Making yourself audit-ready with Verae DataCubes

How to prepare an organization for HIPAA-aligned, SOC 2, or ISO 27001 work using Verae DataCubes on Peergos (encrypted cryptree + hashed IPFS) and HPKE on an untrusted NATS broker.

This repository is not a HIPAA, SOC 2, or ISO certificate.
Peergos’s public pentests are not your Type II or ISO registrar certificate. They are component security evaluations you can attach.

What we verified about Peergos (EU)

Full sources: PEERGOS-VERIFICATION.md.

Fact	Verified?
Encrypted client-side filesystem (cryptree); keys not on the storage server	Yes — Peergos book + Cure53 design review
IPFS blocks content-addressed; Peergos verifies hashes (tamper-evident restore)	Yes — trust-free layers
Independent EU security audits, reports published	Yes — two: Cure53 Berlin (2019); Radically Open Security Amsterdam (2024, NLnet; EU Horizon 2020 NGI-POINTER mentioned on the post)
“Peergos is HIPAA/SOC 2/ISO certified”	No. Those audits are pentest/code/design reviews, not management-system certificates

So: Peergos was designed as a trust-minimized encrypted filesystem, evaluated in Europe by two specialist firms, with public reports. That supports the at-rest / backup story. It does not finish your audit.

Architecture (audit interview in one page)

Endpoint (keys stay here / HSM)
    │  HPKE content (NPE suite)
    │  routing: dest + subject in the clear
    ▼
Untrusted NATS (cannot read bodies)
    │
    ▼
Verae DataCube chain (append-only hashes)
    │  written through Peergos client
    ▼
Peergos cryptree (encrypted names, sizes, graph)
    │  chunks → CID / hash
    ▼
IPFS  (distributed, hash-verified ciphertext)

• At rest: Peergos cryptree + IPFS. Hosts with disk/backup see opaque hashed ciphertext, not PHI, if they lack keys.
• In transit (NATS): HPKE-Base to directory public keys. Broker is honest-but-curious: destinations yes, bodies no.
• Integrity: cube JSONL chain + dual hash + IPFS CID check on restore (re-fetch blocks, re-verify hashes — not a plaintext tape).

BAAs / DPAs

Ciphertext-without-keys narrows who is a Business Associate or GDPR processor for content. It does not automatically delete contracts for VMs, usernames, or logs. See BAA-DPA.md.

Pack

File	Use
PEERGOS-VERIFICATION.md	Sourced Peergos/EU audit facts
BAA-DPA.md	Counsel briefing
CHECKLIST.md	Evidence list
HOWTO.md	How to hand this to an auditor
MODULE.md	Callers / non-runtime

Live technical surfaces (ns1): https://pfc.georgelambert.org/health · https://pfc.georgelambert.org/v1/npe/keys · https://docs.pfc.georgelambert.org/controls.html

Related: https://git.georgelambert.org/marchon/system-git-sync

Sphinx (HTML + LaTeX PDF)

Sources live in source/ (Sphinx). Build:

make html
make latexpdf

• HTML: build/html/index.html
• PDF: build/latex/peergos-making-yourself-audit-ready-with-verae-datacubes.pdf

LaTeX companion links are relative PDFs (not Markdown). Live HTML: https://docs.pfc.georgelambert.org/audit-ready/