Mechanism
In the disclosed memory-native identity substrate, a device or agent expresses its identity as a trust slope: the cumulatively validated sequence of Dynamic Agent Hashes (DAHs) or Dynamic Device Hashes (DDHs) formed by successive, verifiable identity mutations, rather than as a static credential. The specification defines the trust slope as the cumulatively validated sequence of DAHs or DDHs produced by successive identity mutations, where continuity requires each successor to be a valid descendant of the previous trusted state under policy-bounded checks. It is an append-only, verifiable sequence of cryptographic identifiers, each computed from the immediately prior identifier and a source of non-exported unpredictability. Identity, in this construction, is the continuity of that sequence.
Each identity step is advanced by an update rule that hashes the prior dynamic hash together with a fresh entropy input and a domain-separating tag. The specification gives the update as H(DAH_prev, Ext(X), salt, tag), where X is derived from a local state vector, and as the alternative H(DAH_prev, KDF(HWID, salt), tag) using a static hardware anchor and a volatile salt. The two contributions may also be combined in a hybrid derivation within the same step. Applying the update yields successive identities along the slope, with the evolution being forward-only. A mutation class is recorded for each step to preserve semantic provenance.
Because each step binds to the prior step and to non-exported unpredictability, an attacker who lacks the device's local state or volatile salt cannot feasibly synthesize valid successors. There is no persistent keypair whose disclosure replays as authentication, and no certifying authority whose compromise compromises the construction. A receiver stores any previously trusted step and evaluates a presented successor against policy-defined continuity criteria, locally, without reliance on centralized authorities, long-lived keypairs, or synchronized registries.
The Unpredictability Source
The specification provides two exemplary mechanisms for the per-step contribution, and a hybrid that uses both. In the hardware-anchor embodiment, a static hardware anchor such as a TPM, TEE, or SoC identifier is combined with a volatile, non-repeating salt through a keyed derivation, so freshness is maintained even when the hardware anchor is constant. In the local-state embodiment, locally observable signals sampled within an epoch are collected into a local state vector and transformed by a strong extractor into a bounded pseudorandom token, which is then combined with a volatile salt.
The local state vector consists of device-observable signals such as monotonic counters, high-resolution timing deltas, CPU performance counters, scheduler jitter statistics, I/O inter-arrival micro-jitter, sensor noise, rolling process histograms, and short-horizon sketches of recent dynamic hashes. The feature map that produces X applies normalization and clipping, projects to a fixed dimension via signed random projections with a public seed, optionally appends a discrete context code, and applies a locality-sensitive binarization so that small fluctuations produce stable X values while genuine role or zone changes flip a controlled subset of bits. This construction accommodates constrained devices that expose only a hardware identifier as well as richer platforms that can derive robust local state vectors, and the disclosed mechanisms are agnostic to which source a given step employs.
Trust-Slope Continuity
Trust-slope continuity, as the specification defines it, denotes that a presented successor is a valid descendant of a previously trusted state under policy-bounded checks. When a new message or agent presents a claimed identity in its transport header, the receiving node reconstructs the expected successor neighborhood from its last trusted identity and checks whether the presented value lies within the allowed successor set. Claims that satisfy continuity are classified as on-slope and allowed to proceed; those that do not are treated as probable spoofed or forged identities.
The continuity check is embodiment-specific. In local-state embodiments, continuity is enforced using a stability-tuned acceptance radius over extractor outputs derived from local state vectors, so that benign fluctuations in local measurements stay on-slope while genuine role or zone changes flip a controlled subset of bits. In hardware-anchor embodiments, continuity is enforced by verifying that the volatile salt used to derive the successor is fresh relative to past observations and to expected temporal cadence. In hybrid embodiments, both checks must hold, and an anomaly in either source suffices to trigger rejection. The receiving node may validate a short distance sketch included with the claim to confirm that the extractor output falls within a policy-acceptable neighborhood without exposing the underlying local state.
The continuity policy is tunable to favor stability within a role or operating context while remaining sensitive to genuine context changes. The specification achieves this by constructing the local state vector with stability-preserving projections and by verifying bounded drift with error-tolerant sketches, rather than by any accumulation or decay of a stored value.
Two-Stage Message Authentication
Identity is bound at both the transport and semantic layers. A sender places its current dynamic hash in the message header for fast, stateless screening, and embeds an additional copy of its current value, an embedded sender dynamic agent hash (DAH_S) computed contemporaneously, inside the protected payload. The sender derives a symmetric encryption key from the recipient's current dynamic identity, selected from the recipient DAH or recipient DDH, by applying a key-derivation function together with a domain-separating context, and performs authenticated encryption over the payload. The constructed message carries the header hash and the encrypted payload but does not include the symmetric key itself.
Upon receipt, the recipient performs two-stage validation. First, the DAH_t presented in the header is checked against the last trusted successor stored locally using a lightweight continuity test, before any decryption. If continuity is confirmed, the recipient derives a decryption key from its own current identity and decrypts the payload. Successful decryption demonstrates that the payload was generated for the recipient's correct memory-resolved identity state at the time of transmission. Second, the recipient extracts the embedded DAH_S and validates it against the reconstructed sender trust slope under policy-bounded continuity rules. The message is accepted only upon successful validation of both the header-level hash and the payload-embedded hash; failure at either stage causes rejection, recorded with an explicit reason and optional trust degradation or quarantine.
This architecture permits fully stateless operation. Neither party maintains long-lived session keys; all symmetric keys are derived transiently from identity values produced by the update rule, and no asymmetric key exchange is performed. Where the sender does not hold the recipient's most recent identity, it may derive the key from the most recently trusted recipient anchor and, on decryption failure, perform a bounded fallback consisting of a short challenge-response rekey scoped to the recipient's current epoch or a checkpoint request sufficient to reconstruct a successor window.
Resistance to Spoofing and Replay
Replay resistance is achieved by binding acceptance to monotonic advancement along the trust slope and by forbidding reuse of previously accepted successors within a policy horizon. If a presented identity matches a previously accepted value for the same sender and context, or regresses behind the last trusted state, the node rejects it as a replay or regression attempt. Policy may further require advancement of a local epoch counter or enforcement of minimum inter-step intervals to mitigate rapid replay.
Spoofing is mitigated by enforcing on-slope continuity: a presenter must produce a valid descendant of the verifier's last trusted state. In the local-state embodiment, the receiving node may validate a short distance sketch included with the claim to confirm that the extractor output falls within a policy-acceptable neighborhood without exposing underlying local state. In the hardware-anchor embodiment, the node verifies salt freshness and cadence. Failure outcomes are recorded with explicit reasons such as continuity violation, sketch or neighborhood mismatch, stale salt, cadence anomaly, or replay detection. Validation and the resulting acceptance or rejection follow the trust-slope lineage and local policy and do not require external authentication services.
Agent-to-Substrate Slope Entanglement
When a semantic agent mutates while executing on a host, the agent's identity evolution is entangled with the host's device identity. The host maintains a current DDH and, when the agent initiates a mutation such as a role change, delegation, policy commit, or semantic state transition, computes a mutation class indicator and derives a host mutation token bound to its current DDH. The mutation token may be calculated as a hash of the DDH, mutation class, and epoch identifier. The agent's successor DAH is then computed by hashing its prior identity with the host mutation token, an optional agent-side extractor output, a volatile per-epoch agent salt, and a domain-separating tag.
The host records a signed entanglement trace containing the prior agent identity, the host's current device identity, the mutation token, the resulting successor identity, and the mutation class, and the agent appends the entry to its memory field. A verifier accepts the successor only if the entanglement trace opens to the host DDH under policy and the successor is a valid derivation from the predecessor. Because the host's device identity is itself derived from non-exported unpredictability, an attacker lacking the host's device entropy cannot synthesize a valid mutation token or forge an acceptable entanglement entry. Verification fails closed when the host signature or MAC is invalid, when the mutation token cannot be reconciled with a valid host DDH, or when the successor is not a valid derivation, preventing off-substrate mutation. Agents that execute across multiple hosts accumulate a sequence of entanglement traces, forming a provenance path that links each agent-side identity transition to the host on which it occurred.
Lineage, Anchors, and Recovery
Each identity transition is committed into an append-only mutation lineage. Per-entry digests are folded into a cumulative chain hash, so that omission, reordering, modification, or replay of any entry diverges the terminal value and is detectable. In size-bounded deployments, periodic anchors are emitted at fixed intervals by hashing the cumulative chain with the prior anchor, enabling compact proofs over long histories. Verifiers validate by bounded replay from a stored reference, recomputing each successor from the disclosed materials and folding the per-entry digests until the recomputed chain opens to the trusted anchor.
For intermittent or disconnected operation, delayed validation lets a verifier replay missing steps from its last trusted value using a bounded slope proof carrying per-step materials, and request a checkpoint when its stored state predates the included anchor. Sparse devices retain only selected identities plus a checkpoint and reconstruct intermediate steps on demand. When a device loses its lineage, a quorum-based recovery path lets it reseed an identity and aggregate signed attestations from previously trusted peers into a recovery token, which, once quorum thresholds defined by a referenced policy are met, is appended as a successor anchor that re-attaches the device to the trust graph. None of these paths require persistent credentials or external registries.
Anchor Rotation and Predictive Verification
To maintain freshness over an operational lifetime, a slope health monitor evaluates staleness indicators such as elapsed-epoch limits, drift or cadence anomalies, entropy-reuse heuristics, or compromise signals. When a monitored condition meets policy thresholds, the system reseeds: it generates a new entropy anchor, derives a new initial identity under the same update rule with a versioned domain separator, and records a forward link binding the terminal value of the prior epoch to the new initial identity. Downstream verifiers reconcile pre-rotation and post-rotation slopes through that forward link using only local policy and bounded proofs. Certain embodiments permit optional biometric-assisted reseeding through a privacy-preserving fuzzy extractor, used only locally and never exported.
Predictive mutation verification supplements continuity checking by forecasting expected successors before a discontinuity occurs. A cadence estimator models expected timing for the next step, and a role-transition model predicts likely mutation classes, together producing an acceptance envelope: a token-space neighborhood in the local-state embodiment, or a salt-freshness and cadence window in the hardware-anchor embodiment. Claims inside the envelope and within the cadence window proceed to standard continuity validation; claims outside are treated as behavioral drift and may trigger trust degradation, a request for supplemental bounded proofs, or quarantine.
Distinction From Persistent-Key Identity
Conventional digital identity relies on persistent public-private keypairs and signature-based validation, exposing users and devices to key compromise, metadata correlation, certificate revocation failure, and susceptibility to quantum cryptographic attacks. Public key infrastructure typically requires centralized trust anchors, global registries, and persistent key material, making it unsuitable for decentralized, memory-constrained, or privacy-sensitive environments, and impractical in ephemeral or cognition-native systems where maintaining static credentials is infeasible.
The trust-slope construction removes the dependency on long-lived keys altogether. Identity is a progressing sequence of ephemeral, non-reusable dynamic hashes, each meaningful only as part of a monotonic sequence anchored in a previously trusted state. Observing a dynamic identity yields no ability to generate successors, because continuity checks require advancing from retained prior state under policy-bounded update rules. Security depends on the per-step min-entropy of the unpredictability source and the preimage resistance of the hash or extractor rather than on algebraic assumptions vulnerable to Shor's algorithm. Legacy PKI interoperability, where required, is confined to a segregated fallback-identifier adapter whose artifacts never influence DAH or DDH evolution, with attempted crossover failing closed.
Disclosure Scope
The trust slope, defined as the cumulatively validated sequence of Dynamic Agent Hashes or Dynamic Device Hashes produced by successive identity mutations where continuity requires each successor to be a valid descendant of the previous trusted state under policy-bounded checks, together with the update rule combining a prior hash with at least one unpredictability contribution and a volatile salt, the hardware-anchor, local-state, and hybrid unpredictability sources, the two-stage header-then-payload authentication, on-slope spoof and replay resistance, agent-to-substrate slope entanglement, append-only mutation lineage with cumulative chain hashes and periodic anchors, delayed and sparse validation, quorum-based recovery, entropy-anchor rotation with forward links, and predictive mutation verification, is disclosed in U.S. Application No. 19/388,580.
The disclosure does not constrain the specific hash function, extractor, or key-derivation function beyond the structural requirements of forward-only successor formation, non-exported unpredictability, and policy-bounded continuity. This article describes that disclosed mechanism. It does not assert numeric trust scores, accumulation rates, saturation ceilings, or decay half-lives; the trust slope is a validated hash sequence, not a scalar quantity, and the trust-degradation actions described above are policy responses to validation failure, not adjustments to a stored reputation value. Licensees evaluating whether a contemplated implementation falls within the disclosed scope should consult the claims of U.S. Application No. 19/388,580 directly.
