What Aegis does
Aegis is device-recovery for sovereign infrastructure. When a Soteria-registered device connects to the internet, Aegis quietly records where it is. When you flag one stolen, every subsequent ping lights up your inbox.
Setup — once per device
Sign into your dashboard, register a device with a label like "briefcase-rig" or "field-laptop," and choose whether it's a personal device or a Soteria Covenant Trust asset.
Aegis generates an Ed25519 keypair for that device, stores the public key, and hands you the
private key once. You run a one-line installer on the device. The installer drops
the key into /etc/aegis/device.key, installs a systemd timer and a NetworkManager
hook, and fires the first beacon. From that moment on, the device beacons home every time it
sees the internet.
Normal operation
Each beacon contains:
- An ISO-8601 timestamp
- The device's public IP and geo-located city / country / lat-long
- The hostname and interface MAC addresses
- A scan of nearby WiFi networks (SSID, BSSID, signal strength)
- A cryptographic signature proving the message came from this specific device's key
The beacon is verified, persisted, and appended to a hash-chain ledger (each entry's hash references the previous entry's hash). If anyone ever tampers with the trail, the chain breaks at the next verification — instantly visible.
Beacons fire on every network-up event and every six hours otherwise. While the device's status is ok, beacons are silent — the trail just builds up. You can review it at any time on the device's detail page.
When a device walks off
From any browser, sign in and hit Flag stolen. From that moment forward, Aegis treats every beacon from that device as urgent. Each one fires an email to your registered address with:
- Time and timezone
- Public IP and geo-located city
- Google Maps link to the approximate coordinates
- The list of nearby WiFi networks — often the killer detail, since the thief's home network ESSID will appear in it
- The ledger entry hash, for forensic / legal use later
The alert email itself is Ed25519-signed by Soteria's timestamp service, so the metadata is independently verifiable.
When you get it back
Sign in, hit Mark recovered. Status flips back to ok, beacons go silent again, and the entire history stays in the ledger forever. If law enforcement later needs proof of when and where the device was, the chain is there, verifiable, and tamper-evident.
The trust guarantees
Each beacon's signature proves it came from that specific device's key — not a forged "I'm fine, no need to look for me" message. A 10-minute replay window prevents capture-and-replay attacks. Commands that change device state (flag, unflag, retire) are gated by your magic-link session and recorded in the ledger with the email that performed them.
Path-independence: the dashboard and alert pipeline live on a server independent of any Soteria device you might be protecting. If your primary infrastructure walks off, Aegis is still reachable, still alerting, still ledgering.
What Aegis will NOT do
- It can't recover an offline device. If a thief never powers it on, or never connects it to the internet, no software-side beacon will fire. Pair Aegis with a hardware tracker (Tracki, AirTag) for the offline-thief case.
- It can't survive a disk wipe. Software cannot. Full-disk encryption is what protects the data; Aegis catches the beacon if the thief boots the unwiped device online.
- It doesn't remote-lock or remote-wipe (yet). Coming in v0.2.
- It doesn't pinpoint street addresses (yet). v0.1 gives city-level geolocation. v0.2 will integrate WiFi-SSID lookup against open wardriving databases for apartment-level fixes.
The bigger frame
Aegis is a member benefit. Every Soteria Beneficiary, Trustee, and Steward can register their own devices. Trust-owned hardware appears on a shared fleet view that any Senior Trustee can see. The model mirrors the rest of the Trust: members protect their own things, Trustees see what affects the body, Stewards can act when no one else can.
Names matter. Aegis was the shield of Athena and Zeus — divine protection, fearsome to whoever it faced. In Soteria's hands it is exactly that: a small, sovereign, member-owned shield against the most ordinary kind of theft.