Show HN:Conduit–Headless browser with SHA-256 hash chain - Ed25519 audit trails

3 points

3 months ago

I've been building AI agent tooling and kept running into the same problem: agents browse the web, take actions, fill out forms, scrape data -- and there's zero proof of what actually happened. Screenshots can be faked. Logs can be edited. If something goes wrong, you're left pointing fingers at a black box.

So I built Conduit. It's a headless browser (Playwright under the hood) that records every action into a SHA-256 hash chain and signs the result with Ed25519. Each action gets hashed with the previous hash, forming a tamper-evident chain. At the end of a session, you get a "proof bundle" -- a JSON file containing the full action log, the hash chain, the signature, and the public key. Anyone can independently verify the bundle without trusting the party that produced it.

The main use cases I'm targeting:

- *AI agent auditing* -- You hand an agent a browser. Later you need to prove what it did. Conduit gives you cryptographic receipts. - *Compliance automation* -- SOC 2, GDPR data subject access workflows, anything where you need evidence that a process ran correctly. - *Web scraping provenance* -- Prove that the data you collected actually came from where you say it did, at the time you say it did. - *Litigation support* -- Capture web content with a verifiable chain of custody.

It also ships as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, so Claude, GPT, and other LLM-based agents can use the browser natively through tool calls. The agent gets browse, click, fill, screenshot, and the proof bundle builds itself in the background.

Free, MIT-licensed, pure Python. No accounts, no API keys, no telemetry.

GitHub: https://github.com/bkauto3/Conduit

Install: `pip install conduit-browser`

Would love feedback on the proof bundle format and the MCP integration. Happy to answer questions about the cryptographic design.

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