Provenance
In openIE CAD, a design is never just its final shape. Every artifact along the way carries a content hash, and those hashes link together into a chain that runs from the original source all the way to a physical, manufactured board.
The chain
Section titled “The chain”The chain begins at the source: a design’s source is hashed with FNV-64. From there, the canonical intermediate representation — the UDD — carries its own content hash. The fabrication bundle derived from the UDD has a hash of its own, and so does the vendor submission body that goes out to be built. Finally, an Ed25519 attestation signs the result.
Each link is derived from the one before it, so the chain is not a loose collection of fingerprints but a continuous path. Change anything upstream and every downstream hash changes with it.
What this enables
Section titled “What this enables”The practical payoff is re-derivability. A buyer holding a manufactured board can re-derive every step of the chain and verify, byte for byte, exactly what was built. There is no need to trust a claim about what a board contains — the chain can be recomputed and checked against the signed attestation.
Agent work is held to the same standard. Every tool call an agent makes is recorded as a hash-chained work order, so the operations that shaped a design are as auditable as the artifacts themselves.
Why it matters
Section titled “Why it matters”A content-hash chain turns trust into something you can check rather than something you have to take on faith. It makes a design auditable: anyone with the artifacts can confirm how they relate. It makes a result reproducible: the same source yields the same hashes. And it supports supply-chain integrity, because a manufactured board can be tied back, byte for byte, to the source it came from — and to the agent operations that produced it, each captured as a work order.
This is a verification mechanism, not a guarantee about a design’s correctness or fitness — it tells you faithfully what was built and how it was derived, so that judgment can rest on facts rather than assertions.