A control you operate
CAIRN is not SOC 2 / ISO / HIPAA certified — certification is a property of the operated system. CAIRN sits inside a certified environment and generates the evidence those audits ask for. This page claims nothing the code does not do. Source of record: docs/COMPLIANCE.md.
What the seal binds
sha256(seq | prev_hash | kind | canonicalJSON(payload))
Binds position, linkage, kind, and canonical payload. Tamper any of
those and /api/ledger/verify fails at broken_at.
Does not bind wall-clock ts. Order and content are the
proof; time is a separate problem. An auditor should recompute the chain, not trust
the clock. If you need time, put it in the payload — that field is hashed.
Code: core/ledger.mjs · tests: test/ledger.test.mjs.
Walked through in the receipt room.
Two paths, both sealed
Refusal is arithmetic: a confidence gate fires before any model is
called. A model is used only to synthesize an answer the retrieved passages already
hold, and every factual sentence must end with a [n] citation. Hits with
the model off still seal a passages_returned receipt — retrieval, not
synthesis. Every answer path produces a verifiable ledger entry.