Open Downlink Custody: custody receipts over SatNOGS data (feedback and requests welcome)

SatNOGS
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Hello Libre Space Foundation and SatNOGS community,

We have released Open Downlink Custody, an open-source (Apache-2.0) tool that reads the public SatNOGS Network archive and produces signed custody receipts for observations: a content hash for every archived frame, which independently owned stations received byte-identical frames, and a record of frames a station missed during its own window. A verifier re-downloads every frame from SatNOGS and checks it, so anyone can confirm a run without trusting us. An optional station-side hook lets operators sign their decoded frames with their own key before upload.

In our first runs it covered passes heard by up to 11 stations with 10 different owners, and re-verified 1,139 frames with none changed.

We want this to be a good citizen of the network:

It credits SatNOGS contributors and the CC BY-SA license in every record, and shares derived records under CC BY-SA.
It never records station coordinates, hostnames or frame contents.
It caches every frame and downloads it only once.
It says clearly that it is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Libre Space Foundation.
If you would like anything changed (request rates, naming, attribution, what is recorded) or would like to contribute edits, please open an issue or pull request, or reply here. Your requests get priority.

Repository: GitHub - BSVKey/open-downlink-custody: Signed custody receipts and cross-station corroboration for real satellite downlinks on the public SatNOGS network. Not affiliated with the Libre Space Foundation. · GitHub

Thank you for building and running SatNOGS.

Embryo Space Inc. (BSVKey)

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hi @openlinkcustody i still dont understand what for is this app? can you explain it with some example and screenshot? thank you

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or maybe live website that i can open without install it first.

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latest:
what is Embryo Space Inc. (BSVKey). what is BSV ?

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Hi Bali,

BSV https://bsvassociation.org/

Embryo Space is a company developing software.

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i still confuse.. btw wishing the best for you !

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do you have run satnogs-client?

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It’s posted here for others to use.

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Hi Bali, sorry, my last answer was too short. Let me try again with an example.

What it does, in one sentence: it gives every SatNOGS frame a signed receipt, so that later anyone can check that the frames on the server are exactly what the stations heard, and which stations heard the same thing.

Why that matters. When your station uploads an observation, the frames go to the SatNOGS server. Months later, someone (a satellite team, a researcher, an insurer) may ask: “Is this really what was received? Was anything changed or lost?” Today the answer is “trust the server.” This tool makes it checkable instead:

Each station’s frames get a fingerprint (a hash) and a signature.
When several stations hear the same pass, it compares them. If two stations owned by different people received exactly the same bytes, that is strong evidence the data is real.
Frames a station missed inside its own pass window are recorded as gaps, not hidden.
One short fingerprint of the whole batch is written to a public blockchain, so the record can’t be quietly rewritten later.
A real example. On 29 September we ran it on 3 satellite passes heard by 13 stations from 12 different owners, 242 frames in total. Every frame was downloaded again and matched its receipt, with nothing changed. The batch fingerprint is public here (opens in your browser, nothing to install):

https://whatsonchain.com/tx/3528965b42b56b4ca28b5b042b45b13f4a8bee16bd77b2e134531a8224cafe16

Live website, no install: https://custody.bsvkey.com/try
This is the same idea for data relayed through space. Pick a mission, press “Send”, and watch the data get held during an outage and then verified when the link comes back. Then you can try to tamper with it and see it get caught. Everything runs in your browser. Screenshot attached.

What is BSV? Bitcoin BSV is one version of Bitcoin. We only use it as a public notice board for timestamps: we write a 32-byte fingerprint there, and anyone can look it up. You don’t need any coins or a wallet to check it, and your station doesn’t need to change anything.

What is Embryo Space / BSVKey? Embryo Space Inc. is a small US software company. BSVKey is the name of our software tools. This project on github is open source (Apache-2.0)

Thank you for asking, and for the good wishes! If anything is still unclear, ask me and I’ll explain more.

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