives you two free tools to act on this today:

1. qwashed audit — Point it at your websites, email servers, and online services. It tells you, in plain language, which ones are using encryption that future quantum computers will break, and what to ask your IT people (or your hosting provider) to fix. Produces a signed report you can share.
2. qwashed vault — A free, local-only filing cabinet for your most sensitive files. It uses two layers of encryption: one that protects against today's attackers, and a second layer designed to protect against the quantum computers expected later. An attacker has to break both layers to read your files.

No accounts. No cloud. No fees. Runs on a regular laptop. Works offline.

If you're not sure whether this applies to you, the docs/QUICKSTART.md walks through the first audit in about five minutes — it costs nothing to find out.

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Why Qwashed exists

State-scale archival adversaries are recording encrypted internet traffic right now — banking on future quantum computers to decrypt it in 5–15 years. The communications most archived today belong to journalists, organizers, asylum seekers, abortion-access networks, immigrant-rights organizations, queer communities in hostile jurisdictions, union organizers, public-defender clients, community health centers, legal-aid clinics, and indigenous-rights advocates.

Default enterprise post-quantum migration trajectories invert the equity-correct order: well-resourced firms migrate first, civil society last. Qwashed exists to flip that order. Free, offline-capable, no telemetry, no accounts, no paid tier.

See THREAT_MODEL.md for what Qwashed defends against and, just as importantly, what it does not defend against.

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Install

# Core only (smallest install, library APIs)
pip install qwashed

# Audit module
pip install "qwashed[audit]"

# Vault module
pip install "qwashed[vault]"

# Everything user-facing
pip install "qwashed[full]"

The vault module depends on liboqs-python, which wraps the upstream liboqs C library. Wheels are published for macOS arm64 and Linux x86_64. On other platforms you may need to install liboqs first (brew install liboqs on macOS, package manager or build from source elsewhere).

Verify a downloaded release before installing from a third-party mirror — see docs/VERIFY_RELEASE.md.

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Quickstart

The five-minute install + first audit + first vault flow lives in docs/QUICKSTART.md. Preview:

# Audit a list of endpoints under the journalism threat profile
qwashed audit run my-audit.yaml --profile journalism -o audit.json

# Verify a previously signed audit artifact
qwashed verify audit.json

# Initialize a new vault
qwashed vault init

# Store a sensitive file
qwashed vault put source-interview-notes.md --name "session-1"

# Verify the vault hasn't been tampered with
qwashed vault verify

Full guides:

• docs/QUICKSTART.md — five-minute first run.
• docs/AUDIT_GUIDE.md — civil-society IT teams.
• docs/VAULT_GUIDE.md — vault scenarios + runbooks.
• docs/THREAT_PROFILES.md — write your own scoring profile.
• docs/VERIFY_RELEASE.md — verify downloads.

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Design principles

• Free forever. Apache 2.0. No paid tier. No telemetry. No accounts. No phone-home. Verified by network-disabled test runs in CI.
• Threat-profile-first. Journalist, organizer, clinic, public-defender, and immigrant-rights profiles are first-class, not afterthoughts. Enterprise is provided for comparison and deprioritized.
• Auditable and reproducible. Every report is signed (Ed25519, optionally hybrid Ed25519 + ML-DSA-65), every input is canonicalized (RFC 8785), every score is recomputable from raw probe data. --deterministic mode produces bit-identical output across runs for legal evidence preservation.
• Hybrid by default. Suspenders and belt: classical (X25519, Ed25519) plus NIST-standardized post-quantum (ML-KEM-768 / FIPS 203, ML-DSA-65 / FIPS 204). An attacker has to break both. If ML-KEM falls to cryptanalysis tomorrow, X25519 still protects you. If a quantum computer arrives in 2030, ML-KEM still protects you.
• Offline-capable. Civil-society users cannot assume reliable cloud access, nor should they have to.
• Honest scope. Qwashed does not undo prior archive exposure. It stops further bleeding and provides verifiable migration proof.

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What Qwashed is not

• Not a Signal replacement. Use Signal (or another PQXDH-deploying messenger) for messaging.
• Not a TLS scanner that competes with sslyze / testssl.sh / SSL Labs. It uses similar primitives but produces a different artifact: a threat-profiled, signed, civil-society-oriented HNDL audit, not a generic security report.
• Not a quantum-hardware tool. Runs on a laptop. Runs offline. No backends.
• Not a substitute for operational security training, legal counsel, or threat modeling by a qualified practitioner. Qwashed is one layer in defense-in-depth, not a guarantee.

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Positioning

Who Qwashed is built for

In plain language: a small organization — clinic, newsroom, legal-aid office, organizing campaign, community group — that needs to (1) check whether its online services will be readable by a future quantum computer, and (2) lock its most sensitive files in a way that should hold up even after quantum computers arrive. Without a security engineer. Without a budget. Without a vendor contract.

If that describes you or someone you support, Qwashed is currently the most appropriate tool we know of for the job. Pilot it, write down what's confusing, open an issue about anything that breaks, and ask for help.

Where Qwashed is not the right tool

For developers and security engineers evaluating Qwashed against alternatives:

• Large enterprise post-quantum migration programs. Use commercial cryptographic-inventory tooling (e.g., Cryptosense), the PQ migration paths from your KMS or HSM vendor, and dedicated CBOM/SBOM tooling. Qwashed is not aimed at this segment and does not try to compete in it.
• Replacing a TLS scanner like testssl.sh, sslyze, or SSL Labs. Those probe more deeply across more protocols (SMTP STARTTLS, IMAPS, MQTT, etc.). Qwashed produces a different artifact — a signed, civil-society-tuned HNDL roadmap — using a deliberately narrow probe that classifies algorithms by HNDL exposure rather than enumerating every cipher and vulnerability.
• Replacing a mature file-encryption tool like age for non-civil-society use. age has years of deployment, formal review, language bindings, and an ecosystem of plugins. Qwashed adds post-quantum protection that age does not, but it is v0.1 software with neither age's deployment hours nor independent cryptographic review of the integration code (the underlying primitives — ML-KEM-768 and ML-DSA-65 — are NIST-standardized in FIPS 203 / FIPS 204).
• Auditing keys held in HSMs, mobile keychains, or RSA/ECC usage embedded in your own codebase. v0.1 covers TLS and SSH endpoints; v0.2 (in development) adds offline PGP and S/MIME key/cert audit but still does not reach into HSMs or mobile keychains.
• Threshold or M-of-N decryption. Many real journalist-source workflows want this. v0.1 does not have it; age plugins do.

Qwashed addresses an underserved gap, not a solved problem done worse. The gap is "small civil-society organization wants HNDL audit + PQ-grade file storage today, free, offline, no security engineer required." The v0.2 roadmap closes most of the developer-facing gaps above (broader probe coverage, threshold export, hybrid release signing, performance benchmarks).

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Relationship to QCert

Qwashed has a conceptual sibling, QCert, which is a separately licensed commercial product for QKD (quantum key distribution) certification — a different layer of the post-quantum stack.

The two share an epistemic posture (fail-closed, RFC 8785 canonical artifacts, signed reproducibility) but no code. Qwashed reimplements the small generic infrastructure pieces it needs. The two products can evolve independently without licensing entanglement.

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Contributing

Contributions welcome under the terms in docs/CONTRIBUTING.md. Security issues: see docs/SECURITY.md — please do not open public GitHub issues for cryptographic vulnerabilities.

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License

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE.

The name "Qwashed" is a trademark. See NOTICE for the trademark statement and its narrow restriction on derivative works that meaningfully alter the security posture or add telemetry.