Hestia

# Hestia

> **Governance for multi-vendor AI agents — local-first, witnessed, and earned.**
> The road to universal Web4 presence for humans and AI. We are some way along it.

**Hestia is the open local governance layer that gives people and their AI agents persistent identity, scoped authority and a witnessed action record.**

Hestia is the open-source local-first daemon that lets **AI agents from different vendors
share one machine under one law**: a single signed policy every agent transits, a
hash-chained record of what each one did, a human in the loop when an agent reaches for
something it should not have, and a trust score **derived from that record** rather than
asserted. Claude Code, Codex, Kimi, Gemini and Cursor plug into the same gate. No cloud
required.

That governance is what makes an agent **admissible to a Web4 hub**. A hub cannot verify
an agent it has no record of; Hestia is where the record is made, so the hub has something
to check. Governance is the key to hub access, not a feature beside it —
see [Hub membership](#hub-membership).

**On the headline.** This README used to open *"Universal Web4 presence — for humans and
AI."* That is the destination and the project is not there. What exists today and is
exercised daily is the governance layer above; the human-presence half (Tauri source,
credential issuance, device constellation) is **plumbed but thinly exercised**, only an
older Android APK is publicly released, and federation is not started. The tables below separate *measured*, *plumbed but unexercised*
and *not built*, because a status page that flattens those three is the same defect this
codebase keeps finding in itself: a check that reports success while measuring nothing.

> **Status:** Phase 2 (connected presence), active development. The reference daemon is running
> current source, but the public daemon and Android releases are older and there is no public
> desktop app artifact. Hub, constellation, messaging, and credential-issuance source paths exist;
> newcomer, second-device, wallet, and current-release-pair evidence remains incomplete. See
> [Honest Status](#honest-status). The [2026-08-08 audit](docs/STATUS_AUDIT_2026-08-08.md) remains
> the baseline artifact; gate-consolidation status below was refreshed on 2026-08-23 against the
> subsequently merged work and keeps repo state separate from live-install evidence.

**Standards and public-sector reviewers:** the [standards review entry point](docs/STANDARDS_REVIEW.md) maps Hestia's identity, delegated authority, runtime governance, provenance, audit, non-repudiation, and allow/deny/revoke mechanisms into current NIST / NCCoE agent-identity vocabulary, with explicit A1/A2 assurance boundaries.

> ### ⚠️ The gate stops accidents, not adversaries
>
> Hestia's policy gate is an **early prototype**. It reliably stops simple erroneous or
> accidentally-destructive commands, and it produces an accountability record. It **does
> not** — and is not intended to — stop a sophisticated agent from routing around or
> gaming it. A heuristic gate always plays whack-a-mole with a general reasoner.
>
> **Read [issue #49](https://github.com/dp-web4/hestia/issues/49) before relying on it.**
> It states the honest scope, the measured bypasses (two environment variables suffice
> today), a demonstrated third-party reputation-poisoning class, and the planned hardening:
> an agentic heterogeneous policy entity, better heuristics, relying parties that demand
> policy-signed actions, and ultimately OS-kernel-level enforcement.
>
> Hestia's A1 gate makes bypass attributable. Hardbound is the enterprise tier that binds
> identity and enforcement to enterprise-controlled hardware and raises the assurance grade.

> **A living example.** The lab that builds and runs Hestia is itself a live Web4 society — a public fleet of autonomous agents that hold roles and witness each other's work. Its members are published at **[4-lab.io/fleet](https://4-lab.io/fleet)**. Presence over privacy: a society that isn't witnessed has no presence to trust, so the collective is visible by design. (Secrets stay in the vault; presence stays in the open — the same split Hestia draws in code.)

## What Hestia does

### For humans

**The app is the intended front door** — a Tauri 2 source implementation with
dashboard, vault, witness chain, delegations, hubs, policy, fleet, and
settings views. The only public app artifact today is an older Android APK; desktop bundles are
not published, and compatibility with the current daemon is not continuously tested. The CLI and
web dashboard are the currently exercised surfaces:

- `hestia init` → encrypted vault + Web4 LCT identity on your machine
- `hestia vault add` → store API keys, tokens, secrets (ChaCha20-Poly1305 + Argon2id)
- `hestia delegate grant <agent-id> --role administrator --expires 24` → give an AI agent scoped authority, cryptographically signed, revocable
- `hestia delegate list` / `hestia delegate revoke` → manage 

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