sign-decision

name	sign-decision
description	Sign an approval decision with the owner's ed25519 delegate key over canonical JSON, so every call Claudia makes is attributable and verifiable. Use before posting or logging any approval decision.

sign-decision

Every decision you make carries a signature, so it can be told apart from a call the owner made themselves and can be verified later. This skill signs the decision payload with your ed25519 private key. Public key only is ever shared; the private key never leaves the machine, is never printed, logged, or committed.

When to use

Before you write a governance_ledger row or post a paperclipApprovalDecision. The signature goes in the ledger row's attestation field (and optionally the approval decisionNote). A decision without a verifying signature fails gate 2 and is not posted.

The scripts (working code, ed25519 over JCS, Node stdlib only)

This skill ships executable. All four scripts are dependency-free Node ESM (crypto, no npm). Run them with node.

• scripts/canonical.mjs: RFC-8785 (JCS) canonical JSON over the decision payload. Recursive key sort by UTF-16 code unit, no insignificant whitespace, so signer and verifier byte-match. node canonical.mjs runs a self-test proving key order is stable. Both sign and verify import it, so they canonicalize identically by construction.
• scripts/keygen.mjs: generate the ed25519 keypair, once. Private key to ~/.openclaw/keys/identic-ai.pem (chmod 600), public to identic-ai.pub. The private key is NEVER printed; it prints only the public SHA-256 fingerprint and runs a sign/verify self-test. It refuses to overwrite an existing private key (--force only for deliberate rotation).
• scripts/sign.mjs: read a decision payload as JSON on stdin, canonicalize it, sign the canonical bytes with the private key, print ONLY the base64 signature to stdout. The public fingerprint goes to stderr (public_fingerprint=...) for the ledger to record.
• scripts/verify.mjs: verify a signature against the PUBLIC key only (--sig <base64>, payload via --payload <file> or stdin). Exit 0 = valid, exit 2 = invalid, so callers gate on it.

The decision payload

A plain object: at minimum the approval id, the action (approve / reject / request_revision / surface_to_owner), the principal (owner_identic_ai), who you act for, and a timestamp. Keep the field set stable; signer and verifier must agree on it exactly. govern-queue's decide.mjs builds this payload and calls sign.mjs + verify.mjs for you on every cleared decision; the signature lands in the ledger row's attestation_b64.

Hard rules

• Private key never printed, logged, copied to clipboard, or written to git. The base .gitignore already ignores *.pem and keys/; do not undo that.
• Public key only travels.
• Same canonicalization on signer and verifier, or signatures silently fail to verify.
• Do not invent a bespoke crypto scheme; ed25519 over canonical JSON, using Node stdlib crypto, is the whole design.