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Signed Tickets

A signed ticket is an OpenSSH-signed authorization payload that ASF50 uses to gate high-stakes production operations. The design is offline-friendly: the owner signs on their workstation, the orchestrator verifies, and the private key never enters the ASF50 repository, runtime, evidence, chat, or documentation.

Deterministic payload​

A signed ticket payload has the following canonical fields:

{
  "ticket_id": "<uuid>",
  "gate_id": "<uuid>",
  "goal_id": "<GOAL_ID>",
  "subject_sha": "<40-char commit SHA>",
  "production_target": "<environment name or identifier>",
  "issuer": "<human principal name>",
  "namespace": "<namespace>",
  "payload_digest": "<hex digest of the payload being authorized>",
  "created_at": "<UTC ISO-8601>"
}

The payload_digest binds the ticket to the exact bytes of the operation payload (e.g., the production manifest). Changing a single byte invalidates the signature.

Trust model​

The owner maintains an owner public trust file at agent-harness/governance/allowed_signers (one line per principal). The matching owner private key lives only on the owner's workstation — never in the repo. The orchestrator verifies with ssh-keygen -Y verify:

ssh-keygen -Y verify \
  -f agent-harness/governance/allowed_signers \
  -I <issuer> \
  -n <namespace> \
  -s <signature-file>

If verification succeeds against the principal in allowed_signers, the ticket is considered authentic.

Replay protection​

Tickets are single-use. After the orchestrator consumes a ticket, the gate transitions to APPROVED. A second submission of the same ticket_id is rejected with a replay error.

Subject binding​

The ticket's subject_sha must match the runtime's observed HEAD. A ticket signed for SHA abc123 is rejected if the runtime is at def456. This is the canonical stale-subject rejection.

What the private key is NOT​

  • It is not in the ASF50 repo.
  • It is not in the runtime DB or evidence/.
  • It is not in chat history.
  • It is not in this documentation.

If you see a private key anywhere in the canonical ASF50 repository, that is a security incident. Open a REPAIR_GOAL and revoke the key immediately.

See Signed-Ticket Guide for the operator walkthrough.