Plugins & CRP Specification

CheeseWAF defines CRP (CheeseWAF Resources Package) as its signed resource-package format and provides local offline verification and staging commands. Release policy and developer instructions are maintained in CheeseSec_Plugin and CheeseSec_Plugin_Docs.

CRP v1 Archive Layout

The CheeseWAF CRP v1 parser requires resource packages to be standard ZIP archives containing only the following three entries. Any extra files or unknown directories cause immediate admission rejection (Hard Reject):

my-plugin-v1.0.0.crp (ZIP archive)
├── manifest.json              # Package metadata manifest
├── artifact/                  # Single payload directory
│   └── payload.bin            # Binary payload artifact
└── signatures/
    └── manifest.json          # Offline Ed25519 signature bundle

Manifest Schema Reference

The manifest.json file uses strict schema validation and rejects unknown JSON properties:

Signature Verification & Offline Admission

CRP archives require multi-party threshold signatures using Ed25519:

• Trust Roots & Source Registry: Admission verifies public key fingerprints and validity windows against policy/trust-roots.json and policy/source-registry.json. No outbound CRL or OCSP network calls are made.
• Signature Thresholds: Defined by policy/trust-levels.json, requiring official packages to meet threshold criteria (such as 2-of-3 quorum signatures).
• Air-Gapped Operation: In air-gapped environments, the daemon verifies complete cryptographic integrity locally as long as trust roots are installed.

Command-Line Operations

CheeseWAF provides dedicated subcommands for offline verification and local staging:

1. Verify Package (crp verify)

Validates archive format, digest consistency, and signatures without installing, executing, or accessing the network:

cheesewaf crp verify \
  --package ./plugin.crp \
  --trust-roots ./trust-roots.json \
  --sources ./sources.json \
  --now 2026-09-08T12:00:00Z

2. Stage Package (crp stage)

Persists verified packages into protected, content-addressed staging slots (restricted to owner-only read/write permissions, without activating):

cheesewaf crp stage \
  --package ./plugin.crp \
  --trust-roots ./trust-roots.json \
  --sources ./sources.json \
  --runtime-dir /var/lib/cheesewaf/crp-runtime \
  --now 2026-09-08T12:00:00Z

3. Explicit Temporary HTTPS Probe (temporary-online probe)

For constrained environments requiring remote connectivity testing, CheeseWAF provides an explicit, single-use HTTPS probe. This command requires administrator password stdin, TLS leaf certificate pinning, and records metadata-only audit logs to <data-dir>/audit/netlease.jsonl:

cheesewaf temporary-online probe \
  --administrator admin \
  --password-stdin \
  --plugin-id my-plugin \
  --plugin-version 1.0.0 \
  --host updates.cheesesec.com \
  --leaf-pin sha256:abcd... \
  --ttl 60s

Distribution Endpoints

• Catalog Service: https://store.cheesesec.com (read-only metadata)
• OTA Index Service: https://ota.cheesesec.com (read-only release indices)
• Immutable Resource Store: https://res.cheesesec.com (read-only SHA-256 content-addressed artifacts)

Offline Analytics Boundary (DuckDB)

The DuckDB extension operates as an asynchronous, host-provided one-shot-job rather than a persistent service on the request path. The job reads redacted Parquet audit snapshots to produce structured analysis-record/v1 outputs, ensuring offline analytical queries run in an isolated sandbox without affecting real-time WAF throughput or forwarding latency.