Signals in. Certificate out.
We produce none of the signals. Manifide sits between the tools that produce trust signals about an API and the parties that consume it: it ingests, normalizes into one vocabulary, composes across the chain, and exposes a certificate anything can verify.
Ingest
Connect to the gateways, scanners, attestation bodies, monitors, and the published policy. We connect to what others produce — we don't run the pen test or probe every endpoint ourselves, and we say so.
Normalize & compose
Map every signal into one machine-readable claim vocabulary, then walk the chain — parent provider, IaaS host, model, subprocessors — to compute the effective trust of the whole composed service.
Issue & verify
Sign a certificate into a shared graph, with a short-lived status token for the hot path. Consumers verify locally, offline, before the call — no phone-home in the common case.
The effective certificate
An API's certificate references the pinned certificates of what it's built on. Manifide computes the effective trust of the whole — residency unions, assurance takes the weakest link, throughput takes the minimum — with a chain-validation summary that surfaces a stale or revoked dependency several hops down.
Vertical — inherit
A per-API cert inherits cross-cutting claims (SOC 2, residency, privacy) from the provider-level cert. Declared once, never duplicated across a provider's many APIs.
Horizontal — compose
The API composes the certs of its host, its model provider, its upstream dependencies — aggregated per claim type, so you evaluate the API and its supply chain in one shot.
Chain validation
Each link reports valid? still live? The verdict — valid / valid-with-warnings / invalid — is the one thing a consumer reads. The US-subprocessor-three-hops-down case stops being invisible.
Verified in the hot path, before the call leaves.
We borrow the proven PKI pattern: a heavy certificate that changes rarely, plus a lightweight, short-lived, signed status token — the OCSP-stapling analog — carrying live monitoring and revocation state.
Local, offline signature check
Like a TLS handshake — no round-trip in the common case. An agent runtime, an API gateway, or a CI pipeline verifies before it acts.
Stapled status token
A fresh, signed, short-lived snapshot of monitoring + revocation, cheap to carry. Expired or absent? Fetch a fresh signed status; otherwise proceed.
Freshness contract
Every claim and the certificate carry asOf + recheckAfter. Staleness is explicit — consumers never silently trust old data.
Policy-as-code
Express requirements once; get allow / alert / block + why against the effective certificate, evaluated in milliseconds.
We run it on our own catalog before we ask anyone to rely on it.