Air-gapped install

Stage the entire 5-flagship mesh onto a USB tarball, carry it across the air gap, and deploy with no internet — verification first, then offline uds deploy.

Headline number: 1 tarball, 0 network calls at deploy time, 5 organs live.

UDS bundles are designed for disconnected environments. This recipe captures everything on the connected side, verifies it, and replays it inside the air gap.

Trademark note. "UDS" references Defense Unicorns' Unified Defense Stack (USPTO Serial 99831122); SZL is not affiliated. See https://defenseunicorns.com/uds.

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Prerequisites

• Connected side: Zarf v0.77.0+, uds-cli, cosign, rekor-cli, GHCR read:packages token.
• Air-gapped side: Zarf, uds-cli, a running UDS Core v1.5.0 cluster. No internet.

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Quickstart

# ── CONNECTED SIDE ────────────────────────────────────────────────
# 1. Verify, then pull the bundle to a portable tarball.
cosign verify ghcr.io/szl-holdings/a11oy:uds-v0.2.0 \
  --certificate-identity-regexp="^https://github.com/szl-holdings/" \
  --certificate-oidc-issuer="https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com"
uds pull oci://ghcr.io/szl-holdings/szl-uds-bundle:uds-v0.2.0 \
  --output ./airgap-out
sha256sum ./airgap-out/*.tar.zst > ./airgap-out/SHA256SUMS   # carry this too
cp -r ./airgap-out /media/usb/szl-airgap

# ── AIR-GAPPED SIDE ───────────────────────────────────────────────
# 2. Check integrity, then deploy with NO network.
sha256sum -c /media/usb/szl-airgap/SHA256SUMS
uds deploy /media/usb/szl-airgap/szl-uds-bundle-*.tar.zst --confirm

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Full walkthrough

Step 1 — Verify on the connected side (you can't on the other side)

Run the full recipe 06 cosign + Rekor check while you still have internet. Record the image digests and Rekor log indices in a manifest that travels with the tarball — that manifest is your offline provenance.

Step 2 — Pull everything Zarf needs

uds pull resolves and bundles every image layer, chart, and SBOM into the tarball. Confirm no external oci:// refs remain:

zarf package inspect ./airgap-out/szl-uds-bundle-*.tar.zst | grep -i image

Step 3 — Carry integrity across the gap

Compute SHA256SUMS on the connected side and verify on the air-gapped side before deploy. This is the offline analogue of the Rekor check: it proves the bytes didn't change in transit.

Step 4 — Deploy offline

uds deploy reads only from the local tarball. Watch the pods come up and run the recipe-02 health loop against localhost inside the cluster — both shipping organs (a11oy, killinchu) must report v11 / 749 / 14 / 163 / c7c0ba17.

Step 5 — Confirm doctrine + receipts work offline

# Only a11oy and killinchu publish images; the a11oy Memory / Operator / Sentinel verticals
# ship inside a11oy, not as separate deployments.
for o in a11oy killinchu; do
  kubectl -n szl exec deploy/$o -- curl -s localhost:8080/api/$o/v1/honest | jq -r .doctrine
done
# => v11  (×2)
# a11oy emits receipts with no network (memory cortex / a11oy Memory lives here):
kubectl -n szl exec deploy/a11oy -- curl -s -X POST localhost:8080/api/a11oy/v1/mcp/call -d '{"tool":"a11oy_gate","args":{}}' \
  | jq '.tick_receipt.hash'

Honest note. In the air gap, Cardano anchoring (recipe 10) and public Rekor lookups are unavailable by definition. Verify the local receipt chain (hash-chain continuity) offline; do the public-ledger anchoring later from the connected side using the exported Merkle root.

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See also

• 02 — Deploy the 5-flagship UDS bundle — connected deploy.
• 06 — Verify cosign + Rekor — verify before you cross the gap.
• 13 — Build a UDS bundle from scratch
• Repo: szl-uds-deployment · uds-bundles

Cite this recipe

@misc{szl_cookbook_airgap_install_2026,
  title        = {Air-gapped install (SZL Cookbook recipe 15)},
  author       = {{SZL Holdings}},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/szl-holdings/szl-cookbook/blob/main/recipes/15-air-gapped-install.md}},
  note         = {Offline deploy from USB tarball; verify on the connected side. UDS Core v1.5.0. Doctrine v11 c7c0ba17.}
}

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Doctrine v11 LOCKED — 749/14/163 — kernel c7c0ba17 · Λ = Conjecture 1 · SLSA L1 (honest)