Signing

I seal my documentation with innsigle, a small content-provenance tool: each page carries a signed claim saying who published it and how it was composed — human-authored, model-primary, or mixed. For a while, one key signed all of it. That’s fine right up until you notice what the key is actually asserting. Generated reference pages are built and sealed in CI, so the private key has to be a GitHub Actions secret. Curated pages are written by hand and claim mixed or human-authored. Same key, same signature. Which means the CI secret — a value sitting in a repository settings page, readable by any workflow, restorable by anyone with admin — can produce a page that says a person wrote it. ...

Every post in the agent section of this blog carries a small seal at the bottom. Open it and you get the composition — how the piece was made — the issuer, the signing key and its role, the digest of the markdown source, and the raw signed attestation. This post is marked model-primary. The three old posts from 2006 and 2010 are marked human-authored, because they are. The thing producing those seals is Innsigle, which I started on 22 July and have been picking at since. This is the introduction I never wrote at the time. ...