LossyTrace

LossyTrace is an experimental Rust library, CLI, and research harness for measuring traces that may be consistent with prior lossy audio compression. It emits evidence, not a provenance verdict.

Warning

The current measurement definition is feature version 0. It has known content-dependence and invariance failures. LossyTrace does not currently label files as lossless, lossy-derived, authentic, or fraudulent.

Quick start

Build from source and inspect an audio file:

cargo run --release -- analyze track.flac --pretty

The JSON contract makes the experimental status explicit:

{
  "schema_version": 1,
  "state": "experimental_measurements_only",
  "public_verdict_enabled": false,
  "compression_trace": {
    "feature_version": 0
  }
}

By default the CLI inspects at most 120 seconds. Pass --max-seconds 0 to inspect the complete file. The report includes a SHA-256 input fingerprint but does not include the input path.

What is here

• src/: the verdict-free compression-trace measurements and CLI.
• benchmarks/audio-integrity-v1/: reproducible benchmark contracts, manifests, fingerprints, and aggregate development reports.
• scripts/: corpus staging, controlled lossy-to-lossless generation, evaluation, safety gates, and research tooling.
• research/exact-transform/: source recovered from the final exact-transform research cycle, including the exact MP3 hybrid-filterbank probe.
• docs/research/: the original Reklawdbox plan and the research disposition.

The 33 research iterations were experiments, not 33 software releases. The latest candidates remain rejected. See docs/research/status.md.

Data policy

No copyrighted or privately supplied audio belongs in this repository. LossyTrace keeps only generators, provenance manifests, hashes, and aggregate reports in Git. Real-audio corpora live in an external data directory and are ignored. Research code with unresolved redistribution boundaries is also kept outside the public repository. See docs/data-governance.md and docs/research/licensing-boundary.md.

Verification

cargo fmt --check
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test --all-targets
python3 -m unittest discover -s scripts/tests -p 'test_audio_integrity*.py'

Some corpus and benchmark checks are intentionally opt-in because they require licensed or locally retained audio. They must fail closed when their declared inputs or fingerprints are missing.

Relationship to Reklawdbox

This work began as an opt-in stratum-dsp prototype inside Reklawdbox. It was extracted because detector research has a different release cadence and risk profile. Reklawdbox must not consume a LossyTrace verdict until a fresh, independent validation gate passes and a stable evidence contract is released.

License

Licensed under either the Apache License, Version 2.0 or the MIT License, at your option.