cloakllm-verifier 0.12.0

Standalone, dependency-light verifier for CloakLLM audit artifacts -- verify hash chains, Ed25519 signatures, key provenance, RFC 3161 timestamps, and compliance reports WITHOUT the full SDK or trusting CloakLLM's code.

cloakllm-verifier

Independently verify CloakLLM audit artifacts — without the PII-detection stack, and without trusting CloakLLM's code.

CloakLLM's whole pitch is compliance you can verify, not compliance you're asked to believe. This is the tool that makes that literal: an auditor, regulator, or CI pipeline installs cloakllm-verifier and checks the artifacts themselves.

It reuses CloakLLM's own verification code (single source of truth — no reimplementation, no drift) but pulls only the cryptography extras — no spaCy, no NLP models. A lean install for people who need to check, not produce.

pip install cloakllm-verifier      # Python; crypto deps only, no spaCy
npm install cloakllm-verifier      # JavaScript; zero deps beyond cloakllm (see js/README.md)

This repo ships two packages from one source of truth: the Python package at the root and the JavaScript package under js/. Both expose the same CLI (cloakllm-verify) and the same checks, with byte-comparable --json output.

CLI

cloakllm-verify audit      ./cloakllm_audit                 # hash-chain integrity
cloakllm-verify timestamp  ./cloakllm_audit                 # offline RFC 3161 checkpoint tokens
cloakllm-verify keys       cert.json --manifest m.json      # KeyManifest provenance + revocation
cloakllm-verify report     report.json ./cloakllm_audit     # re-validate a compliance report
cloakllm-verify all        ./cloakllm_audit                 # everything, one exit code
cloakllm-verify audit ./cloakllm_audit --json               # machine-readable (CI)

Exit code 0 = verified, 1 = failed/invalid. Output is ASCII-only.

Python API

from cloakllm_verifier import verify_audit, verify_timestamps, verify_all

r = verify_all("./cloakllm_audit")
assert r["ok"], r          # {ok, audit: {...}, timestamps: {...}}

What it checks

• Hash-chain integrity — recomputes every SHA-256 link from the canonical JSON; any tampered, reordered, deleted, or relinked entry fails.
• RFC 3161 trusted timestamps — offline-verifies every chain_checkpoint token (proving the chain existed no later than the TSA's time); reports the earliest provable time.
• KeyManifest provenance + revocation — verifies a signed certificate against its published KeyManifest (signature, key-id binding, validity window, manifest-hash integrity, offline-root signature when claimed) and checks it against a root-signed RevocationList.
• Compliance-report re-validation — independently re-verifies the audit chain a report describes and rejects any report that claims a verified chain or a COMPLIANT verdict over a log that does not actually verify. It does not trust the report's own claims.

What a passing result does — and does NOT — prove

Be precise about the guarantees (an auditor needs to know the edges):

• audit proves integrity + internal consistency of the entries present — every SHA-256 link recomputes and chains cleanly. It does not prove:
  • Completeness. A hash chain is anchored at its genesis, not its head, so removing entries from the end (tail truncation) leaves a still-valid prefix. Detecting truncation needs an external head anchor — an RFC 3161 checkpoint over the final entry_hash (timestamp), which binds "the chain was at least this long at time T".
  • Authenticity. The chain is a keyless SHA-256 construction: anyone who can write the log can recompute a self-consistent one. Authenticity comes from the Ed25519 attestation (keys) — a signed certificate whose key provenance you verify against a published KeyManifest.
• keys without --manifest only checks the certificate's signature against the key embedded in the certificate — it does not establish who owns that key. Pass --manifest for real provenance; the CLI marks signature-only results UNVERIFIED, not "verified".
• report re-verifies the chain and checks the report's claims for internal consistency against it; it is not a cryptographic binding of that exact report to that exact log beyond an entry-count sanity check.

Known limitation: cross-SDK whole-number floats

A hashed floating-point field that happens to be a whole number (e.g. a timing metric of exactly 0.0 or 5.0) serializes as 5.0 in Python but 5 in JavaScript, so a chain written by one SDK can be reported as tampered by the other SDK's verifier. This is a false-negative that fails safe (a genuine chain is flagged for investigation; a forged chain never passes), it is intermittent, and it predates this package. A proper fix is an RFC 8785-style number-canonicalization migration (a hash-semantics change, tracked for a future release). Workaround today: verify a chain with the same-language verifier that produced it.

Why a separate package

So an auditor's install is minimal and its purpose is unambiguous — it's a verifier, not the PII middleware. The verification logic lives in cloakllm (reused here), so the two can never drift.

MIT · part of CloakLLM