announcement 3 months later is not super great, considering that the current advice is "Stop using private repositories (over the network) until the security update is released."
> 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.
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.