Custody

A credential is only as safe as the party that holds it. In valiss the party that keeps a subject’s seed, and the tokens that go with it, is that subject’s custodian. Custody is the question of who that party is: the subject itself, the issuer that issued the credential, or some component standing between a client and the verifier.

One thing to state plainly and up front: valiss has no custodian server today. A first-party service that would hold credentials on a client’s behalf is planned but not implemented. It does not exist, it has no release, and nothing in the protocol depends on it. Everything below that describes custody as it works now is custody you already arrange yourself out of the pieces valiss ships. Everything that describes the custodian server is a statement of a problem, not of a built component. The two are kept clearly apart.

Custody as it works today

Today custody is self-custody. A service that authenticates with valiss holds its own credentials file, its tokens packaged with the signing seed, and signs its own requests. Nothing sits between it and the verifier. The verifier holds only the operator public key and an allowlist, never a seed, so custody is one-directional: signing power lives only on the signing side, and a verifier compromise cannot leak it. The seed is the secret in the file, and its holder can be the subject; the tokens beside it are public artifacts that give nothing away.

The issuer is the one custodian valiss treats as special, and the rule there is firm: the operator seed never touches production. It lives with the issuer and comes out only to sign new credentials (see the security model on operator-seed custody). The valiss CLI (early development) is the designed home for exactly this custody: an operator’s keys and tokens are meant to live in its encrypted per-operator store, with issuance and creds export running from there. That store is not built yet, its commands are stubs today, so keeping the seeds apart from the services that only consume the creds is a separation you arrange now out of the parts valiss ships, with a secrets manager holding the seeds. The Go library exposes the same issuing primitives directly for programmatic issuance, and valiss-go’s examples/minter is a minimal illustration of driving them out of process, resolving seeds from the environment rather than holding them.

The gap custody leaves

Self-custody assumes a client that can hold and protect a whole credential. Not every client can.

• Constrained environments, where a credentials file and a signing key cannot be stored safely, or cannot be stored at all.
• Third parties you want to authenticate but cannot hand a full credentials file to, because handing over the seed is handing over the ability to be the subject.
• Contexts where transmitting a whole token on every call is impractical: the token is large, or the channel between the client and the service carries only a short opaque string.

For these, self-custody is either impossible or unsafe. Bearer tokens help only partly: a bearer token still is the whole token, replayable by whoever holds it until it expires. What is missing is a party that will hold the real credential and let a weak client act through it with something smaller.

The planned custodian server

That party is the planned custodian server, described here at the level of the problem it solves. Its design is not yet settled, and the points below will not invent one.

What can be said about the intent:

• It is planned as an optional, first-party service. An operator chooses whether to run one, and a deployment that does not is a complete valiss deployment. The protocol never requires it.
• It would hold credentials and verify tokens on behalf of holders that cannot carry or protect a full credential themselves.
• It would issue short aliases that stand in for a stored credential: an api-key-style id and secret pair a weak client can carry and present where transmitting the whole token is impractical. The alias refers to the credential the custodian holds; the client need never see the token or seed behind it.
• It is infrastructure, not the trust anchor. Offline verification against the pinned operator key stays the core of valiss with or without a custodian. Running one adds a convenience for weak clients; it does not move the trust anchor onto a server, and everything in the security model still roots in the operator public key.

What is deliberately left open, and must not be read into the points above:

• whether the custodian stores seeds, or only tokens;
• how an alias is consumed, whether a client exchanges it for a credential or the custodian introspects it on the client’s behalf;
• the RPC framework, the storage backend, and any timeline.

These stay open: fixing them here would commit the design before it is decided. When the custodian server is built, the custodian’s concept page lands here. Until then it marks the boundary between what valiss does today and one direction it may grow.

Related

• Creds: the credential file whose custody this page is about, and why the seed inside it, not the tokens, is the secret to guard.
• Security model: the operator-seed custody guidance, and the one-directional custody the verifier enforces by holding no seed at all.
• Allowlist: a single-method predicate the verifier consults on every request. Because it is a pluggable predicate rather than a fixed list, a custodian is exactly the kind of service that could back an interface like it.