awdit

Docs · Source · pip install awdit · The Aither World

The Aither World is an operating system for agents — a Linux you can hand to one, the runtimes it works in, and the tools it works with. awnix is the Linux underneath it; awdit is one of its 67 bricks — each installs on its own, runs offline, and needs no account.

Start here: Write one sensitive action to it and then try to remove the record.

An append-only audit trail whose gaps are detectable.

```bash
pip install awdit

```python
from awdit import append, verify

append("audit.log", "deploy", service="veil", by="david")

r = verify("audit.log")
if not r:
    for problem in r.problems:
        print(problem)

```bash
awdit append audit.log deploy --field service=veil
awdit verify audit.log        # 0 verified · 1 a real problem · 2 could not judge
awdit tail   audit.log -n 20

What it actually proves

Records are hash-chained: each one binds the digest of the one before it, so altering or reordering history breaks the chain at the point of the edit and verify names the record. That much is ordinary.

The part usually got wrong is truncation. A hash chain proves the records you are holding follow one another. It says nothing about records that used to be on the end and are not there now — and cutting the tail off a chained log leaves a perfectly valid shorter chain. That is exactly the edit someone who has just done something wants to make, and exactly the one a naive "tamper-evident log" permits in silence.

So the anchor is part of the format, not an add-on. append() maintains a sidecar holding the head digest and the record count, and verify compares against it:

```
TRUNCATED: anchor records 3 entries, log holds 2 — 1 removed from the end

Three failures, reported as three different things, because during an incident they call for different responses:

What it does not prove — stated, not papered over

If the anchor is on the same disk as the log, an attacker with write access edits both. The anchor turns truncation from undetectable into detectable by anyone who has a copy of the head. To get a real guarantee, put the head somewhere the writer cannot reach: another host, a signed artifact (awseal), a transparency log, a sentence in a chat channel.

A security property whose limits nobody can state is not one you can rely on, so: this detects tampering, it does not prevent it, and its truncation detection is exactly as strong as the independence of the anchor.

verify also reports NO ANCHOR as a warning that is not a pass — a chain with no anchor is self-consistent and truncatable, and reporting "ok" there would convert a missing record into a positive assurance.

Design notes

• No dependencies. An audit log that needs an install before it can be read is one nobody reads during an incident; hashlib and json are the whole requirement.
• The record lands before the anchor moves. If the process dies between the two, verification reports an anchor behind the log — recoverable and obvious. The other order loses a record while claiming completeness.
• Digests are taken over canonical JSON (sorted keys, no whitespace), so a log rewritten by a different writer does not read as tampered. An alarm that fires on formatting is an alarm nobody keeps.
• An unparseable line is reported as itself, not skipped — a silently dropped line becomes a chain gap blamed on the next record.

Tests

Every claim has a mutation that breaks it, including one asserting that a truncated chain with the anchor removed verifies clean — the proof that the anchor is load-bearing rather than decoration.

```bash
pip install -e ".[dev]" && pytest

Part of the aw family: awgit · awgraph · awseal · awdk · awnode

Apache-2.0.

The aw family

Standalone tools that share one idea: replace something you would otherwise have to trust with something you can check.

Each installs on its own, works offline, and needs no account.

awnix is the ground floor — A Linux you can hand to an agent — immutable base, capabilities included.

The Aitherium ecosystem

Every repository here is public. Each publishes an aither-manifest.json beside its page, so any surface can read every sibling's — the network is browsable from any node in it.

Built on llama.cpp · vLLM · ComfyUI · CentOS Stream · Podman · Docker · LanceDB · WireGuard · FFmpeg · Blender + Rigify · headroom · SANA · Hunyuan3D · repowise · Playwright · Chromium · Next.js · React.