notbefore

Consumer CLI for the public qrng-beacon-log — an hourly, commit-then-reveal, host-attested randomness log anchored to drand quicknet, RFC 3161 timestamps, Rekor and OpenTimestamps. Spec: NOTBEFORE.md (draft 0.2) in https://github.com/docdailey/qrng-beacon-log.

What it proves: the 32-byte attested value (V) of hour (N) was fixed before drand round (R) and not selected after (R) existed. What it does not prove: that the bits are quantum, secret, certified, or unique. This is not a certification of anything; see CLAIMS.md in the log repository.

pip install notbefore            # PyPI, 0.2.0; needs git and openssl on PATH; add [anchors] for OpenTimestamps proofs
notbefore verify 41              # commit 40 + reveal 41: signatures (pinned keys), drand BLS offline, RFC 3161, Rekor anchors
notbefore value 41               # V, only if verify passes
notbefore seed 41 --purpose clinic-qi-roster-2026-09-12       # S = SHA256("notbefore/derive/v1" || V || purpose)
notbefore shuffle 41 --purpose split:iris-csv:v3 rows.txt      # deterministic shuffle of the lines of rows.txt
notbefore split 41 --purpose split:iris-csv:v3 --frac 0.8 rows.txt

Streams, for scripting. Payloads go to stdout only; the verification transcript goes to stderr. So V=$(notbefore value 45) is the 64-hex value and nothing else, and notbefore shuffle … > out.txt is clean. -q silences the PASS/INFO lines; FAIL/WARN lines and a non-zero exit still report a bad pair. --json gives a machine-readable result on stdout.

seed, shuffle and split write a transcript JSON (notbefore-<seq>-<purpose>.json) — the engineering artifact that lets anyone reproduce the result from the public log.

Trust model. The verifier, the signing keys, the drand group key, the Rekor log key, the freetsa CA and the expected host configuration are vendored inside this package, pinned at a named commit of the log repository (notbefore --version prints it). The CLI executes only those files; the log is read as data. Updating the verifier means updating the package — deliberately.

Two publication surfaces. The log is read from git (a cached clone of the repository, or --log-dir); https://notbefore.net serves the same repository statically. Once checkpoints are enabled, verify also fetches https://notbefore.net/checkpoint and requires it to be the same head as git's, or an append-only relative of it — two different heads under the log's key is a split between surfaces and fails loudly (--checkpoint-url overrides).

Eligible pairs start at 0020/0021 (0026/0027 preferred, execution enforced). verify 19 fails by design (ERR-007). Pulses 0001–0041 carry retroactive anchors (2026-09-12 12:47 UTC); from 0042 anchors are contemporaneous.

MIT. Data in the log: CC BY 4.0.

Releasing (operators): RELEASING.md — every change to the verifier or keys needs a new package, and the flow there is the only way one gets made.