polaris-verify

A detached verifier for Polaris credentials and signed artifacts. It decides authenticity on its own: no Polaris server, no database, no operator console, no network unless you ask it to fetch status.

Project name and import name differ, and the obvious guess lands elsewhere. This project, polaris-verify, installs the polaris-verify COMMAND and the module polaris_verify_cli. The module polaris_verify belongs to a different project, polaris-sdk-python, which is the library. They install side by side without colliding, and pip install polaris-verify followed by import polaris_verify is the mistake this paragraph exists to prevent. The names were fixed before either was published and are not worth changing after: conformance/SPEC.md publishes python -m polaris_verify.conformance as the reference verifier command, so the module name is part of a contract.

# Not on PyPI yet. This works today, from a clean machine, and is measured:
pip install "polaris-verify[cryptography] @ git+https://github.com/EgorKhaklin/polaris-id#subdirectory=packages/polaris-verify"

polaris-verify --pqc-provider auto --pack credential.json

The #subdirectory= fragment is required and is easy to miss: this repository holds several packages, so its root has no pyproject.toml, and pip install git+… without the fragment fails with "does not appear to be a Python project", which reads as "this is not installable" rather than "look one directory down".

Once it is published the command becomes pip install "polaris-verify[cryptography]". See RELEASING.md for why nothing is published yet.

It refuses to start until you say what cryptography it is doing

There is no default and no environment variable for this choice.

--pqc-provider oqs           real ML-DSA via liboqs
--pqc-provider cryptography  real ML-DSA via cryptography>=48
--pqc-provider auto          whichever real backend is installed
--dev-placeholder            NO real cryptography; development only

Run it with none of them and it exits 4 without reading your files. Name a backend that is not usable on the machine and it exits 4 rather than starting and reporting a verification failure for every credential, which reads as the credentials being bad instead of the verifier being unable.

Under --dev-placeholder every verdict carries "crypto": "DEV-PLACEHOLDER" and a banner goes to stderr. Development crypto is never mistaken for production crypto.

Offline means it cannot reach a network

Not "does not today". The verifier contains no networking code at all: zero references to urllib, http.client, socket or requests, and check_detached_verifier fails the build if one appears. An air-gapped relying party is running the same code path as a connected one.

The online status path is a different thing and lives elsewhere, in the SDK and the relying party, both of which are allowed urllib on purpose.

What it verifies

Authenticity packs, presentations and QR frames, status assertions (offline, with a freshness window), ID tokens, epoch checkpoints and leaves, revocation feeds, federation manifests and status bundles, trust lists and attestations, registries, timestamps and their transparency anchors, signed documents, exchange requests, receipts and mints, holder bindings and proofs, agent grants with their revocations and proofs, and cross-authority decisions. --verify-dir re-verifies a directory of published vectors; --selftest checks the verifier against material it generates.

Trust

--issuer-anchor takes a JSON file of the issuer's published verification keys, and --trusted-anchor takes one key hex. Without either, the verifier reports whether a signature is genuine but leaves issuer_trusted unanswered, which is the honest verdict: a genuine signature by a key you do not trust is authentic and worthless.

Configuring a trust root

The anchor file is a JSON list of hex keys, or an object carrying one under public_keys_hex, anchors, public_key_hex or keys. All four are accepted:

["90bece7e1902ccce...the issuer's ML-DSA public key, in hex..."]

polaris-verify --pqc-provider auto --issuer-anchor anchors.json --pack credential.json

Where the key comes from is your decision, and it is the decision that matters. The issuer publishes its keys in a signed registry (GET /api/v1/registry/<agency_id>, verified with verify_registry) and in a signed federation manifest; both are themselves signed, so each moves the question one step rather than answering it. Somewhere a key is pinned out of band, by you. This tool does not pretend otherwise and will not fetch one for you.

What it does guarantee, and what you can script on:

A genuine signature by a key you did not anchor is reported authentic and untrusted, and exits non-zero. The two questions stay separate because collapsing them is how a format check gets read as a trust decision.

Status

0.1.0. Unreleased on any registry as of this writing, and not yet exercised by a named external implementation. See lab/EXTERNAL-NOUNS.md in the repository for what has and has not happened outside the project.

Apache 2.0. Part of the Polaris reference implementation, which runs on notional data.