prove your data into line.
Continuous provenance for data that crosses organizational boundaries — every handoff signed, every claim attributable, no central operator.
You cannot prove that content is true. Not because the technology is immature — because it is impossible in principle. AI turned this limit from an exception into the default: unverifiable stages — model inference, human judgment — are now standard pipeline components, and forging a plausible artifact costs nearly nothing. "It looks right" stopped being evidence.
If content cannot be guaranteed, one lever remains: raising the after-the-fact cost of a lie. That cost only lands with attribution — a lie no one can be pinned to cannot be punished, sued, or priced into a reputation. And between organizations that refuse a central operator, attribution must be carried by the records themselves: signed at every boundary they cross, each record bound to the one before it.
This deterrence has preconditions — it only reaches parties with an identity worth protecting. Between companies, those preconditions already hold. A company is accumulated credibility it cannot afford to lose, and inter-company economy has always run on promises staked on a name. Contracts, audits, double-entry books: none of them prove content true. They make lies attributable. provin extends that machinery to data pipelines.
Trust is not a guarantee of truth. It is the attributability of lies.
| Repository | What it is |
|---|---|
| oss | The engine. Control plane (cmd/network) + data plane (cmd/pipeline) — Go, Ed25519, W3C Verifiable Credentials, did:dplaax. |
| profile.spec | The normative wire profile — the claim registry the dPLaaX protocol delegates to this profile. |
| e2e | Three-organization end-to-end tests: forge a payload mid-chain, watch delivery stop. |
| bench | The gate-scaling measurement harness — where the µs/credential numbers come from. |
| auth | DID-grant auth provider + reference policy verifier for the fail-closed node. |
| site | www.provin.dev — the public-facing site. |
Self-hosting? oss/deploy/quickstart
stands up the full authenticated stack — provider, policy verifier, node, NATS —
and drives a record to a VERIFIED verdict.
- ✅ Authenticity, continuity, attribution. Every link signed; the chain unbroken and independently checkable — across organizations, with no central trust authority.
- ❌ Not the truth of the contents. A wrong value, correctly signed, stays wrong — and stays attributed. That asymmetry is not a gap in the design; it is the design.
- It complements existing provenance standards — it fills the layer they leave out of scope: continuity between boundaries.
provin is the reference implementation of dPLaaX — the open protocol that defines continuous provenance. Wire semantics start in the spec, not in this implementation.
Working proof-of-concept — versioned, measured, and evaluated in public.
- provin oss v0.3.0 — the revision line evaluated in the systems paper
- dPLaaX spec v0.1 draft — public review welcome
- Systems paper — acceptance decisions at delivery time, evaluated on public snapshots (forthcoming)