# RAVEN Protocol

> Robotic Attested Verifiable Evidence Network. An open protocol for producing tamper-evident, cryptographically verifiable evidence from autonomous robots operating in extreme environments.

## What RAVEN is

RAVEN is an open specification (Apache 2.0) that defines how autonomous robots produce cryptographically signed event logs, how robots in proximity cross-attest each other's observations, how compact evidence summaries are anchored to globally observable substrates, and how any third party can verify the resulting evidence offline.

Think of it as a flight data recorder standard for autonomous machines, but cryptographic, decentralized, and post-quantum ready.

## Core problem solved

Autonomous robots (drones, USVs, rovers, agricultural machines) make decisions and take actions without human supervision, but there is no open standard for proving what they actually did, where, when, and that the record was not tampered with. Aviation has had black boxes since 1960. Autonomous robots have nothing equivalent. RAVEN fills that gap.

## Key properties

- Post-quantum ready: cipher suite registry supports classical (ECDSA P-256, Ed25519), hybrid (Ed25519 + ML-DSA-44), and pure post-quantum (ML-DSA-44, Falcon-512) signatures
- Offline-first: robots keep producing signed, chain-linked evidence while disconnected for days or weeks, anchoring opportunistically when connectivity returns
- Hardware-agnostic: runs on constrained MCUs with secure elements up to embedded Linux SBCs
- Vendor-neutral: no dependency on any manufacturer, cloud provider, or blockchain
- Graceful degradation: four compliance levels (L0 standalone, L1 witnessed, L2 anchored, L3 quantum-resilient)
- Open specification: Apache 2.0 licensed, free to implement

## How the protocol works

1. Sign: the robot signs every event with its private key and appends it to a local hash chain using deterministic CBOR serialization
2. Witness: when robots encounter peers, they exchange mutual cryptographic attestations about each other's latest state
3. Anchor: Merkle roots of evidence batches are published to global substrates (Bitcoin via OpenTimestamps, Ethereum L1/L2, Certificate Transparency-style logs)
4. Verify: any third party runs the deterministic verification procedure offline with no trust in operators or vendors required

## Compliance levels

- L0 (Standalone): signed events with local hash chain, no external dependencies
- L1 (Witnessed): adds peer witness attestations between robots
- L2 (Anchored): adds Merkle root anchoring to public substrates
- L3 (Quantum-Resilient): adds post-quantum or hybrid cipher suites

## Cipher suites

- RAVEN-v1-CLASSIC: ECDSA P-256 or Ed25519 + SHA-256 (active in v0.1)
- RAVEN-v1-HYBRID: Ed25519 + ML-DSA-44 + SHA-256 (planned v0.5)
- RAVEN-v1-PQ: ML-DSA-44 + SHA3-256 (planned v0.5)
- RAVEN-v1-COMPACT-PQ: FN-DSA Falcon-512 + SHA-256 (under evaluation)

## Target use cases

- Insurance underwriting for autonomous fleets
- Environmental monitoring with legally opposable evidence
- Carbon credit MRV (measurement, reporting, verification)
- Regulatory compliance (EU AI Act and similar legislation)
- Forensic investigation of autonomous system incidents
- Scientific data integrity from remote research platforms

## Reference deployment

Small Thing (https://small-thing.com) operates the first reference deployment with autonomous marine surface vehicles (USVs) collecting microplastics in the Mediterranean Sea.

## Standards and primitives used

- CBOR (RFC 8949) and dCBOR for deterministic serialization
- W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0 with did:key method
- FIPS 186-5 ECDSA and RFC 8032 Ed25519 for classical signatures
- FIPS 204 ML-DSA for post-quantum signatures
- FIPS 180-4 SHA-256 and FIPS 202 SHA-3 for hashing
- OpenTimestamps for Bitcoin anchoring
- RFC 3339 for timestamps

## Current status

v0.1 specification published for community review. Reference implementations under active development. Wire format stability committed at v1.0.

## Links

- Specification: https://github.com/ravenspec/raven
- Website: https://ravenspec.org
- Reference operator: https://small-thing.com
- License: Apache 2.0

## Optional

- llms-full.txt: [SITE_URL]/llms-full.txt