Lucent

Tooling to author, verify, and attest ERC-7730 Clear Signing descriptors for the public registry that compatible wallets read from.

A descriptor is a JSON file that tells a wallet how to render a contract call in plain language, so users see what they are signing instead of raw hex. Lucent covers the full path: find contracts that lack a descriptor, write and harden one, check it beyond schema validity, prove it against real transactions, and produce an ERC-8176 attestation.

Hosted preflight API

Lucent's primary product surface is a call-scoped HTTP API with a stateless analysis core and bounded access/payment ledgers. It binds one unsigned EVM call (including sender) to one descriptor deployment, resolves the exact calldata selector, decodes the arguments, and runs the audit, comprehension, and danger checks only for that selected function:

make setup
make api
curl http://127.0.0.1:8780/health
open http://127.0.0.1:8780/docs

POST /v1/preflight returns call and assessment fingerprints with a safe_to_present, review, or block decision. A blocked call is a successful assessment and therefore returns HTTP 200; malformed, unbound, ambiguous, or undecodable input returns a stable application/problem+json error.

The words are intentional: safe_to_present never means safe to execute. Version 1 uses a deliberately narrow scalar presentation profile. Local mode can analyze caller-supplied ABI data; protected deployments can instead require a finalized runtime-bytecode match and Sourcify ABI before a verdict is returned. Hosted V1 rejects proxy-backed deployments until dispatch and upgrade-state semantics can be proven, including custom delegatecall dispatchers without EIP-1967 slots. Neither mode simulates state, detects economic exploits, or judges the counterparty. Those limits ride in every response. Full contract and deployment modes: docs/HOSTED-API.md.

Protected access and Base-USDC payments

The API and container start disabled. make api opts into loopback-only local development (open, verified source off, x402 off). Production modes are configured explicitly at startup and fail closed when their dependencies are incoherent:

• api_key — hashed tenant keys, per-tenant token buckets, and five-minute idempotent result replay;
• x402 — official x402 v2 challenge/signature/receipt headers and exact USDC settlement on Base mainnet;
• api_key_or_x402 — subscription/quota access for integrations, with USDC pay-per-request fallback.

Any mode that accepts x402 requires verified-source mode. Payment proofs are verified before Lucent uses RPC/Sourcify capacity, settled only after a complete result exists. Exact retries replay the retained receipt, while a separate authorization ledger prevents the same signed EIP-3009 transfer from being rewrapped under a new idempotency key. Paid outcomes are not evicted while unexpired, and authorizations must expire within the server-owned five-minute window. The container runs one worker by default; scale-out requires a shared quota/idempotency/authorization-claim backend.

For signing agents: the MCP server

An AI agent about to sign a transaction faces exactly the question Lucent's checks answer — is this call clear enough to present, and does the screen a human would see actually describe what it does? scripts/mcp_server.py exposes that as an MCP server (JSON-RPC over stdio) so an agent can pre-flight a signature:

• preflight_transaction — the primary transaction-time gate. It binds chain_id, from, to, data, and value to a matching descriptor deployment, decodes one unique selector, analyzes only that function, and fingerprints the complete request.
• check_descriptor — an authoring-time report over an ERC-7730 descriptor: the audit grade (screen shows the right fields), the comprehension grade (a plain-language consequence sentence + risk tier per function), and the danger scan (structural primitives a clear screen can't make safe). It is not bound to a pending call and must never authorize one.
• explain_signature — an unbound actor→action→object sentence + risk tier for descriptor-authoring and UX-copy review, never transaction approval.
• scan_contract — danger-scan a deployed contract by address (fetches the verified ABI from Sourcify), so an agent can assess a contract before any transaction is built.

make mcp    # or: .venv/bin/python scripts/mcp_server.py

Register it as a stdio MCP server pointing at scripts/mcp_server.py from the repo root (see mcp.json). Same transport shape as the sibling Groundcheck and Seiche servers.

For every pending call, use preflight_transaction. Its model-facing output hashes arbitrary string calldata, and its server-owned consequence sentence never incorporates descriptor-authored prose.

Install

make setup     # creates .venv and installs requirements (Python 3.12+)

Most stages that read on-chain data need a free Etherscan API key:

export ETHERSCAN_API_KEY=...

Pipeline

A common.py module holds the shared Sourcify and Etherscan clients and ABI utilities. lucent/preflight.py is the shared call-scoped decision core used by both HTTP and MCP, so transports cannot drift on verdict policy.

Audit

erc7730 lint checks that a descriptor is well-formed. audit.py checks whether the on-device screen would mislead a user, which lint does not:

• CRITICAL: a payable function that never shows @.value, or a tokenAmount with no known token.
• HIGH: a signable function with no intent or no visible field, or an address shown as raw hex.
• MEDIUM/LOW: labels or intents past the device character limits, missing interpolated summaries.

It reports a letter grade. to_submission.py refuses to package below grade B. A raw generated draft of the ENS controller scores F; the hardened descriptors score A.

Comprehension risk

Lint checks that a descriptor is well-formed; audit.py checks that the screen shows the right fields. Neither asks the question that "What I Sign Is Not What I See" shows is the real failure: users mis-understand a technically-correct screen. Its studies found people fixate on the amount and recipient and miss scope, delegation, and unlimited allowances — and that a bare field list, even a complete one, leaves comprehension at chance on the dangerous cases. Its Signature Semantic Decoder cut false approvals on unlimited-allowance and phishing transactions by 73% and 46% by rendering an actor→action→object sentence and a risk tier with a reason.

comprehend.py brings that to the descriptor. For each signable function it emits:

• a consequence sentence — who acts on what, plus conditions, built from the ABI and the descriptor's own labels so it renders what the wallet will show: "You let {Operator} transfer ANY of your tokens in this contract, at any time, until you revoke it."
• a risk tier with the clause that earned it — the paper's users rejected bare labels and demanded the why. Patterns scored are the ones the study found people miss: operator grants (setApprovalForAll), ERC-20 allowances (flagged distinctly from ERC-721 token-id approvals, since approve(address,uint256) reads identically but means different things), permits (off-chain, invisible in history), admin/upgrade authority, and raw-hex recipients (the address-poisoning surface).

An unrecognised function with no on-screen intent is reported as an unexplained screen (a caution), never silently cleared — an unexplained screen invites blind approval, which is the failure the paper measures. Run it with make comprehend DESC=…; NameWrapper's setApprovalForAll and the controller's transferOwnership both surface as CRITICAL comprehension risks that lint and audit pass.

Danger surface

Audit asks whether the screen shows the right fields; comprehend asks whether the human understands them. danger.py asks the third question: can this function, by construction, do something a clear screen still can't make safe? A descriptor can render a perfectly honest sentence for execute(address target, bytes data) — "Call {target} with {data}" — and that call can still drain the wallet, because the primitive itself is unbounded.

Runtime systems catch this by instrumenting transaction-trace properties (arXiv:2408.14621: arbitrary CALL/DELEGATECALL/SELFDESTRUCT in the trace). danger.py lifts the same property set to static ABI analysis, so the danger is named before anyone signs:

• CRITICAL — arbitrary external call (a call-family name, or a target-address
  • calldata-blob signature), delegatecall (foreign code in this contract's context), self-destruct, and upgrade-and-execute.
• HIGH — unbounded delegation (setApprovalForAll), authority transfer (ownership / admin / role).
• MEDIUM — value sweep to a caller-supplied address.

Precision is the whole game: a danger scan that cries wolf on safeTransferFrom is worse than none. The detector distinguishes calldata from data-as-content by parameter name (target+data, not any address-plus-bytes), excludes to (a recipient, not a callee), and whitelists the standard ERC receiver hooks — so the shipped ENS bundle raises zero false arbitrary-call flags while a real execute(target,data) drainer is still caught. --strict exits non-zero on any CRITICAL.

Semantic verification

Lint proves a descriptor is well-formed, not that its summary is honest. A descriptor can pass every schema check and still render a benign screen for a call that sends assets elsewhere.

For each test vector, semverify.py fetches the mined receipt (the record of what actually moved), extracts the asset movements and approvals (ETH, ERC-20, ERC-1155, ApprovalForAll), and checks the screen against them: every real recipient and operator is shown, ETH spent is shown, and the field labelled as the recipient matches the address that received the asset.

Worked example, a safeTransferFrom descriptor with the To and From labels swapped:

The receipt is exact for mined transactions. The recipient check is heuristic on field labels; it catches recipient hiding and label spoofing, not every possible mismatch.

Unmined calls — fork replay. A brand-new descriptor for a call that has never been mined (a fresh contract, a rarely-used function) has no receipt to check against. forkreplay.py closes that gap: given a call spec {signer, function, args, value} it forks mainnet at HEAD into a local anvil, impersonates the signer, executes the call against real on-chain state, and reads back the standard eth receipt. That (tx, receipt) pair is handed to semverify.verify_one unchanged — so a label swap or hidden recipient on an unmined call is caught by the identical, tested code path, not a second implementation. Run it with make semverify DESC=… SIMULATE=1 on a test file whose vectors carry a call object instead of a txHash. It needs anvil + cast (foundryup) and an RPC URL (ETH_RPC_URL); without them the call vector is skipped with a reason, never silently passed.

Reviewing a registry PR

The clear-signing governance model asks security reviewers to check descriptor PRs "for correctness, clarity, and adversarial edge cases, then publish your findings clearly." review.py is that role as one command: it composes lint, the screen audit, the comprehension grade, the danger scan, and (when test vectors and an ETHERSCAN_API_KEY are available) semantic verification into a single markdown report ready to post on the pull request:

make review DESC=path/to/calldata-Contract.json OUT=review.md

review.py and check_descriptor are authoring reports over the full descriptor. They intentionally do not replace the call-scoped preflight_transaction gate: only preflight binds sender, destination, calldata, value, and one selected function. Checks that cannot run are reported as explicit skips with the reason, never silently passed. To review a descriptor from a registry PR, fetch its ABI first (make fetch CHAIN=<id> ADDR=<address>) so the audit runs against the verified on-chain ABI.

Post-quantum co-signing

A descriptor hash is keccak256, which is quantum-safe. The ECDSA signature over it is not, and attestations are long-lived. attest.py --pq adds a post-quantum signature over the same hash so the attestation stays verifiable if the signature scheme is broken. The hash is unchanged; only the signature scheme is added.

The signature binds the exact descriptor hash. Keys are read from LUCENT_PQ_* env vars or a gitignored .attester-keys/ directory, written owner-only. No cryptographically-relevant quantum computer exists yet and there is no standard for post-quantum attestations, so this is forward positioning, not a current requirement.

Attestation and fork replay are offline operator tools. They are deliberately absent from the hosted API container: the current scripts accept RPC/process or key-bearing inputs that belong in isolated workers with strict egress, resource, and signing-policy controls.

Current state

Three ENS descriptors, each grade A and lint clean against the on-chain ABI, packaged under dist/registry-pr/ens/:

Test vectors are real historical transactions, built with fetch_tx.py <chain> <address> <descriptor>.

A registry PR should be submitted by or on behalf of the contract's owner. The remaining step for the ENS descriptors is that authorization, not code.

Attester registration

attest.py --profile writes an auditor profile (auditors/eip155-1-<address>/profile.json) for a registry PR. Signing an EAS offchain attestation needs the ERC-8176 schema UID (published on clearsigning.org) and an attester key. Without them, attest.py writes an unsigned evidence bundle so the pipeline can run end to end first.