Verification expresses confidence and check outcomes over execution behavior.

Core Signals

  • trustLevel: high-level trust posture (proven, attested, best-effort, unverified).
  • status: overall check state (passed, failed, pending, skipped).
  • checks: per-check results with required, severity, evidence, and message.
  • coverage: required and total check ratios.
  • confidence: optional numeric confidence indicator (0..1) for advisory scoring.
  • method: verification strategy (state-compare, policy, composite, etc.).

Verification Semantics

  • Verifiers MUST derive status from checks, not arbitrary strings.
  • Required checks with passed=false that represent completed evaluations MUST force status=failed.
  • Required checks that are not yet evaluated MUST force status=pending.
  • If all checks are skipped/not-run, verifiers MUST emit status=skipped.
  • trustLevel SHOULD align with coverage + required-check outcomes.
  • Evidence references SHOULD point to immutable artifacts where possible.

Status Derivation Table

Use this precedence order when deriving status:

  1. failed: at least one required check is evaluated and failed.
  2. pending: no required evaluated failures, but at least one required check is not yet evaluated.
  3. passed: all required checks are evaluated and passed (optional checks may be mixed).
  4. skipped: all checks are skipped/not-run.

In v1, checks use a boolean passed field. To represent “not yet evaluated”, emit passed=false, set overall status=pending, and provide a pending reason in the check message/details.

Confidence Caveat

confidence is optional and advisory. It MUST NOT override status or required check outcomes in policy decisions.

Typical Decision Pattern

  1. Run deterministic checks.
  2. Mark each check passed/failed with evidence.
  3. Compute coverage metrics.
  4. Derive status and trustLevel.
  5. Emit confidence score and method.

Verification is machine-evaluable by design and intended for downstream policy engines.

Schema: v1/schema/verification.json