Christian: 'The goal is not to hamstring closed source developers. It's just to
validate clean code.'
Right. So the cap is a rung, not a wall, and it now says so.
L0 unattested -> 3 nothing but your word
L1 declared -> 5 SBOM + signed hash + published destination allowlist
L2 observed -> 7 someone other than you watched this exact binary
L3 reproducible -> 9 anyone can rebuild it and get the same bytes
L4 contested -> 10 someone tried to break it and published the attempt
A court filing lifts the ceiling entirely, because it needs no vendor cooperation.
db/attest/validate.mjs computes the level from which artifacts exist. A vendor
cannot claim one. The load-bearing rule is the attestor column:
a vendor running our harness produces a DECLARATION, not an OBSERVATION.
Verified against three cases. A vendor claiming L2 with their own capture report
is downgraded to L1 and fails validation. The same artifacts with us as attestor
grant L2. A broken rebuild claim never reaches L3.
Levels 3 and 4 survive a self-run on purpose: a public rebuild recipe and a
published adversarial review can be re-executed or re-read by anyone, so who
pressed the button stops mattering.
Honest limit, written into the module: this cannot prove the absence of a
backdoor. Rice's theorem makes that undecidable, and a backdoor triggered by
remote config or message content is invisible to static inspection. An
attestation raises the cost and shortens the shelf life. It is not a proof.
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