belal-dist

Distribution artifacts for Belal, a prayer-table update system for ESP32 mosque relay controllers.

This repository contains only published release artifacts: manifests and content-addressed BTRP payloads. It contains no source code, no device firmware, and no configuration.

It is intentionally public: devices fetch from raw.githubusercontent.com anonymously, over HTTPS, with no credential of any kind. A private repository could not work — raw content for one requires a token, and Belal firmware carries none.

What a device verifies, and what it does not

A device accepts a release only after all of:

1. a SHA-256 for every payload, taken from the manifest
2. the structural validity of every BTRP table
3. a monotonic counter, rejecting replayed or downgraded releases
4. a payload path that encodes the same year, region and digest the manifest declares

There is no signature. Belal does not cryptographically authenticate releases. SHA-256 binds the manifest to its payloads — that is integrity, not authenticity.

Ed25519 signing was removed from the architecture. Any .sig file or signing language found in the history of this repository is obsolete; nothing verifies it, and it must not be taken as evidence that a release is signed.

This repository IS a trust anchor

This is the direct consequence of having no signature, and it is stated plainly rather than buried:

Whoever can push to this repository decides what every device installs. Write access must be restricted accordingly.

What still holds even against a hostile origin: no rollback (counter monotonicity), no structurally invalid table, no cross-origin redirect, no oversized transfer, and a device's currently installed table survives every failed update.

HTTP metadata — Date, ETag, Last-Modified, CDN headers — is never trusted for authenticity and is used only for caching.

Layout

gaten/manifest.json                                   PRODUCTION release index
gaten/tables/<year>/<region>.<64-hex-sha256>.btrp     content-addressed payloads

The production raw base is:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/techmarkai/belal-dist/master/gaten/

Payload paths embed the full SHA-256 of the file, so any change of content is also a change of URL. A cached copy can never go stale against its own URL, and a republished payload occupies a URL that was never fetched before.

A release is Jordan-wide: one manifest, one counter, every supported region. A device downloads the manifest and then only its own region's table.

Current release

counter : 3
year    : 2026
regions : 10

Prayer times are the Ministry of Awqaf's published local civil time for Jordan (UTC+3), stored without conversion. Counter 3 corrects counter 2, which carried an inherited −60 minute transformation and therefore called every prayer an hour early. Do not reintroduce any offset in the publisher or on the device.

test/ is DEVELOPMENT ONLY

test/ holds an older development release (counter 1) from the era before the above corrections. It is not a production release and must not be treated as one. It is retained only as a historical artifact of the distribution path.

Publishing

Releases are built and verified with the publisher in the Belal source repository, then uploaded here manually. There is no CI, no Actions workflow, no Pages deployment and no CDN in this path.

python belal/tools/release.py build --year <YYYY> --shifted belal/data \
       --raw awqaf_<YYYY> --out <dist>
python belal/tools/verify_release.py --dist <dist>

--raw enables the time-basis guardrail, which aborts the build if the device tables differ from the Ministry's published times by any offset at all.