Your signing certificate

Every package on market.opvs.ai is signed with its vendor's ed25519 key. OPVS runs a small certificate authority: it creates your key pair, records the public half against your vendor, and gives you the private half once.

This is not the credential that authenticates your HTTP calls. That is the partner key. The certificate signs the package bytes; the partner key authenticates the upload.

What the signature protects

The public half of your key is checked at three points:

1. At publish. The registry checks the signature on your bundle against your registered public key. A mismatch is refused before anything is stored.

2. At install. The bundle's SHA-256 and signature are checked before a workspace installs it.

3. After revocation. If your certificate is revoked, OPVS disables every install of packages signed with it, normally within about a minute.

There is no way to publish unsigned.

How you receive it

 You ──"please mint my certificate"──▶ OPVS
                                        │ creates the ed25519 key pair
                                        │ keeps the public key + fingerprint
                                        ▼
 You ◀────── email with a one-time link ─┘
  │
  └─ open the link once ──▶ copy the private key into your CI secrets
                            (the link is then used up; OPVS no longer has the key)

• The link works once. It stops working after the first successful read, or after 72 hours, whichever comes first.

• Open it on the machine you will copy from. Opening it on a phone "to check it works" uses it up.

• OPVS keeps only the public key and its fingerprint. If you lose the private key before storing it, ask for a new key pair. There is no "send it again".

The fingerprint

Each certificate has a SHA-256 fingerprint of its public key, for example:

SHA256:00cc2f3aa0f3662dd40fc71a30bf4f5ee927b5845128c8fea29d54e93fbc61f5

You will see it in the cert_fingerprint field of every package you publish (the CLI fills it in), and on the package detail. Anyone can look up a public key by fingerprint:

curl -s "https://market.opvs.ai/api/v1/registry/certificates/SHA256:<fingerprint>"
# → { "public_key": "…", "cert_fingerprint": "SHA256:…", "status": "active", "issued_at": "…" }

Where to keep the private key

In your CI secrets. GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or any other CI secret store. The publish command reads it from a file or an environment variable and signs locally; the key never leaves the runner. See Sign and publish.

Optionally, in a password manager as a break-glass copy. That is one more place to protect.

Never in a repository (even encrypted), a loose laptop file, a chat message or an email. If that has happened, ask OPVS to revoke the certificate and mint a new one.

More than one certificate

A vendor can hold several active certificates at once. The registry accepts a signature from any of them. That allows:

• Zero-downtime rotation: mint the new one, switch CI, then revoke the old one.

• One per environment (staging and production) or one per release engineer.

Rotation

There is no enforced expiry. Rotate when you see fit (yearly is a sensible default) and immediately after a suspected leak. The steps are in Rotate a credential.

Not provided today

• No public revocation-list endpoint. Revocation reaches installs through OPVS's own poller.

• No certificate chains. Each vendor key is checked directly.

• No automatic renewal.

Next

Partner keys and publish credentials.