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Security model

Designed for compromise - not for marketing.

OSDF should make tampering, rollback, revision deletion, and unauthorized access detectable or preventable under the selected profile. We are explicit about what is guaranteed and what is not.

Core principles

Four properties, built into the format

Passive by default

Documents cannot carry scripts, macros, executables, or auto-fetched content. Opening a file never runs document-supplied code.

Fail closed

Unknown mandatory extensions, failed proofs, unsafe content, and malformed packages block rendering - they never silently degrade.

Cryptographic verification

Integrity and provenance rest on standard primitives: SHA-256 digests, Ed25519 signatures, and signed Merkle roots.

Zero-trust architecture

Policy follows the data object. Access decisions consider identity, device, context, and freshness at the data layer.

Non-negotiable invariants

The rules we don't break

A handful of protocol-level invariants define the boundary of the design. Implementations that violate them cannot carry an Assured or Government-Restricted designation.

INV-001

No universal master key capable of decrypting all customer documents.

INV-002

Every byte in a package belongs to a declared object, or is rejected.

INV-003

Every protected document uses a random per-document encryption key.

INV-004

Organization identity resolution and ledger trust are separate checks.

INV-005

Update trust roots are offline, threshold-protected, and separated from web infrastructure.

INV-006

Historical offline verification remains possible from embedded evidence.

Responsible disclosure

Found a vulnerability?

We maintain a coordinated disclosure process and publish signed advisories. Help us keep the ecosystem safe.