Mechanism

The biological identity architecture supports delegation and multi-identity authorization scenarios in which multiple distinct biological identities are authorized to act with respect to a common resource without requiring any party to disclose biological trust-slope data to any other party. The governing constraint is structural: delegation operates through policy-mediated capability transfer rather than through biological identity sharing. The delegating individual does not hand over biological signals, a stable sketch, a biological hash, or any portion of a trust-slope. Instead, the delegating individual's trust-slope authorizes the creation of a derived capability token, and that derived token is bound to the delegate's own independently established trust-slope.

This rests on the capability-binding mechanism that governs ordinary authorization. A capability is a structured token specifying what actions an authorized individual may perform with respect to a specific resource, under what conditions, and for what duration. A capability token is bound to a biological trust-slope, and it remains valid only as long as that trust-slope continues to be validated with sufficient continuity confidence. Delegation reuses this binding: the derived token names the delegate's trust-slope as its binding target, so that the delegate exercises the delegated authority through the same continuity-validated identity mechanism that governs any other capability the delegate holds.

The Derived Capability Token

When an authorized individual delegates, the system creates a derived capability token from the delegator's existing capability. The derived token grants a subset of the delegator's capabilities to the delegate, subject to the constraints specified in the delegation policy. The disclosure frames delegation as granting "a subset of that individual's capabilities," so the delegate's authority is bounded by, and cannot exceed, the authority the delegator itself holds.

Because the derived token is a capability token bound to the delegate's trust-slope, it inherits the continuous re-evaluation property of all capability bindings. The delegate's authority under the derived token persists only while the delegate's trust-slope is validated with sufficient confidence. If the delegate's trust-slope confidence degrades, through failed validation events, excessive sparsity, or detected anomalies, the capability tokens bound to that trust-slope are automatically suspended or revoked. Authorization is therefore continuously re-evaluated for the delegate exactly as it is for any direct grantee, rather than granted once at delegation time and assumed indefinitely thereafter.

Delegation Without Data Disclosure

The defining property of the disclosed delegation mechanism is that it requires no party to disclose biological trust-slope data to any other party. The delegating individual and the delegate each maintain an independent trust-slope. Delegation creates an association between a derived capability token and the delegate's trust-slope; it does not create a composite identity, a shared trust-slope, or any cross-party visibility into either individual's biological signals.

This follows from how identity itself is represented in the architecture. A trust-slope is an ordered sequence of biological hashes, each evaluated for continuity with its predecessors, and each biological hash is non-invertible, domain-scoped, and temporally bound. Delegation operates at the level of capability tokens and policy, above the biological signal layer, so the privacy properties established for direct identity resolution, structural non-invertibility of the stable sketch and domain separation of the hash, are preserved unchanged when a capability is delegated.

Multi-Identity Authorization

Multi-identity authorization enables policies that require authorization from multiple biological identities before a resource action is permitted. The disclosure gives two illustrative cases: a two-person authorization requirement for high-consequence actions, and a quorum requirement for access to shared resources. In both cases the policy is satisfied only when the required set of distinct biological identities has each authorized the action.

The mechanism evaluates each participating biological identity's trust-slope independently, without disclosing any individual's trust-slope data to other participants. Each participant validates independently through that participant's own continuity-validation process. The authorization engine then evaluates whether the set of independent validations satisfies the multi-identity policy. Critically, this evaluation is performed without requiring a composite biological identity or a shared trust-slope structure: there is no merged identity object that multiple people contribute to, only a set of independently validated trust-slopes whose combination the policy tests.

Continuous Re-Evaluation of Delegated Authority

Because delegated capabilities and multi-identity authorizations are bound to trust-slopes, and trust-slope validity is itself continuous rather than one-time, delegated authority is governed by the same ongoing confidence assessment that governs direct authority. A trust-slope carries a cumulative confidence measure reflecting the overall strength of the identity chain, and the assurance level of the most recent validation event. Authorization is a function of that resolved confidence and assurance against the resource's access policy.

The practical consequence is that a delegated capability is not a static grant that outlives the conditions under which it was issued. If the delegate's identity chain weakens, the derived capability bound to it weakens with it and is suspended or revoked automatically. In a multi-identity authorization, each participant's contribution depends on that participant's trust-slope continuing to validate; a participant whose continuity fails no longer counts toward satisfying the policy. Authorization throughout the architecture is continuously re-evaluated rather than granted once and assumed indefinitely.

Delegation in Operational Handoff

The delegation mechanism also serves operational continuity in embodied systems such as autonomous vehicles, robotic platforms, medical and surgical systems, and industrial machinery, where the architecture verifies that the human operator currently in physical control is the same operator who initiated the operational session. Operational handoff verification runs continuously during a session, evaluating the operator's biological signals at intervals determined by the safety criticality of the operation. If biological continuity breaks, indicating that the operator has changed, has left the station, or has become incapacitated, the system enters a governed degradation mode proportional to context rather than performing an abrupt shutdown.

Resumption of full operational capability requires either successful biological continuity re-establishment with the authorized operator, or delegation of authority to a newly verified operator. In the latter case the same delegation mechanism applies: the new operator's authority is established through that operator's own validated trust-slope, and the transition is recorded in the lineage of both the embodied system's semantic agent and the biological identity trust-slope, enabling subsequent forensic analysis of operator transition events.

Distinction From Conventional Delegation

Conventional delegation in credential and biometric systems either transfers a bearer artifact, whose possession is detached from the holder's biological identity, or shares enrolled biometric material, which exposes a template that can be stolen and replayed. The disclosed mechanism does neither. The delegate is bound to the resource through the delegate's own continuity-validated biological identity, so authority cannot be exercised by anyone other than the human individual whose trust-slope the derived token names. No biological data passes between delegator and delegate, and no shared or composite identity is constructed for multi-party authorization. Because the binding is to a trust-slope rather than to a static credential, the delegated authority is continuously re-evaluated against ongoing identity confidence rather than granted once and held indefinitely.

Disclosure Scope

Delegation and multi-identity authorization without biological data disclosure, comprising policy-mediated capability transfer in which a delegating individual's trust-slope authorizes a derived capability token bound to a delegate's independently established trust-slope, the granting of a subset of the delegator's capabilities subject to delegation-policy constraints, multi-identity authorization in which each participating biological identity's trust-slope is evaluated independently and without disclosure to other participants and without a composite identity or shared trust-slope, the continuous re-evaluation under which capability tokens bound to a trust-slope are automatically suspended or revoked when that trust-slope's confidence degrades, and the application of the delegation mechanism to operator handoff in embodied systems, is disclosed in the cognition filing (U.S. Application No. 19/647,395 and its international counterpart). This article describes that disclosed mechanism. The scope extends to deployment configurations and policy structures, including two-person and quorum authorization requirements, in which the delegation and multi-identity properties described above are preserved, and is independent of any particular biometric modality, capability-token format, or policy encoding.