Honestly issues like this crop up pretty commonly. JWT alg:none for example. Or even older people forcing SSL to downgrade to encryption null.

In any system that provides security it should only be designed to run if the security is in use, and to fail immediately with no further action if the security is not used.

And not using authentication.

> Peer authentication in the connection handshake is broken and allows impersonation. An attacker can connect to your node and present a Node ID that is not its own. Private repositories are shared only with allow-listed Node IDs. An attacker who fakes an allow-listed Node ID can fetch a private repository directly, without being on the network path. This was reported to us by cryptocode on 2026-08-12. We proposed a fix upstream, see this pull request.

They are trying to sweet write it as much as possible. But basically there is neither encryption nor authentication. The person who made the protocol/program simply didn't care.

That's a downside of all decentralised software, isn't it? If there's a convenient access point, that access point is also a point of centralisation. To be distributed, you have to be running the software yourself. The big problem is that the software always ends up being inconvenient. People have no problem using bittorrent because the software is actually usable.

it's not the same name