KSI Command-line Tool

Guardtime's KSI Blockchain is an industrial scale blockchain platform that cryptographically ensures data integrity and proves time of existence. The KSI signatures, based on hash chains, link data to this global calendar blockchain. The checkpoints of the blockchain, published in newspapers and electronic media, enable long term integrity of any digital asset without the need to trust any system.

There are many applications for KSI, a classical example is signing of any type logs, e.g. system logs, financial transactions, call records. For more, see https://guardtime.com

KSI command-line tool enables the access to the KSI blockchain and its functions from the shell. It can be used for signing data in files or other sources, extending existing KSI signatures and verifying them using different trust anchors.

INSTALLATION

Latest Release from Guardtime Repository

In order to install the KSI on CentOS/RHEL:

cd /etc/yum.repos.d

# In case of RHEL/CentOS 7
sudo curl -O https://download.guardtime.com/ksi/configuration/guardtime.el7.repo

# In case of RHEL/CentOS 8
sudo curl -O https://download.guardtime.com/ksi/configuration/guardtime.el8.repo

# In case of RHEL/CentOS 9
sudo curl -O https://download.guardtime.com/ksi/configuration/guardtime.el9.repo

yum install ksi-tools

In order to install the KSI on Debian / Ubuntu:

# Add Guardtime pgp key.
sudo curl https://download.guardtime.com/ksi/GUARDTIME-GPG-KEY-2 | sudo apt-key add -

# In case of Debian 12 (Bookworm)
sudo curl -o /etc/apt/sources.list.d/guardtime.list https://download.guardtime.com/ksi/configuration/guardtime.bookworm.list


sudo apt update
apt-get install ksi-tools

In order to install the KSI on OS X:

brew tap guardtime/ksi
brew install ksi-tools

From Source Code

If the latest version is needed or the package is not available for the platform you are using, check out source code from GitHub and build it using gcc or VS. To build KSI tool, libksi-devel (KSI C SDK) and libparamset-devel packages are needed (can be found in Guardtime repositories). Both are available in GitHub as source code. See https://github.com/GuardTime/libksi for libksi and https://github.com/GuardTime/libparamset for libparamset.

Use rebuild.sh script to build KSI tool and see rebuild.sh -h for more details (use flags --get-dep-online -s to get libksi and libparamset from GitHub automatically without installing the libraries).

On Windows see WinBuild.txt for more detail how to build KSI tool or call WinBuildOnline.bat to get and build libksi and libparamset from GitHub automatically, producing KSI tool binary linked with Windows native libraries.

See test/TEST-README.md to learn how to run KSI command-line tool tests on Windows and Linux.

Upgrade

The older package of KSI tool is deprecated but can concurrently exist with ksi-tools. After some time the older versions will be obsolated by ksi-tools, thus it is strongly recommended to upgrade. To upgrade from ksitool one must install package ksi-tools.

To perform upgrade of older package of ksi or ksi-tools call:

yum upgrade ksi
yum upgrade ksi-tools

USAGE

In order to get trial access to the KSI platform, go to https://guardtime.com/blockchain-developers

The first argument of the tool is the KSI command followed by the KSI service configuration parameters and options. An example of obtaining a signature for a data file data:

ksi sign -i data -S http://example.gateway.com:3333/gt-signingservice

See man ksi for detailed usage instructions (Linux) or read documentation formatted as pdf from doc/ directory (Windows).

LICENSE

See LICENSE file.

CONTRIBUTING

See CONTRIBUTING.md file.

DEPENDENCIES

Library   Version    License type  Source

libksi       >=3.20     Apache 2.0    https://github.com/GuardTime/libksi
libparamset  >=1.1      Apache 2.0    https://github.com/GuardTime/libparamset
OpenSSL      >=0.9.8    BSD           https://github.com/openssl/
Curl         >=7.37.0   MIT           https://github.com/curl/curl.git

• Note 1: OpenSSL is libksi dependency. On Windows platform it's optional. This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit (http://www.openssl.org/). This product includes cryptographic software written by Eric Young (eay@cryptsoft.com). This product includes software written by Tim Hudson (tjh@cryptsoft.com).

• Note 2: Curl is libksi dependency. On Windows platform it's optional.

COMPATIBILITY

OS/Platform                         Compatibility

CentOS/RHEL 7,8,9, x86_64 architecture  Fully compatible and tested.
Debian 12+                              Fully compatible and tested.
Ubuntu                                  Compatible but not tested on regular basis.
OS X                                    Compatible but not tested on regular basis.
Windows 7, 8, 10, 11                    Compatible but not tested on regular basis.