FS architecture and the WORM backbone
Every record written to the PointSav platform — identity anchors, email communications, document artifacts — lands in service-fs, a per-tenant Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) immutable ledger. Once written, records cannot be modified or deleted; the ledger is the tamper-evident backbone that Ring 2 services query and Ring 1 services write to. For a regulated operator, this means every data event has a provable, auditable history from the moment it enters the platform. The worm-ledger-design article describes the WORM design philosophy in detail.
The Four-Layer Architecture
To ensure modularity and survivability, service-fs is implemented as a decoupled four-layer stack:
- L4: Anchoring (Workspace-Tier): Monthly periodic work performed by fs-anchor-emitter that anchors signed checkpoints to the public Sigstore Rekor log.
- L3: Wire Protocol: The communication interface (HTTP/axum today; MCP long-term) that enforces per-tenant
moduleIdboundaries. - L2: WORM Ledger API (Rust Trait): The stable core contract (
append,read_since,checkpoint) that survives changes to the layers above or below. - L1: Tile Storage Primitive: The envelope-specific storage engine (POSIX on Linux; capability-mediated on seL4) using the C2SP tlog-tiles format.
Dual Boot Envelopes
A core design property of service-fs is its ability to operate across two distinct runtime envelopes using the same codebase. The WORM storage architecture article describes how each envelope satisfies the append-only constraint.
- Envelope A (Current): A Linux/BSD daemon under systemd. It uses standard POSIX file I/O and process isolation.
- Envelope B (Intended): A verified seL4 Microkit Protection Domain. It is intended to use
moonshot-database(PSDB) for capability-addressed storage, providing formally verified tenant isolation.
Durability and Compliance
The platform achieves structural WORM compliance by structurally denying record modification at the storage layer. This is reinforced by:
- C2SP tlog-tiles: An open-standard text-based format ensuring 100-year readability.
- C2SP signed-note Checkpoints: Compact, signed artifacts that prove the state of the ledger at any point in time.
- Audit-Log Sub-Ledger: A dedicated WORM ledger that records every read event to satisfy SOC 2 processing integrity requirements.
This architecture ensures that service-fs remains portable, verifiable, and resilient to vendor obsolescence.