The axis we want to be measured on
How independent is the evidence?
Signing is becoming ordinary. The useful question is how far the evidence is independent of the party that produced it.
- 7
- rungs
- 4
- you can check today
- 3
- are open, with the work that says so
The ladder
Signed
checkableDid the party that made the decision put its name to it?
An Ed25519 signature, in production since April 2026. The floor, not a differentiator.
The published key →Read more
An Ed25519 signature over a canonical record. This is the floor, not a differentiator: most systems in this category now sign. Our issuer key has been signing in production since April 2026 and its rotation history is published.
Independently verifiable
checkableCan someone check it offline, without asking us?
Two verifiers we wrote separately, in TypeScript and Python, agree offline on every published vector.
Run it yourself →Read more
Two verifiers we wrote separately, in TypeScript and Python, that must return the same verdict on the same bytes. Every published conformance vector passes on both. The check runs offline against a pinned key. Others publish verifiers, vector sets and several implementations too; this rung asks only that ours agree on every published vector. Both are ours, so the next test is an implementation written independently from the published specification.
Independently anchored
checkableCould we quietly remove a record after the fact?
Every record enters a public append-only log, so none can be quietly withdrawn.
The live log and its anchor →Read more
Every record enters one public append-only log built on RFC 6962, so a record cannot be withdrawn without breaking a proof someone already holds. The log is anchored at a published size and root, and heads pinned before that anchor are stated not to chain. A defect in the ordering was found and fixed on the day the log opened, and the note about it has never been removed.
Adversarially tested in public
checkableHas anyone outside tried to break it, and were the failures published?
A public bounty ran 27 August to 12 September 2026. Outsiders found four defects, each fixed and published.
The bounty and what it found →Read more
A public forgery bounty ran from 27 August to 12 September 2026. Four defects found by people outside the company, each fixed and covered by a published test: a 32-bit cursor in proof verification, key ordering outside ASCII, the policy_applied comparator, and a decoder that accepted bytes that were never signed. Our own sweeps found others, including a canonical-number divergence and a signature-encoding leniency. All were fixed and written into a public changelog. The bounty is closed and offers no reward.
Omission-detectable
openCan you tell that something was never recorded at all?
A signature says nothing about what is missing. This is the problem we are working on next.
Read more
A signature proves that what you are holding is authentic. It says nothing about what is missing. This is the field’s acknowledged limit, not ours alone: Agent Flight Recorder (arXiv 2609.01931) states plainly that within-epoch suppression is undetectable from the log alone, and Audita (arXiv 2608.22160) proves a related impossibility rather than solving it. Omission is the problem we are working on next.
Counterparty-attested
openDoes anyone other than the operator sign what they saw?
While the operator is the only signer, the evidence comes from the party it is about.
Read more
While the operator is the only signer, the party producing the evidence is the party being evidenced. Sello (arXiv 2606.04193) states the problem exactly and inverts it: let the receiving service sign what it observed. Its own named open problem is not the cryptography but the incentive, since a counterparty has to agree to sign. That is a commercial question before it is a technical one.
Physically enforced
openCan a machine refuse to move without a valid grant?
Every system we know of, ours included, refuses in software. Hardware gating is research, not a product.
Read more
Every system we are aware of, ours included, performs the refusal in software running alongside the thing it governs, so a compromised controller can proceed anyway. In a search of the 2026 literature we found no paper or implementation where a secure element gates an enable line directly. That is absence of evidence from a bounded search, not proof that nobody has done it. It is the direction our edge-signer work points, and it is research, not a product.
What this is not
Not a claim that we invented any mechanism here: each has prior art. Not a claim that the open rungs are ours alone to solve. Not a certification: Aqta issues signed evidence, never certificates.
Last reviewed September 2026 · rungs move only when the evidence does