cert-generator

Render a QC certificate from a bmc-sensor-audit attestation.

Released — 0.2.4, tagged v0.2.4, Apache-2.0, on PyPI as odm-cert-generator.

0.2.4 is a source distribution its own suite runs from. 0.2.3's sdist carried tests/ and not the hygiene and commit-message tools two of those tests import, so anyone running the suite from it -- a distribution packager, a reviewer -- got two collection errors and no tests. It now carries the whole tracked tree. Nothing the wheel installs changed except the version.

0.2.3 needs the BMC half where a walk is read, not at import. Both symbols this tool takes from the audit package are called in capture_from_walk and nowhere else, and both were imported at module scope -- so render --walk-digest, which reads no walk, required the package anyway. It is imported by the one function that reads a BMC walk now. The seam is unchanged: the attestation format is a presence audit's and a walk is a BMC's.

0.2.2 takes the attestation from presence-audit. bmc-sensor-audit 0.3.0 moved everything that was never about a BMC into a separate package; the attestation validator and its format name went with it, the Redfish walk validator did not. Two dependencies now, and the referee floor rises with them. The message you get when one is missing names the one that is missing, which it did not.

0.2.1 says what the problem list is. check printed each problem indented under no header, so the first line an operator read began with whitespace and never named what the list was about. The refusal now negates the sentence the clean run prints, so both verdicts use one vocabulary. Nothing else changed.

0.2.0 raises the referee floor to 0.2.0. From there the referee refuses a command that asks to verify and not to verify at once, instead of running unverified — and a certificate rendered from a walk taken over an unverified connection is a document nobody should rely on. What this package does is unchanged; the break is in the floor.

0.1.3 carried the repository's publication-hygiene tooling: the rules run over commit messages as well as files, and a pre-commit hook refuses a commit whose staged content it has not read.

0.1.2 lets a certificate name the capture it was judged from. The audit tool refuses to hold unit identity and this package holds nothing else, so the binding between them has to happen on content — and a content handle is what the audit tool supplies. The version that does is the floor in pyproject.toml, not a number repeated here.

The distribution and the command differ, and the reason is worth one line. PyPI ultranormalises a name by stripping its separators, so cert-generator becomes certgenerator — which an unrelated project holds — and the upload is refused as too similar to an existing project. So this publishes as odm-cert-generator and installs a command still called cert-generator. A certificate records the distribution name, because that is the one that resolves on an index.

pip install odm-cert-generator

cert-generator render \
    --attestation attestation.json \
    --identity identity.json \
    --coverage coverage.json \
    --out-json certificate.json \
    --out-pdf certificate.pdf

What it is for

The audit tool judges a machine and deliberately keeps the machine's identity out of everything it writes. A certificate has the opposite job: it has to name the unit. This renders one from the other, and holds the serial number on its own side of the line.

Two trust domains, split on purpose. The referee cannot leak what it never sees. The certificate can say what a certificate must.

The certificate never claims a flat pass

It will not print "100 % match". It prints the denominator:

6 invariant(s) checked over 3 entit(ies); 1 finding(s) recorded;
3 check(s) declined and therefore not judged

...and then a section headed Not part of this judgment, which is emitted even when every list in it is empty — because an absent section reads as nothing was left out, and that is a claim.

That section carries:

A certificate showing what was not checked is one an incoming-inspection team can act on. The denominator is the point, not a concession.

The declaration diff is a second, optional input

attestation/1 records what the engine judged. It does not record what was declared and never showed up. Run the audit tool against a board declaring four sensors where one is absent and the artifact reads checked: {entities: 3} — three, with nothing on it saying three of four.

So --coverage takes the JSON from bmc-sensor-audit coverage --json, which does carry the diff. Supply it and the certificate states declared-vs-present and names the absent sensor. Leave it out and the certificate says, on the page:

no declaration diff was supplied, so this certificate cannot state how many declared sensors were present; the attestation counts only entities that reached the engine

It is optional because requiring it would make a certificate impossible for anyone holding only an attestation. It is stated because the smaller denominator must not pass for the whole picture.

That coverage artifact is written for a CI log, not a customer. It names the BMC by URL and the configuration by filesystem path. Both are dropped here before anything is rendered; see tests/test_privacy.py.

The PDF is a projection of the JSON

No number appears in the PDF that is absent from the certificate JSON. The JSON is the record; the PDF is how it looks. Anyone holding both can check one against the other without trusting this code:

cert-generator verify --certificate certificate.json --pdf certificate.pdf

Shipped rather than kept in a CI script, for the same reason the audit tool ships its attestation validator: the person who receives the document is the one who needs to check it.

The suite checks the same property with poppler's pdftotext — a reader nobody here wrote.

Which capture the judgment came from

The audit tool refuses to hold unit identity; this package holds nothing else. The binding between the two has to happen on content, and since the tool shipped a content handle there is finally something to bind to:

cert-generator render --attestation attestation.json --identity identity.json \
                      --walk walk.json          # computes and verifies the handle
cert-generator render ... --walk-digest sha256:81422480...   # records one produced elsewhere

Both are legitimate and they are not the same claim, so the record carries which one it is. --walk means this program read the file and computed the handle; --walk-digest means it was handed the value and checked nothing. A clean orchestrator run deletes its walks long before a certificate is rendered, so often the handle is all that survives — that case is supported and labelled rather than quietly presented as a measurement.

The handle is a SHA-256 over the walk file's bytes, computed with the audit tool's own function so there is one definition of it rather than two. A recipient matches it with sha256sum and no tooling at all; a walk that does not match is not the walk that was judged. A malformed handle is refused rather than printed — one that looks like proof and matches nothing is worse than none.

Reading a walk is not a boundary crossing. A walk carries no identity by construction: the audit tool serialises the parsed sensor set and never the raw payloads, which is the same rule described below.

Identity goes one way

Identity flows into the certificate and never back toward the audit inputs. This package does not construct walks, configurations or supplemental declarations, and has no HTTP client. tests/test_boundary.py enforces it by parsing this package's own imports, because a rule kept by review lasts exactly as long as the reviewer's attention.

The only thing it may reach for in the audit tool is validate_attestation — the tool's shipped validator, not a second copy of its rules. A shapeless artifact is refused, not decorated.

Exit codes

The family's contract, not this tool's invention:

Precedence is max, copied from the audit tool. A run that both found something and failed to finish reports 2, because 2 is the statement about the denominator and 1 would let a reader conclude the rest was checked.

A certificate is still written when the verdict is 1. A QC record for a unit that failed is a valid document.

A certificate is not the pipeline's verdict

Two records run in parallel and neither contains the other. This one certifies what the referee established about a unit: the attestation, the identity, and the declaration diff when one is supplied. Conformance and fault injection are not in it. Those meet in odm-qa-pipeline aggregate, which answers a different question — did all four gates run, and what is the worst thing any of them found.

Worth stating because reading either as the other goes wrong in both directions: a clean certificate says nothing about whether the injection gate ran, and a clean pipeline verdict is not a document anyone can hand to a customer.

The identity block

{
  "serial": "SN-A17-000482",
  "work_order": "WO-2026-08-1174",
  "station": "FCT-3",
  "signer": "L. Okonkwo",
  "part_number": "PN-88213-B",
  "customer": "Example Hyperscale Inc.",
  "line": "Kaohsiung 2"
}

The first four are required. The rest are optional and rendered when present. Nothing is inferred, and an unrecognised key is refused rather than dropped — a typo would otherwise vanish silently, and nobody reads a certificate looking for the field that is not on it.

Known limits, written down rather than implied

• Latin-1 only. The built-in PDF fonts cannot draw characters outside it. An identity field containing them is refused, not transliterated: a serial number silently rewritten is worse than a failed render. Shipping a Unicode font would lift this; it has not been done.
• verify needs a PDF reader. poppler's pdftotext if it is on PATH, otherwise pip install 'odm-cert-generator[verify]' for pypdf. If neither is present the command exits 2 — not finding a reader is not a pass.
• Nothing here re-audits the machine. verify proves the page matches the record. The record's authority comes from the attestation, and the attestation's from the engine.
• One page. Automatic page breaks are off on purpose, so a certificate that overflows is visible as overflow rather than quietly paginated. A unit with very many findings will need the JSON.

Where it sits

arbiter-engine        the invariant envelope
presence-audit        the attestation format, and the validator for it
bmc-sensor-audit      the referee: the walk, and the handle for it
cert-generator        this: identity, and the honest certificate

No version ranges in that diagram, on purpose. It carried two and both had gone false — an arbiter-engine floor this package does not declare at all, and a bmc-sensor-audit floor one patch below the real one. The pin that binds is in pyproject.toml; pip show odm-cert-generator prints what your install actually resolved. A number whose only job is to be current belongs where it is enforced, not in a picture.

qa-orchestrator sits beside this one, injecting faults and checking the referee caught them. odm-qa-pipeline composes all of them.

Licence

Apache-2.0.