akmon bundle attest

Documented for Akmon 2.2.0.

Who this is for

Operators who want to bind a named human (or service account) and a role to an AGEF bundle's session, answering "who claims to have operated this session", on top of the bundle's integrity hash chain and any head signature. akmon bundle attest records a signed AGEF-OPERATOR-v1 operator attestation in manifest.operator_attestations[]. Verifiers later check it with akmon bundle verify --operator-key or agef-verify --operator-key.

The honesty point: trust attaches to the KEY, not the name

An attestation is a signature over the four self-asserted identity fields (operator_id, display_name, role, org) plus the session head. Verification proves only that the holder of a particular private key signed those fields. It does not prove the person is who the operator_id string claims. Trust in the identity is out-of-band: a verifier decides which key_id (public key) they trust, by some external process (an HR directory, a key-distribution ceremony, a signed roster), and only then does the self-asserted name carry weight. Verification surfaces the name verbatim but the trust signal is operator_key_verified against a key the verifier supplied. Akmon never claims the name is true on its own.

What you will have at the end

• The same bundle with one more entry appended to manifest.operator_attestations[]. The write is atomic (temp file + rename) and purely additive: the event hash chain, the AGEF-SIG-v1 head statement, any existing head signatures, and the prove-openssl head bytes are byte-untouched.
• The attester's key_id (lowercase hex SHA-256 of the operator public key) and the operator public key as 64 hex characters, surfaced on stderr (human mode) or in the JSON report.

Prerequisites

• A .akmon bundle on disk (signed or unsigned).
• An Ed25519 private key in raw PKCS#8 v2 DER form, as produced by akmon bundle keygen --out. (openssl genpkey emits PKCS#8 v1, which the signing path rejects. See the keygen honesty note.)
• A stable --operator-id (an email, employee id, or service account). It is required and must not contain a newline or carriage return.

Steps

Generate an operator key and attest a bundle in place:

akmon bundle keygen --out operator.pk8 --public-out operator.pub.hex
akmon bundle attest /path/to/audit.akmon --key operator.pk8 --operator-id ops@example.com --role approver

Then distribute operator.pub.hex to verifiers (out-of-band) and have them verify:

akmon bundle verify /path/to/audit.akmon --operator-key operator.pub.hex --require-operator

Optional flags

• --display-name <NAME>: human-readable display name (signed). Defaults to empty.
• --role <ROLE>: role the operator acted in, for example approver (signed). Defaults to empty.
• --org <ORG>: organization the operator belongs to (signed). Defaults to empty.
• --output <FILE>: write the attested bundle here instead of attesting in place.
• --format human|json: default human. JSON emits BundleAttestReportV1 with tool, akmon_version, bundle_path, session_id, operator_id, role, key_id, public_key_hex, and output_path. The private key is never printed.

Note on head signatures (O9)

If the bundle already carries a head signature, attest leaves agef_version untouched so the existing AGEF-SIG-v1 signature stays valid; on an unsigned bundle it stamps the current spec version. Either way the attestation is built from the manifest's current agef_version, so it is self-consistent. Attesting never invalidates a previously verifiable head signature.

Exit codes

See also

• akmon bundle keygen
• akmon bundle verify
• akmon bundle prove-openssl
• agef-verify
• akmon sign