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fissible/attest

Tamper-evident signed evidence chains for application events, with optional public anchoring via OpenTimestamps.

Status: Stable — v1.0+. The public API (types marked @api) follows semantic versioning; see STABILITY.md. Anchoring ships @experimental in 1.x.

What is this, in plain terms?

fissible/attest is a tamper-evident logbook for the important things your software does.

Most applications already log events — "invoice approved," "document published," "permission granted." But ordinary logs and database rows can be quietly edited or deleted afterward, and nobody can tell. If a row says a contract was approved at 3pm Tuesday, you're trusting that nobody changed it since.

attest removes that "just trust us." Every event you record is:

• Signed — stamped with your application's cryptographic key, so a forged entry can be told apart from a real one.
• Chained — each entry is linked to the one before it by a fingerprint (hash). Change, insert, or delete any entry and the chain visibly breaks.
• Optionally anchored in time — a batch of entries can be "notarized" against the Bitcoin blockchain, so you can later prove the entries existed before a certain point in time, even to someone who has no reason to trust you.

The result is a history you can hand to an auditor, a court, a customer, or your future self and prove it hasn't been tampered with.

Why is that valuable?

Picture a dispute months from now:

A customer insists they never approved a $50,000 contract. Your database has a row saying they did — but that row could have been inserted or edited at any time by anyone with database access, so on its own it proves nothing.

With attest, that approval was signed and chained the instant it happened. If anyone altered it, back-dated it, or slipped in a fake one, verification fails and points at the broken entry. If you also anchored it, you can show it existed before a specific Bitcoin block — so it couldn't have been fabricated after the fact.

Typical uses: audit trails, compliance evidence, security investigations, financial and approval workflows, and anywhere "prove this log wasn't edited" actually matters.

What this is not: this is not artifact/build provenance (Sigstore, SLSA). Those prove where a binary came from. attest proves what your application did, and when.

The 30-second example

Record something important when it happens:

Later — maybe months later — prove the whole history is intact and authentic:

If someone tampers with any stored entry, isVerified() returns false and $result->brokenAtSeq tells you exactly which entry broke.

That's the whole idea. Everything below is detail you can read when you need it.

Install

Requires PHP ^8.2 with the bundled sodium extension (used for Ed25519 signing).

Using Laravel? See fissible/attest-laravel for Eloquent storage, Artisan commands, queue-ready anchoring, and a JSONL importer.

Storage adapter contract tests

Packages that provide their own storage backends should run the same contract tests as core. The traits are shipped in src/Testing so adapters can depend on one canonical definition:

Anchoring adapters can likewise use Fissible\Attest\Testing\AnchorClaimStoreContractTests. Both shipped contract-test traits are stable @api test support.

How it works (a layer deeper)

fissible/attest always starts with local integrity, and lets you optionally add a public time anchor on top.

Local integrity (always on)

Each event becomes an envelope: it is Ed25519-signed, stored in canonical JSON form, and linked to the previous envelope by hash. That proves whether a local chain is internally consistent and signed by the keys you expect — no network and no third party required.

Public anchoring (optional)

Anchoring adds an external time and publication signal. Chain ranges are batched into RFC 6962-style Merkle roots, submitted to OpenTimestamps calendars, and later upgraded when a Bitcoin block-header attestation is available.

Anchoring is experimental in the 1.x line: the subsystem is usable and tested, but its PHP API may change in a minor release. It graduates to stable after live-network validation against real OpenTimestamps calendars and Bitcoin confirmations. See STABILITY.md.

Verification levels

Verification can require anything from a local-only receipt up to a full Bitcoin-confirmed attestation. The meaningful levels, weakest to strongest:

Full verifier example (anchored)

The complete shape, requiring a Bitcoin-confirmed anchor and a trusted Ed25519 key:

Use AnchorOutcome::REMOTE_HEADER_CONFIRMED with EsploraHeaderProvider when a remote explorer is acceptable. It is convenient, but weaker than a local Bitcoin Core node because the remote service is part of the trust path.

OpenTimestamps calendars receive nonced commitments rather than raw chain roots. That protects the committed content, but submission timing and IP metadata can still link activity.

Payload Types

Payloads passed to record() accept JSON-native scalars (string, int, bool, null), arrays, objects, plus opaque binary blobs via Fissible\Attest\Envelope\Binary. Example:

Binary blobs are stored in canonical form as {"$binary": "<base64>"} and round-trip stably. The $binary key is reserved — a payload that uses it directly is rejected, so your data can never be mistaken for the binary sentinel. Each blob is capped at 64KB raw; larger artifacts must be stored externally and referenced by URL and sha256 hash.

The total signed canonical envelope size is capped at 64KB; payloads approaching that size will be rejected at record() time.

CLI

bin/attest is a Symfony Console application. Install globally or invoke via Composer:

Commands

Exit codes

Examples

JSON output schema

All commands emit a stable JSON envelope on stdout when --json is passed. The four schema identifiers are pinned within the 1.x line; future additions will be additive (no removals or renames within the same schema identifier):

• attest.cli.result.v1 — emitted by verify and bundle:verify
• attest.cli.export.v1 — emitted by bundle:export
• attest.cli.anchor.v1 — emitted by anchor
• attest.cli.upgrade.v1 — emitted by upgrade

Bundles

Bundles are ZIP containers (extension .attest.zip) with the following layout:

Members are stored uncompressed for byte-accounting symmetry; the reader enforces per-member size caps, a total size cap, and a compression-ratio guard against bundles produced by other writers.

Trust model: keys claimed inside the bundle are NOT trusted by themselves. Operators must supply trusted public keys via --trusted-key <path> or --trusted-key-file <path> at verification time.

Stability & Versioning

From v1.0.0, fissible/attest follows semantic versioning. The supported public API is the set of types marked @api; anything marked @internal (or unmarked) is implementation detail and may change in any release. The on-disk and interchange formats — canonical envelope JSON, the {"$binary": …} sentinel, the fissible.attest.bundle/v1 bundle, and the attest.cli.*.v1 JSON schemas — are frozen within 1.x (additions are additive; removals or renames require a format-version bump). The CLI contract (commands, options, exit codes, --json schemas) is stable even though the PHP classes under src/Cli/ are internal.

Anchoring is experimental in 1.x. The OpenTimestamps/Bitcoin anchoring subsystem (src/Anchor, src/Headers, src/Merkle) is usable and tested, but its PHP API may change in a minor release; it graduates to stable after live-network validation.

See STABILITY.md for the full surface list and policy.

Documentation

The supported surface is the set of @api-annotated types in src/ — see STABILITY.md for the full list and the wire/format stability guarantees.

License

MIT