Sovereign by construction
Sovereignty is not a sticker on the box. It is a set of engineering decisions you can read, audit and verify — every one of them in the open.
The name is the mission
Ἀρχεῖον was the house of the archons of Athens, where the city kept its records of record — the direct root of archivum, and of every archive since. A database is a civic institution in miniature: whoever holds the records holds the truth. We think that institution should live under European law, in code anyone can read.
Made and governed in Europe
arkeion is designed, written and governed in Europe by Syrakon — a group of developers building tools for developers. No foreign parent company, no export-controlled black boxes, no jurisdiction surprises. Your regulator can read the same source you do.
A supply chain you can hold in one hand
The engine has exactly four runtime dependencies — all pure Rust except the FIPS-validated primitives. Parser, B-tree, encodings, varints and cache are written by hand, in-repo:
sha2- SHA-256 (FIPS 180-4) for integrity tags and the hash chain. RustCrypto, pure Rust.
getrandom- OS entropy for file identity and key-derivation salt at file creation.
aes-gcm- AES-256-GCM (FIPS 197 / SP 800-38D) for at-rest encryption, per page.
zeroize- Secure erasure of raw key material in memory.
No inherited constraints
arkeion is not a fork of SQLite, and inherits nothing from its file format. A clean-room
design is what makes versioning, hash-chained audit and time-travel possible at the storage
layer instead of bolted on top. And the compiler holds the door: #![forbid(unsafe_code)] — not a line of unsafe in the engine.
Open to the last line
The engine is dual-licensed MIT or Apache-2.0. Audit it, embed it, ship it. Sovereignty that you cannot read is just marketing — read ours.