verify-witness

verify-witness is a skill for Claude Code from ruvnet/metaharness. It costs 45 tokens per session (435 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A check that verifies whether an Ed25519 digital signature matches a harness’s exact set of files. A harness is the scaffolded project being checked.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it in CI, registry mirroring, or when two harnesses connect and need a fast valid-or-invalid signature check.
Why use it?
It quickly shows whether the files were signed by the embedded key and have not changed since signing.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: a Claude Code plugin manifest. Also seen: mentions Codex.

Part of the agent-harness-generator plugin — 14 skills, 1 plugin shipped together

Good fit Use it in CI, registry mirroring, or when two harnesses connect and need a fast valid-or-invalid signature check.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ruvnet/metaharness/verify-witness
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add ruvnet/metaharness --skill verify-witness
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ruvnet/metaharness

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install agent-harness-generator, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 14 skills, 1 plugin.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for verify-witness

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ruvnet/metaharness/verify-witness/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ruvnet/metaharness/verify-witness)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ruvnet/metaharness/verify-witness"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ruvnet/metaharness/verify-witness/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for verify-witness

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ruvnet/metaharness/verify-witness"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ruvnet/metaharness/verify-witness.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 45 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 435 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00045 $0.00435
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00217
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00087
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00044

Measured 12d ago against content hash 807527b6526c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

verify-witness scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.claude-plugin/skills/verify-witness/SKILL.md · 48 lines

What it actually says

verify-witness

Codex skill: Ed25519 witness manifest verification for a scaffolded harness.

What it does

Reads .harness/witness.json, validates the Ed25519 signature against the embedded public key, and reports VALID / INVALID with a one-line reason.

Distinct from validate-harness:

  • validate-harness is the umbrella — doctor + verify + path-guard + mcp + secrets
  • verify-witness is only the signature check — fast yes/no for CI / federation handshakes / multi-signer workflows

Usage from Codex

/verify-witness
/verify-witness path=./my-harness
/verify-witness path=./my-harness strict=false

Equivalent CLI

harness verify ./my-harness

Why it's separate from validate-harness

When two harnesses federate (iter 9), they need to confirm each other's witness signatures BEFORE doing the full release-readiness check. Splitting this surface lets federation peers run a fast signature handshake without paying for the full validate sweep.

Also: CI workflows that only care about signature integrity (e.g. mirroring a published harness to a private registry) can call this skill instead of the heavier umbrella.

What's checked

Check Detail
File present .harness/witness.json exists
Manifest shape All required fields (harness, version, entries, public_key, signature)
Signature Ed25519 verify against the embedded public key
Strict mode If strict=true and no witness, exit non-zero. If false, soft-skip with PASS

Exit 0 = signature VALID. Exit 1 = INVALID / missing (strict mode).

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 48 lines · 45 tokens per session scan A 807527b6526c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

verify-witness is a skill published in the GitHub repository ruvnet/metaharness (645 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 435 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.