SociACL

Social-graph authority plane for a self-healing mesh of devices and data.

Four verbs on one graph: Check, Remint, Discover / Elect, Destroy. People, agents, and devices are first-class nodes. Grants come from jointly stated edges and named predicates. Light, radio, and proximity can attest a statement; they do not grant.

This repository is the public core (MIT). It is not Hypermesh, Panopticon acl-service, or LightIFF. Social Light is a named attestation channel here. FyberLabs/socialight owns badge and hop delivery. crates/social-light is a local lab for the hop frame. A flash is a channel, not a grant.

Verbs

Verb	When	What it does
CHECK(action, object, accessor)	Hot path	Object-named predicate on a snapshot of jointly stated edges (plus privilege-up delay). Hopcap 1. Reason is the predicate id. Fail closed if the predicate is unknown, mismatched, or does not hold. delegate is a keep-operating grant with an action mask (read / write / execute) and optional until. Owner stays owner.
REMINT	Authn holds, authz stale	Fresh capability from ACLs that already name this principal, including a live delegate grant. Not an election.
DISCOVER / ELECT	Authn gone	Object finds or elects an owner from a will written while alive. Elect uses the slow clock. Live principals can cancel. No public vacancy ads.
DESTROY	No heir, or the will says stay secret	Cryptographic erasure of the object's key material.

Two clocks: keep-operating (fast; no new owner, no rekey) and Elect (slow). There is no dead-hand timer. Inactivity is not treated as death.

After a cut, export_bundle freezes what a remaining principal already held. The durable file wraps share keys with XChaCha20-Poly1305 and holder-signs the frame. Client::from_bytes / from_path keep Check, Remint, Discover, and Destroy on that snapshot. Elect refuses. Rejoin continues the same pre-cut snapshot and refuses a union of post-cut Elects. A captured file without the holder secret is not the object.

Build and test

Requires Rust 1.83+ (edition 2021). CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml) runs the same steps on ubuntu-latest.

cargo build --workspace --locked
cargo test --workspace --locked
cargo run --locked -p sociacl-core --example check
cargo run --locked -p sociacl-core --example wills
cargo run --locked -p social-light --example lab
cargo run --locked -p sociacl-gun --example gun

The Check example is a 3-node posix-mode Check (mode 0640). The wills example parses and writes the templates in examples/wills/. The Social Light lab is three devices, one enrolled station, a voluntary badge share, and a quiet node that does not become owner. The Gun example is a hint that is not a grant, then dest delegate Check.

C FFI (sociacl-c) and the Python package (python/sociacl) wrap live Check, owner-only delegate / undelegate, will write/load, the Case C Client (Check, Remint, Discover, Destroy; Elect fails closed), Social Light hop frames (encode / accept / Check / Remint / Discover; Elect fails closed), and the Gun adapter (hint encode / accept / Check / remint / cancel; Elect fails closed). The Gun surface is Check + delegate. s3r.ch copies docs/s3rch-check.d.ts and reimplements light Check in the browser. It does not import this crate.

cargo build --workspace --locked
cc -I crates/sociacl-c/include examples/check.c -L target/debug -lsociacl -o target/sociacl-check-c
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=target/debug target/sociacl-check-c
cc -I crates/sociacl-c/include examples/client.c -L target/debug -lsociacl -o target/sociacl-client-c
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=target/debug target/sociacl-client-c
cc -I crates/sociacl-c/include examples/social_light.c -L target/debug -lsociacl -o target/sociacl-social-light-c
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=target/debug target/sociacl-social-light-c
PYTHONPATH=python python3 python/tests/test_check.py
PYTHONPATH=python python3 python/tests/test_client.py
PYTHONPATH=python python3 python/tests/test_social_light.py
cc -I crates/sociacl-c/include examples/gun.c -L target/debug -lsociacl -o target/sociacl-gun-c
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=target/debug target/sociacl-gun-c
PYTHONPATH=python python3 python/tests/test_gun.py

See ARCHITECTURE.md, docs/verbs.md, docs/wills.md, docs/attestations.md, docs/clocks.md, docs/social-light.md, docs/gun.md, and docs/s3rch-check.md.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.