Research Overview

Design Philosophy

PALISADE was designed from first principles to address long-term cryptographic risk in a world where advances in computing—particularly quantum computing—invalidate many classical security assumptions.

Rather than incrementally modifying existing VPN protocols, PALISADE adopts a clean-slate approach with the following guiding principles:

• Post-quantum cryptography in the entire security-critical path (data AND control planes)
• Zero logging
• Absolute minimal exposed metadata
• Explicit replay resistance and state management
• Clear separation of security domains and cryptographic epochs
• Practical deployability using standardized cryptographic primitives
• Publicly available and peer-reviewed

These principles inform both the PALISADE protocol design and its reference implementation in SeraphVPN.

Threat Model

PALISADE assumes adversaries capable of:

• passive traffic observation and recording,
• active packet injection, replay, and tampering,
• long-term data capture followed by future cryptanalytic advances ("harvest-now, decrypt-later").

The protocol is designed to protect confidentiality, integrity, and authentication under these conditions, assuming standard cryptographic hardness of the underlying post-quantum primitives.

Protocol Snapshot

PALISADE is a UDP-based authenticated key exchange and tunneling protocol that uses:

• ML-KEM-768 for post-quantum key establishment
• Dilithium-3 for post-quantum identity authentication

The protocol features transcript-bound key derivation, encrypted packet headers, deterministic handshake canonicalization, and explicit cryptographic epochs for rekeying and migration. Optional post-quantum 0-RTT resumption is supported with bounded replay risk.

Control-Plane Binding

Unlike most VPN systems, SeraphVPN applies post-quantum cryptographic protections not only to the tunnel itself, but also to the systems that authorize tunnel creation.

Control-plane operations use post-quantum proof-of-possession authentication, and session authorization is cryptographically bound to tunnel establishment. This design avoids repeated transmission of long-lived credentials and reduces reliance on transport-layer security assumptions.

Public Artifacts

We are committed to transparency and review. The following materials are publicly available or in active preparation:

• PALISADE protocol specification (draft)
• Threat model and security invariants
• Negative end-to-end test vectors
• Deployment and operational documentation

These artifacts are intended to support independent evaluation and future standardization efforts.

Ongoing Work

PALISADE and SeraphVPN are under active development. Current research efforts include:

• formal analysis and peer review,
• performance benchmarking,
• interoperability exploration,
• and preparation for broader public and academic feedback.

We welcome discussion, review, and collaboration from the research and security communities.