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Show HN: Verifiable receipts for firmware CVE reproduction

Prevot released a tool that reproduces firmware vulnerabilities deterministically against digital twins and issues a signed, re-verifiable receipt, demonstrated with CVE-2018-19988 on the D-Link DIR-868L rev B router, anchored in the Rekor transparency log at logIndex 2237342620. The receipt is signed by a machine identity via Sigstore/cosign and requires only Docker to verify, with no access to Prevot's infrastructure needed.

read2 min views1 publishedJul 28, 2026
Show HN: Verifiable receipts for firmware CVE reproduction
Image: source

Prevot reproduces public, known firmware vulnerabilities deterministically against digital twins, and issues a receipt: a signed attestation that anyone can re-verify — without trusting us, without seeing the exploit.

Evidence, not assertion.The security community is drowning in AI-generated reports thatclaimvulnerabilities without proving them. A Prevot receipt is the opposite: a cryptographic proof, re-verifiable by third parties, that the reproduction actually happened.

This repo ships a real receipt — CVE-2018-19988, root command injection on the D-Link DIR-868L rev B router — signed and anchored in the public transparency log Rekor (logIndex 2237342620).

You only need Docker:

cd receipts/examples/dir868l-hnap-19988
docker run --rm -v "$PWD:/w" -w /w \
  gcr.io/projectsigstore/cosign:v2.4.1@sha256:b03690aa52bfe94054187142fba24dc54137650682810633901767d8a3e15b31 \
  verify-blob --new-bundle-format --bundle statement.cosign.bundle \
  --certificate-identity 616124453047-compute@developer.gserviceaccount.com \
  --certificate-oidc-issuer https://accounts.google.com \
  statement.json

Step-by-step, including the tamper test: guides/verify-a-receipt-in-5-min.md.

It also states what it does not know:

Medium grade, declared. It reproduces deterministically (2/2)and discriminates the injection (we proved the effect is caused by the payload, not by the request). It lacks the patched-version control — that firmware is encrypted — so we donot call it high grade.It corrects a public data point. The CVE is published as exploitablewithout credentials(PR:N

); on the real firmware it requires authentication. We declare itPR:L

. Reproduction against the real artifact overrides the metadata.

A verifier that cannot tell its own grades of certainty apart is not a verifier.

Piece What it is
receipts/schema/
the receipt schema (in-toto attestation, evidence by sha256 )
receipts/examples/dir868l-hnap-19988/
the signed receipt + its evidence
receipts/README.md
anatomy of the receipt
receipts/validate_receipt.py
optional schema + content-addressing check
guides/
the 5-minute verification guide

Signing is keyless (Sigstore/cosign): a short-lived certificate (Fulcio) bound to an identity, anchored in Rekor. No private keys to manage. The bundle is self-contained: it verifies with just this repo and Docker — no access to Prevot's infrastructure.

On the signer.This receipt is signed by amachine identity(the service account that runs the verifier), not a person — honest, since the receipt is produced by automation. A canonical human signature can be added later; Rekor allows multiple signatures over the same receipt.

AGPL-3.0-or-later. (See LICENSE

.)

Signal S1 — first public proof. This is a first brick of a cyber-physical trust seal for firmware under the European regulatory framework (CRA/RED).

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