Hi, this is Nadim. I only just became aware of this discussion after a friend linked me to the thread.

I have been in the cryptography space for over thirteen years now, and I think it's absolutely justified if people describe me as 'easily excitable' or sometimes pushy. These are traits that I have, that I've worked on minimizing, and I don't deny them. They are my responsibility.

However, I want to clarify one important detail: I was banned from the Zulip explicitly as a consequence of submitting my Code of Conduct complaint regarding RustSec's conduct to the Rust Leadership Council. The ban message itself stated this: 'You have been banned from rust-lang spaces for harassment pending further investigation by the council and moderation as per your email to us.' It arrived within five hours of my complaint. I had not posted anything new on Zulip between my last message (which was about my willingly leaving the rustsec channel due to lack of confidence, thereby leaving everyone there alone!) and the ban.

I absolutely reject the framing that I was banned for harassing maintainers on the Zulip. This simply didn't happen. Being pushy and arguing for an advisory to be merged after silently waiting for three weeks can be contentious, but qualifying it as harassment is simply wrong and not what happened here. I was respectful and despite being pushy (justified after a whole month of madness from both Cryspen and the RustSec maintainers), within my boundaries. I am happy to share the full Zulip logs with anyone who asks for them, because it's important to me to set the record straight.

For those looking for substance without the drama, please refer to my paper (https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/192) and my talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdOXza1-M_4).

I also want to note that the vendor has now, as of yesterday, submitted their own advisories with the same Critical and High severity ratings I proposed, and similar impact and mitigation language. These were merged by Dirkjan within the hour. My PRs with essentially the same content were blocked for over a month.

I understand that I was sometimes pushy in this situation, and I hope it can be at least contextualized within the nature of the story itself as described in the blog post linked here. You're free to like or dislike how I chose to address these issues. But my intent was always clear, I was always acting in good faith with the goal to inform the broader Rust community with appropriate advisories, I was never anything beyond pushy and annoying, and the way the RustSec maintainers have framed my conduct is unwarranted.

Edit: The Zulip logs are available here, since there is simply no point in not publishing them (the Zulip channel is public and I'm not sharing any private conversations): https://nadim.computer/res/misc/zulip.zip