gatekeeper-ledger

Public timestamps of Gatekeeper detections (salted hashes, revealed after confirmation)

How this ledger works

Gatekeeper watches every new npm release. When it flags a package, it commits a line <flag time> <sha256> to commitments/<day>.txt within minutes. The hash is

sha256(salt || {"flagged_at": ..., "package": ..., "verdict": "flagged", "version": ...})

with a random 16-byte salt per flag (canonical JSON, sorted keys, no spaces). The package name stays hidden, so nobody is named before a detection is verified.

Once a detection is independently confirmed (OSV / OpenSSF malicious-packages, GitHub advisories, or an npm takedown), its salt and line are published in revealed/<month>.jsonl. To verify a claim "Gatekeeper flagged X at time T":

1. Recompute sha256(bytes.fromhex(salt) + line.encode()) and find the digest in commitments/.
2. Check the git commit time of that line: it must be earlier than the public report.

Flags that are never confirmed are never revealed.

Update (2026-10-28 10:20 UTC): independent timestamps

Git commit dates can be set by whoever commits, so they prove nothing on their own. Since 2026-10-28 ~10:20 UTC every batch is written as a new file commitments/<day>/<HHMMSS>-<id>.txt together with <same name>.txt.ots, an OpenTimestamps proof that anchors the batch in the Bitcoin blockchain through public calendar servers. To check when a batch existed, independently of Gatekeeper and of GitHub:

pip install opentimestamps-client
ots upgrade <batch>.txt.ots      # once the Bitcoin attestation is available (a few hours)
ots verify <batch>.txt.ots

Entries in the older per-day files commitments/<day>.txt (before 10:20 UTC on 2026-10-28) only have git dates.