Signing & Cryptography
Provenance in System9 is not asserted by a system of record sitting between the producer and the consumer. Content is signed at origin, the signature travels with what it signs, and it is verified again at the moment of use: later, offline, against a key the verifier already holds. The difference is the difference between "our database says this is the original" and "here is the signature; check it yourself."
The same signing and verification concepts hold on both runtimes. A cell mints and signs; the Edge Agent verifies offline against pinned keys, with no coordinator to call and no wall clock to trust. Where the two runtimes implement one contract, that contract is pinned with cross-language fixtures so a signature minted on one side is accepted byte-for-byte on the other.
In this area
- The cryptographic system: the CA trust chain, the per-entity X.509 / SSH / PGP material, cell identity and mutual TLS, post-quantum hybrid issuance, and the key-custody operator quorum, in one map.
- Entity credentials and their lifecycle: three certificate systems at operational parity, each carried through issue, sign, verify, revoke and rotate, with a gossip revocation bus, rotation coordinated as an atomic unit across peers, drift detection, and containment when one compromise threatens to pull others down with it.
- Secrets management: one secret substrate with pluggable backends, local for sovereign operation or a cloud vault you already run, with scoped key-encryption-keys, envelope encryption bound to identity, zeroizing in-memory buffers, and a credential that never crosses a service boundary.
- PKI protocols: the five standard protocol servers that serve, and the three certificate-enrollment scaffolds that refuse deterministically rather than pretending to issue.
- Signing and provenance: what is signed at origin, how a signature is bound to one purpose, and how it is verified at use.
- Post-quantum hybrid signatures: the Ed25519 + ML-DSA-65 construction, independent pinning, and downgrade resistance.
- Key custody and lifecycle: where private key material lives, how it is sealed, rotated, and revoked, and what stays offline.
The properties that hold everywhere
| Property | What it means |
|---|---|
| Signed at origin | A frame is signed on the device at capture; a policy is signed by the issuing entity before it replicates; a workflow step carries a cell-identity signature over its input and output hashes. |
| The signature travels | Provenance is an attribute of the artifact, not a lookup in a service. A shared dataset carries its compiled policy in a signed envelope; a data product carries a provenance envelope. |
| Domain separation | Every signed body is prefixed with a purpose-specific separator, so a signature minted for one artifact class can never be replayed as another: a listing signature is not a package signature is not a grant signature. |
| Verified at use, offline | Verification recomputes the canonical bytes and checks the signature against a pinned public key. It reaches no network, reads no shared state, and takes the current time from the caller. |
| Fail-closed | A malformed envelope, a tampered field, an unknown signer, or a missing post-quantum half is a rejection, never a crash and never a silent pass. |
Certificate and key foundations
System9 operates three certificate systems (X.509, SSH, and OpenPGP) each implementing issue, sign, verify, revoke, and rotate. Underneath them sits a key-encryption-key hierarchy with epochs and a hash-chained ratchet log (an opt-in, default-off forward-secret KEK ratchet builds on it), per-purpose key separation, and key material that can be held in software or behind hardware: TPM 2.0, PKCS#11, and YubiKey PIV. Standard protocol servers (ACME, EST, SCEP, OCSP, CRL/KRL generation, and the SPIFFE Workload API) let ordinary clients enroll and rotate without bespoke integration.
The platform is algorithm-agile by design: an algorithm registry, peer capability negotiation, and a migration planner exist precisely to answer the question "what happens when this curve is broken?", which is also why signing runs a post-quantum hybrid construction.
System9 components are described by mechanism, not by grade. The cryptographic
primitives, hybrid constructions, and offline verification paths on this page are
implemented and exercised by test; no component is presented here as certified or
graded. Post-quantum material is used for signing, key exchange, and X.509
issuance: hybrid X.509 issuance is built and opt-in, the issuance path
dispatches on the crypto policy's algorithm_family, hybrid and pq_only
mint a classical + ML-DSA-65 certificate and fail closed (no downgrade), and
classical is the default.
The default post-quantum OID arc is a reserved placeholder (PEN 99999, unregistered) and is runtime-warned. A deployment must set its own registered Private Enterprise Number arc before any hybrid certificate leaves the fabric. The classical half stays valid regardless.
What is measured
The crypto plane is instrumented in Prometheus-native form, because everything else depends on it. Published signals cover issuance count and duration, unseal duration, rotation count, key-revocation-list propagation time, attestation count, audit-chain verification count, snapshot tick duration, active certificate count, hardware security module availability, per-certificate expiry, key-use count and duration, audit event count, and SIEM forwarding forwarded and dropped counts. Certificate and key inventories (X.509, SSH, PGP) are published as totals.
Labels carry algorithm, purpose, outcome, storage type, backend, trust level and transport, so a slow issuance path resolves to which algorithm, on which backend, for which purpose rather than to a single unhelpful average.
Two of these are security metrics rather than operational ones. Key-revocation-list propagation time measures how long a revoked key stays dangerous. Hardware security module availability measures whether key custody is currently where policy says it should be. See what is measured.
Related topics
- Governance (Deny-Closed), signed policy commitments and the authoritative deny that governance enforces.
- Compliance & Audit, the hash-chained ledgers and external witness proofs that make provenance auditable after the fact.
- Data Exchange, cross-org listings that carry a signed, offline-verifiable attestation across the org boundary.