Goal
Make VMGA evidence tamper-evident under an explicit trust boundary suitable for demos, pilot review, and production-alpha release evidence.
Threat model and claim boundary
VMGA evidence should make post-hoc modification, reordering, truncation, or deletion of evidence records detectable during verification. This is tamper-evident detection, not tamper-proof prevention. VMGA cannot prevent a writer with filesystem access from altering bytes; it can only make alteration detectable under a stated boundary.
Hash-chaining records only detects edits by an actor who cannot recompute a self-consistent chain. An actor who can both rewrite the ledger and read the chaining key can forge a clean chain. Therefore, hard tamper-evidence claims are valid only when the chain's integrity anchor lives outside the agent or broker writer authority domain.
Acceptable anchor tiers:
- Keyed HMAC chain: each record has a MAC keyed with a secret the evidence writer/agent cannot read. This is the realistic production-alpha default and should be preferred for v0.3.0.
- Signed checkpoints: periodic chain-head signatures from a key held by an operator process outside the broker authority context.
- External anchoring: chain heads written to an append-only/WORM sink or external timestamping service the writer cannot rewrite.
Without an out-of-domain anchor, VMGA evidence remains append-only JSONL and integrity-advisory. README/spec/evidence docs must keep the v0.2.1 boundary language until the anchor mechanism is implemented and documented.
Non-goals
- Do not claim tamper-proof storage.
- Do not claim confidentiality; evidence may still contain redacted-but-sensitive metadata.
- Do not claim evidence destruction prevention; gaps should be detectable, not impossible.
- Do not claim non-repudiation or compliance-grade audit by default.
- Do not protect against an attacker who controls both the writer and the anchor key; that deployment is advisory.
Acceptance criteria
Goal
Make VMGA evidence tamper-evident under an explicit trust boundary suitable for demos, pilot review, and production-alpha release evidence.
Threat model and claim boundary
VMGA evidence should make post-hoc modification, reordering, truncation, or deletion of evidence records detectable during verification. This is tamper-evident detection, not tamper-proof prevention. VMGA cannot prevent a writer with filesystem access from altering bytes; it can only make alteration detectable under a stated boundary.
Hash-chaining records only detects edits by an actor who cannot recompute a self-consistent chain. An actor who can both rewrite the ledger and read the chaining key can forge a clean chain. Therefore, hard tamper-evidence claims are valid only when the chain's integrity anchor lives outside the agent or broker writer authority domain.
Acceptable anchor tiers:
Without an out-of-domain anchor, VMGA evidence remains append-only JSONL and integrity-advisory. README/spec/evidence docs must keep the v0.2.1 boundary language until the anchor mechanism is implemented and documented.
Non-goals
Acceptance criteria