agentrust-capture-core

agentrust-capture-core

Shared fingerprinting, comparison and baseline-sealing core for AgenTrust agent-integrity capture engines.

Each engine answers one question about a different coding agent:

Is this the agent composition I approved, with nothing added and nothing subtracted?

What differs between agents is where to look and what to call things. What must not differ is how content is fingerprinted, how snapshots are compared, how a baseline is sealed, and the rules that keep a report honest. This package owns the second list.

Why it exists

Those parts lived in three copies, and the cost was not theoretical:

• The same skill-fingerprinting bypass had to be found and fixed twice, independently, in two shipped engines. A component was digested by its manifest alone, so a payload swapped into a sibling scripts/ directory left the fingerprint unchanged and the report said "nothing added, nothing subtracted".
• A reporting defect that rendered unmeasured categories as measured zeros was fixed in one engine while the other kept shipping it.

A fourth engine would have meant writing both bugs a fourth time.

What it does not do

No dependencies. The engines are invoked by shell hooks at session start and must the smallest possible install for a drift check, so this package is standard library only and a test asserts it.

No opinion on where an agent keeps its files, what its categories are called, or how its report is laid out. Baseline scoping in particular is deliberately not unified: Claude Code keeps one baseline per machine, Codex keeps one per workspace because a workspace carries its own instructions and skills. Both are correct for their agent, so an engine supplies its own paths.

The pieces

Two rules worth knowing before you use it

An unmeasured category is not an empty one. A shell hook cannot see a live tool roster or the model. Rendering those as 0 tools states a measurement that was never taken, and a reader who cannot tell "we did not check" from "we checked and found nothing" treats an absence as a pass. Use measured_or and unmeasured_footnote.

A partial check is not a clean bill of health. clean_verdict(complete=False) qualifies the verdict as "in the categories checked".

On what sealing is worth

attach_seal stores a SHA-256 digest of the baseline's own content. It catches corruption, truncation, and a hand-edit that does not recompute it. It does not catch an attacker who owns the state directory, who can recompute the digest as easily as this package can.

An earlier design used an HMAC with a locally stored secret. It was removed: the only adversary an HMAC defeats here is one who can write the state directory without being able to read it, which barely exists on a developer machine, and the stored secret was a credential to leak in exchange.

The control that does survive a real adversary is off-box. Engines print the baseline digest on approve and on verify, so a human who recorded the first sees a silent re-baseline even when the attacker resealed it perfectly. There is a test that makes this limit executable rather than prose.

License

Apache-2.0.