Report vulnerabilities privately via GitHub Security Advisories. Please don't open public issues for security problems.

Protects:

• Your IP from the Bitcoin network. All P2P traffic goes through Tor (onlynet=onion, proxy= to the tor container). No clearnet P2P connections are ever made. Inbound is accepted over a Tor onion service by default (inbound_onion) — it serves blocks to the network without exposing your IP or opening a host port; set it false to run outbound-only.
• RPC from the outside. Bitcoin Core's RPC port is never published to the host; it is reachable only from containers on the internal Docker network (rpcallowip=172.16.0.0/12).
• Credentials from git. RPC credentials live only in gitignored files — config.json and the rendered .env (mode 600) — and are never written into tracked files.
• Your IP from notification services. Opt-in Telegram alerts and Healthchecks.io pings route through the stack's Tor proxy (socks5h), so those endpoints see a Tor exit, never your address. (The Telegram bot token in .env/dashboard env can send messages as your bot if leaked — it cannot read other chats or control the node.)
• The plaintext RPC password from the bitcoin container. bitcoind gets only a salted HMAC (rpcauth); docker inspect bitcoin reveals no password. The plaintext exists in the dashboard's environment (it must authenticate) and in .env. Its own health check uses Bitcoin Core's cookie file, not the password.

Accepted risks (by design — know them before deploying):

• The dashboard defaults to no authentication on host port 80. It is read-only status information, but it fingerprints the host as a Bitcoin node. Keep it on your LAN and never port-forward it — or set dashboard.password in config.json to require HTTP basic auth (note: basic auth over plain HTTP is only as private as your LAN).
• Anyone with Docker access on the host can read the dashboard's RPC password via docker inspect dashboard. Docker access is root-equivalent on the host anyway, so this is not treated as a boundary.
• Initial block download trusts onion peers and is subject to the usual eclipse-attack tradeoffs of a Tor-only node with a small peer count.