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>
7.1 KiB
Trusted base
What you must believe for the theorems in this repository to transfer to the running Rust code. Everything else is machine-checked.
-
Lean 4 kernel (v4.30.0-rc2) and its three foundational axioms
[propext, Classical.choice, Quot.sound]. Every certificate is#print axioms-audited against exactly this list. -
mathlib (prebuilt oleans fetched by
lake exe cache get). -
Charon + Aeneas (pinned
9dd7f23c/bf13c42e): the translation from Rust MIR to the Lean model is assumed faithful. The generatedgen/files are never edited (comments only); proofs are stated ABOUT them. -
External-function models (
gen/*/FunsExternal.lean): Rust items that Aeneas cannot translate (constant-timesubtleprimitives, iterator plumbing, formatting) are axiomatized as opaque symbols. The axiom audit proves none of these axioms enters the dependency cone of any certificate, except where a model is explicitly listed below. -
The signature-apex boundary (signature layer only): FOUR apex-tier certificates —
CurveFieldProofs.verify_accepts_iff(byte apex: accepted iff compress([s]·B − [k]·A) = R byte-for-byte),verify_accepts_iff_point(half-lift: R is the canonical encoding of the recomputed point),verify_accepts_iff_point_eq(point equation: canonically-encoded Q accepted iff Q equals the recomputed point), andverify_accepts_iff_decompress(full lift: R decompresses to a valid on-curve point that equals the recomputed point) — are each#print axioms-audited by check.sh Phase 3b against EXACTLY the standard three plus this documented set, and the build fails on any deviation:ed25519.Signature(wire-format type), the three SHA-512 wrapper oraclesverifying.sha512_new/update/finalize_bytes(+ the opaquesha2.Sha512state type),ed25519.Signature.to_bytes, andsignature.error.Error/Error.new(opaque error type). The hash is an oracle with no algebraic properties assumed — the theorems hold for whatever bytes it produces; the SHA-512 implementation itself is NOT verified. Zero curve, scalar, or backend axioms are in any of the four cones. The constructive decompress theorem underneath the full lift (decompress_of_canonical) carries the standard three axioms ONLY. -
Compilation of Rust to machine code (rustc backend) is out of scope, as is side-channel behaviour (timing, speculation). The proofs are about functional correctness at the MIR/LLBC level.
-
What the axiom gate binds, and what it does not.
check.shPhase 2b reads every compiledProofs/*.oleanand fails the build if any declaration there is an axiom. It asks the kernel rather than parsing source text, because the source-text check in Phase 1 is evadable four ways — an indentedaxiom,@[simp] axiom,unsafe axiom, andaxiomwith the name on the following line all compile and all miss its pattern. Membership self-derives from the filesystem, soScalar*andAxiomCheckare covered as well, and the count of compiled modules must equal the count of shipped sources, so a deleted.oleancannot make the scan pass vacuously.selftest-axgate.shattacks the shipping gate rather than a copy of it, and was itself negative-tested by removing the gate's error. The residue you must still supply yourself: this binds declarations, not statements. Nothing in the button establishes that a certificate's theorem says what its name — or this document — suggests it says. A theorem gutted to a tautology with the same axiom cone would pass every phase. Reading the statements remains a human act. -
What the statement binding covers.
check.shPhase 3c compilesProofs/Audit.lean, which emits a canonical block containing the policy constants, every certificate's fully-elaborated statement (pp.all, so implicit arguments, instances and universe levels are all visible), and the fully-elaborated body of every specification constant transitively reachable from those statements. The SHA-256 of that block is pinned incheck.shand the block itself is committed asAUDIT-MANIFEST.txt, so a mismatch is diffed rather than merely reported. This is what makes a certificate gutted to a tautology of the same axiom cone fail, and what makes a reference definition redefined to BE the extracted code fail — two attacks that move no cone at all. Phase 0b separately pins the bytes of every extracted-model file undergen/, with membership derived from the filesystem so a new model file fails closed.The residue you must still supply yourself. Three things, stated plainly because a reader would otherwise assume them:
· A digest binds identity, not meaning. The audit proves the statements are the ones that were reviewed. Whether those statements say something worth believing about ed25519 is a question only a human reading them answers.
AUDIT-MANIFEST.txtis committed precisely so that reading is possible without re-running anything.· An author can rotate the pins. Editing a statement and refreshing the digest in the same commit passes every phase. The defence is that both changes are visible in the diff, reviewed at the pinned commit — not that the script prevents it. No harness audits its own author.
· Phase 0b pins the model; it does not verify the translation. That the bytes under
gen/are the reviewed bytes says nothing about whether Charon and Aeneas translated the Rust faithfully. That assumption is item 3 above and is unchanged. -
The harness is pinned, and what that is worth.
check.shPhase 0c requires every executable file underverification/— plus the audit driver, the committed manifests and the policy tables, which are not executable and are therefore listed explicitly in the script — to matchHARNESS.sha256. Membership is derived from the executable bit, so a new script fails the build until someone pins it deliberately, and the required set is computed from the filesystem rather than read out of the pin file, so deleting an entry is a failure rather than a silent un-pinning.lean-guardis inside that set: stubbing the memory-capped compiler wrapper is the cheapest known route to a false green, demonstrated elsewhere in this estate as ALL GREEN in 3.6 seconds over deliberately destroyed proofs.selftest-harness.shreplays that attack and four others.What it does NOT buy, stated plainly. Pinning a harness from inside that harness is circular, and no amount of engineering removes the circularity. An author who edits
check.sh— orlean-guard, or the audit driver — 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 you are reviewing. That is why the consumer's protection is, and has always been, review at the pinned commit rather than the button's own verdict. A green button says "this is the apparatus that was reviewed", never "this apparatus is trustworthy".