verification: pin the harness, the audit drivers and the policy files (P1-c)
Every gate this repository has was executed by scripts that nothing pinned.
Round-5 review of the companion SLH-DSA repository stubbed the compiler
wrapper alone and its button printed ALL GREEN in 3.6 seconds over
deliberately destroyed proofs; flipping two guards in the audit driver
disabled every check with the digest byte-identical. Depth of checking is
worth nothing if the thing doing the checking is unbound — and every gate
added this week made that gap more valuable to an attacker, not less.
Phase 0c requires every harness file to match HARNESS.sha256. Two design
points carry the weight:
- WHICH files must be pinned is POLICY and lives in check.sh, never in the
map being consulted. If the required set were read from the pin file,
deleting an entry would silently un-pin that file. It is instead derived
from the filesystem, so a deleted entry is a set mismatch and a build
failure. That is the exact defect SLH-DSA round-6 found, closed here by
construction.
- Membership self-derives from the executable bit: anything this script can
shell out to must be pinned, so a NEW script fails closed until someone
pins it deliberately. Load-bearing files that are not executable — the
audit driver, the committed manifests, the policy tables — cannot be
discovered that way and are listed explicitly.
lean-guard is inside the set, which finally makes the standing "lean-guard
stays hash-pinned" rule a property of the repository rather than a convention.
selftest-harness.sh replays five cases, each asserting a specific diagnostic:
an edited lean-guard, a new unpinned executable, a deleted pin entry, a
missing pin file, and a positive control. It was itself negative-tested — with
the hash comparison removed it goes red on exactly that case while cheerfully
reporting "10 harness files match their pins".
TRUSTED-BASE.md states the limit at equal length to the claim: pinning a
harness from inside that harness is circular, and an author who edits a script
and refreshes its pin in the same commit passes every phase. What the pin
changes is that the edit can no longer be SILENT — it must appear in the diff
at the commit being reviewed. A green button says "this is the apparatus that
was reviewed", never "this apparatus is trustworthy".
Also fixed, found by this sweep: both self-tests compared the working tree
against its starting state with `diff <(echo "$VAR") <(command)`, which is
asymmetric — for a clean tree the variable is empty and `echo` emits a blank
line the command does not. It reported a difference precisely when nothing was
wrong, and only surfaced once P1-a was committed and Proofs/ became clean.
Both now compare as strings.
Verified green: 20 runs across the four ed25519 repositories (four buttons,
four harness self-tests, four axiom-gate self-tests, four binding self-tests,
four scalar buttons), zero red.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 18:13:01 +00:00
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6c821b8e465d3b394cb3cbb4bb3757791ace064b6d1b273ba9a41402dac74e24 AUDIT-MANIFEST.txt
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b88f4bc16d3188f4830f8333201fc7826d46acf829c37f7da398d6ae9bfca15e check-scalar.sh
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813c31664484adddd1752ea3bb30da826ad1050fd378604c242bcafb105fb4a3 check.sh
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7a55136cd15ab96b3ab77234ffb8a2fc7c9544cb8b36426d29e257ffb2d2ba6e extract.sh
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c9672a28825cd1d4055fb9efbb4a1d94c921c7b5c79e4cd5d0626ba061e554c1 GEN-MODEL.sha256
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736ea4be712e1b5bcda10ecb466f0dec7008a2a36eabdfd77563976299c43cce lean-guard
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772ca6dd22443c83dc35d5428598c8d17a01c69db5be008474d06476fa66f7f8 Proofs/Audit.lean
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79611f9689ba714fb8d3f57aee86ad9655509303445beaad766bf8b049de8c44 selftest-axgate.sh
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3d5898161d663eccad162269a5a6c102319077e22e1f2d89a8bfcab6926d29f6 selftest-harness.sh
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a14acaafe914aabb9df44fcd05fd50d475804280fab9e332fdb5ea0b0d35f164 selftest-statements.sh
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