Sharing an early-stage protocol design I’d like pushback on.
Existing supply-chain defenses verify that an artifact was built from intended blindly trusted components. They don’t answer the question:
can someone get arbitrary bytes into a published artifact?
TAINT rewards cryptographic proof of injection capability. A claimer commits a secret, the contract derives an unpredictable challenge, and the claimer must cause a derived flag to appear inside a scoped region of a published artifact — then prove its inclusion via Merkle proof.
A smart contract verifies and pays out automatically.
If someone can place a harmless flag, they could have placed malware; rewarding the harmless version reveals the capability before it gets abused.
Paper and repo: GitHub - juli/taint: TAINT: Crypto protocol for testing software supply chain integrity · GitHub
Looking for general feedback across the whole protocol: construction, grinding analysis under more permissive extraction strategies, entropy source trade-offs, and the reward mechanism (particularly control claims and propagation).
Prior art I may have missed also welcome; the closest neighbors I found were CHEESECLOTH and the attestation frameworks (signatures, reproducible builds, SLSA, in-toto, Sigstore) , but TAINT proves a different property than either.
Happy to dig into any piece in the thread.