Verified external source provenance

RigorFoundry schema 1.0 records and verifies exact externally cited advisories, versions, standards, and content digests. It is deliberately split into four content-addressed records:

1. ExternalSourceClaim states the exact subject, predicate, expected value, HTTPS source, and extraction procedure.
2. SourceRetrievalPolicy declares allowed hosts, redirect boundaries, timeout, byte limit, media types, and freshness.
3. SourceCapture binds retained raw response bytes to acquisition metadata, the retrieval policy, and the declared retriever identity.
4. SourceVerification exists only after deterministic offline verification succeeds against those exact retained bytes.

Changing a claim changes its verification. Changing retrieval policy changes the capture and therefore its verification. These relationships are registered in the digest dependency graph.

Epistemic boundary

A canonical HTTPS URI and response digest prove which bytes were reviewed. They do not prove publisher authorship, uncompromised DNS or TLS, or universal truth. SourceVerification.authority_scope is consequently fixed to retrieval-policy-only. A genuine publisher signature requires a separate signature-verification record; TLS capture must never be represented as one.

The capture command performs no network access. It records response bytes already retained by an explicitly authorised retriever. Network authority, proxy policy, private-address rejection, credentials, decompression, and redirect execution therefore remain outside deterministic offline verification. The record preserves declared retriever name, semantic version, and executable SHA-256 without inventing executable attestation.

No claim or verification grants permission to modify a repository, accept a risk, suppress a vulnerability, or promote an audit candidate.

Claim methods

advisory, version, and standard claims require json-pointer extraction. The selector must be a non-empty RFC 6901 pointer resolving to one exact JSON scalar. Parsing is UTF-8 only, rejects non-finite numbers and duplicate object keys, and preserves scalar types: JSON true cannot satisfy numeric 1.

content-digest claims require predicate sha256, method whole-payload-sha256, an empty selector, and one lowercase SHA-256 value. They verify raw retained bytes without parsing or redistributing licensed or paywalled content.

Retained-payload workflow

Record one retained response:

rigor source-capture \
  --policy source-policy.json \
  --payload advisory-response.json \
  --requested-uri https://advisories.example.test/CVE-2026-52869.json \
  --final-uri https://advisories.example.test/CVE-2026-52869.json \
  --redirect-count 0 \
  --http-status 200 \
  --media-type application/json \
  --retrieved-at 2026-07-17T08:00:00Z \
  --retriever-name curl \
  --retriever-version 8.10.1 \
  --retriever-executable-digest 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef \
  --output source-capture.json

Verify offline against the same payload:

rigor source-verify \
  --claim source-claim.json \
  --capture source-capture.json \
  --payload advisory-response.json \
  --verified-at 2026-07-17T08:30:00Z \
  --verifier auditor/one \
  --output source-verification.json

The payload reader performs component-wise no-follow traversal, requires a single-link regular file, derives size and SHA-256 from one stable descriptor pass, enforces the policy byte limit, and fails closed if the file changes. Output parents must already exist.

Public Python API

These top-level imports are provisional:

from rigor_foundry import (
    ExternalSourceClaim,
    SourceCapture,
    SourceRetrievalPolicy,
    SourceVerification,
    read_source_payload,
    source_provenance_to_json,
    verify_external_source,
)

Use build, record, from_dict, or verify_external_source; direct success-shaped dataclass construction is unavailable. Parsers require exact fields, recompute derived digests, reject unsupported schema versions, and reject source URI, verified-value, type, or freshness contradictions across a verification record. SourceVerification.from_dict cannot replay extraction because records omit retained payload bytes. At an evidence trust boundary, retain the payload and call verify_external_source again; an internally consistent parsed record alone is not extraction proof.