Zetesis is pre-release. It ships a library surface (sylloge, re-exported by the zetesis facade). Its only network client is StaticAcquirer (anonymous static GET), through which the Tier-0 providers (Semantic Scholar, arXiv, Wikipedia) fetch; no cache or durable ledger exists yet. See docs/design/contract-baseline.md for what each public type enforces today.

Report security issues privately to the maintainer. Do not file public issues for credentials, provider tokens, prompt-injection bypasses, cache poisoning, server-side request forgery, or data exfiltration findings.

Security-sensitive design constraints:

• Provider credentials belong to the operator vault or consumer adapter, not to zetesis config files. Zetesis handles credential references only; no serializable type, cache key, evidence envelope, log line, or error message carries a credential value.
• Paid-provider access is disabled until explicitly configured and a reservation authorizes the spend. A free-tier miss never enables paid use.
• Network targets fail closed: only http and https, no userinfo, and no resolved loopback, private, link-local, unspecified, multicast, reserved, or documentation address, including one embedded in an IPv6 transition form (IPv4-mapped, NAT64, 6to4, Teredo). A local target requires LocalTargetAuthorization, which has no public constructor and cannot be deserialized.
• Static acquisition (planned) validates every redirect hop before connecting, connects only to the validated addresses, and never records cookies or request credentials in its evidence envelope.
• Research outputs must preserve source provenance; synthesized claims without citations are not acceptable output.
• Cache keys and stored results must not include raw secrets or egress policy content; egress scope enters only as an identifier.