The evidence flows the wrong way

A certification is audited over a handful of days and valid for three years. A questionnaire is self-reported. A vendor's log is the vendor's log.

None of that is dishonest. It's structurally the wrong direction for evidence to travel.

Every actor, one identity model

ActorIdentity
PersonDevice certificate, tied to an individual
DeviceNode certificate
CI runScoped, time-bound identity per run
AI agent or scriptScoped, time-bound identity — not an inherited credential

The last row is where most tooling has nothing to say. Rules written for people — including Vietnam's Circular 09, which requires that individual responsibility be determinable at every moment of use — don't yet have an answer for what happens when an automated process acts.

We're not going to pretend this is solved. It isn't — not by us, not by anyone. Our take is narrow: the same primitive that gives a person an identity gives a script or an agent one too. That's it, and we'd rather be corrected than flattered on it.

What the ledger records

Records

  • Which identity reached which service, and when
  • Which release was published, by whom, with a signed receipt
  • Grants issued, their scope, their expiry
  • Revocations and their effect

Does not record

  • The contents of a build
  • Source code, or activity inside the vendor's development environment
  • The payload of any session

That second column matters for adoption. A standard your vendors resist isn't a standard. Tell them directly: the ledger records access and release events, not their internal development rhythm.

What you can export

Honest status Design partner

The server-side invariants — including the append-only ledger — run in production and are checked by an open test harness. They have not been through independent third-party audit.

The client agent is open source and Cosign-signed, so your team can review what runs on your own nodes rather than take our word for it.

Defining the scope of the first independent audit is one of the things we're asking design partners to do with us. If that's a conversation you'd want a seat in, that's the conversation.

Honest limits →