NAV Standard

Network Attached Verification

An open standard for representing evidence that AI-generated information was verified against authoritative sources.

Retired

NAV Standard v1.0 was retired on 6 August 2026. It is not under active development and should not be adopted as a basis for new implementations.

Version 1.0 is retained in full, with its recorded hashes, as a permanent record. Nothing has been deleted. Under the governance model this specification defines, retired artifacts are retained rather than withdrawn, and history is append-only.

Work has moved to the certificate artifact rather than the appliance category. The reasoning that produced this specification is set out in the originating paper below, which remains current.

Version
1.0.0
Status
Retired
Publication Date
17 July 2026
Retired
6 August 2026
Type
Specification, retained for the record

Why NAV Exists

Organizations increasingly rely on AI-generated information to support important decisions.

When those decisions matter, there should be a standard way to demonstrate what was verified, which authoritative source was used, and what the verification found.

NAV defines that standard.

Conceptual Flow

  1. AI-Generated Information
  2. Verification System
  3. Authoritative Source
  4. NAV Certificate

A NAV certificate records the evidence and result of verification against an identified authoritative source.

Origin

The category this standard describes is set out in a working paper, Network Attached Verification: An Instrument Doctrine for Autonomous AI in Regulated Enterprises, which argues why verification belongs in an appliance inside the organization's perimeter and what a certificate must record to be checkable by a stranger.

Swidey, E. (2026). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21722170

What NAV Provides

Primary Documents

Scope and Limitations

NAV certificate integrity validation confirms that a certificate body matches its recorded hash.

NAV v1.0 does not establish:

Terms

The specification documents in this repository are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. The reference validator is made available under the Apache License 2.0.

No patent license is granted by this publication. The author holds pending United States patent applications with claims relating to the certificate data structure, the verdict taxonomy, and the offline validation procedure described in this specification, including provisional applications 64/106,324 and 64/111,896. No express or implied patent license, covenant, or non-assertion is offered here. This is stated plainly so that no party relies on a grant that was never made.

These terms are recorded at retirement so that the position on this specification is unambiguous and does not change after the fact.

Program Status

Conformance and certification programs were never included in NAV Standard v1.0, and none will be established for it. The specification is retired.