Technical detail · Confidential multi-party verification

Cove object model. An artifact is a unit of private data with exactly one owner, encrypted locally before upload. A workflow is a directed acyclic graph with a canonical serialization, and its hash names the bundle. Compilation to per-node manifests is deterministic, and the manifest hash is the node's identity. Owners record allow rules that bind each artifact to approved manifest hashes ².
Cove run and verification. At run time a node fetches and verifies upstream certificates, evaluates preconditions, obtains decryption keys only after attestation, runs the workload and emits a certificate whose TEE report data commits to the certificate-body hash. Report data is two SHA-256 hashes, of a fixed label and of a canonical payload. Verifiers start from a terminal certificate, the workflow bytes and the TEE vendor's roots, and check each certificate recursively ².
ZkAudit. The provider publishes commitments to its dataset and weights, with a zero-knowledge proof that the committed weights result from training. It then answers each audit request by computing a function F privately and releasing F's output with a second proof ³. A copyright or demographic audit of a MobileNet v2 model on Flowers-102 cost $108 in total (about 10 cents per image), and a counterfactual audit of a recommender on MovieLens cost $8,456 ³.
Minimal Information Disclosure. It chooses the evidence mechanism to minimize the conditional mutual information between protected properties and the released evidence, subject to a floor on information about the authorized target. One variant proves a linear projection with a Groth16 zk-SNARK ⁷.