OSAP

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OSAPOpen Source Attestation Protocol

An experimental protocol for signing and verifying source and provenance claims about content.

Read the introduction
Read the manifesto

Specific evidence

A verifier reports signature validity, issuer identity, asset integrity, chronology, and revocation separately.

Explicit policy

A user-selected trust bundle interprets the evidence by issuer, scope, and time.

Local verification

Verification can run offline when the required inputs are available locally.

Detached records

Attestations can accompany the content they describe or be discovered through published links and indexes.

Draft v0.1

The protocol, schemas, CLI, and demos are experimental reference material for evaluation and standards discussion.

Traceable provenance across reuse

Information is quoted, excerpted, translated, and combined as it moves between publications. Each reuse can separate a claim from its source and history.

The problem

Source chains disappear

A passage can move through several publications until its publisher, earlier versions, and corrections are difficult to inspect.

01Field report
“The bridge will close at 18:00.”
Publisher
Publisher A
Issued
09:30
History
Available
excerpted
02News article
“The bridge will close.”
Source
A local report
Issued
Unavailable
History
Unavailable
reposted
03Social post
“Bridge closed”
No linked source recordPublisher, timing, and corrections are unavailable.

The solution

Attestations link each step

Source and derivative attestations reference earlier attestations. A verifier can establish who signed each link and which earlier record it references.

01SourceAttestation
Publisher Asigned source claimattestation …a91c
excerptderived_from …a91c
02DerivativeAttestation
Publisher Bquoted passageattestation …b27e
translationderived_from …b27e
03DerivativeAttestation
Publisher Ctranslated quoteattestation …c44f

Verifier trace

Publisher C ← Publisher B ← Publisher Asigner / exact bytes / relation / issued_at