# DUDE Provider Agent preview

Status: source/Docker preview — no signed public installer yet

## What the Provider Agent is

The DUDE Provider Agent is a constrained offer controller and local execution endpoint. A provider runs it beside approved compute to make explicitly declared capabilities discoverable through a Registry.

It is not an autonomous AI agent, tool framework, remote shell, general host manager, or cryptocurrency miner. It receives no Docker socket, home-directory mount, Registry signing key, or consumer credentials.

## What works today

The current Agent:

1. Loads a strict, versioned provider manifest.
2. Probes each configured local runtime or remote gateway independently.
3. Verifies the exact local model and full model digest before advertising readiness.
4. Exchanges one short-lived, exact-identity enrollment code and then authenticates with its revocable per-Agent credential.
5. Registers declared providers, targets, and independently schedulable offers.
6. Heartbeats per-offer availability and capacity while the Agent remains online.
7. Executes only enrolled local Ollama capabilities after validating a short-lived Registry grant bound to the exact offer.

The provider controls which resources and offers appear in the manifest. Removing the Agent or allowing its lease to expire removes those offers from active discovery.

## Readiness is not attestation

The current live probe proves that a configured endpoint and exact model digest are ready at that moment. Private-preview enrollment binds a bearer credential to one declared provider and Agent ID, but it does **not** yet provide hardware attestation, secure-boot evidence, third-party-verified provider identity, energy provenance, signed sustainability evidence, or a general security certification.

Those evidence-bearing attestations require a deliberate trust design: scoped provider identity, signed releases, enrollment approval, evidence issuers, freshness and expiry, key rotation, revocation, and Registry policy for accepting each evidence class. Until that exists, energy, hardware, geography, and security attributes must be described as provider claims rather than verified facts.

## Preview deployment

The repository currently provides a hardened Docker Compose deployment under `deploy/agent/`. It uses a read-only root filesystem, drops Linux capabilities, sets `no-new-privileges`, mounts only narrow Agent secrets and a read-only manifest, and isolates Ollama model storage from the Agent.

A provider preview requires:

- Docker Engine with Compose v2;
- an approved Registry URL;
- a Registry-issued one-time enrollment code and Registry public key;
- the Registry public verification key;
- an offer manifest declaring exact targets, capabilities, models, digests, boundaries, and limits;
- a consumer-reachable Agent endpoint protected by a trusted private network or HTTPS proxy.

There is no public one-click enrollment or signed standalone Agent download yet. The private preview now has scoped enrollment and revocation. The public release path still requires signed container images/installers, update verification, endpoint abuse controls, device-bound authentication, and an attestation policy—not an unauthenticated binary that can register arbitrary claims.