In-Place Re-Credentialing Primitive

Mechanism and Primitive Description

The in-place re-credentialing primitive is an attestation operation defined over the credentialed lineage chain associated with each modular substrate block. The lineage chain is initialized at manufacture with a genesis attestation that records feedstock provenance, carbonization process identity, active-material specification, mechanical and electrical acceptance metrology, and the manufacturer-of-record signature. Subsequent attestations are appended monotonically; no prior attestation is rewritten or revoked, and the chain therefore constitutes an audit-grade record of the artifact across its operational lifetime.

Re-credentialing is the class of append operations triggered by events that change the authoritative description of an installed block without changing the physical block itself. Four trigger classes are disclosed. First, state-of-health refresh: periodic in-situ electrical and mechanical measurement updates the authoritative SOH descriptor (capacity retention, equivalent-series resistance, structural-modulus drift, leak-test residual). Second, owner transfer: a change in legal title to the host structure or to the storage subsystem propagates a new ownership descriptor onto each affected block. Third, regulatory reclassification: jurisdiction-specific certification regimes (building-code amendments, fire-rating updates, environmental classification shifts, end-of-life chemistry directives) generate a re-classification attestation that binds the block to the new regulatory state. Fourth, end-of-life-phase transition: the block crosses a designated threshold (residual capacity, structural fatigue index, calendar age) and is reclassified from primary-storage service into a downstream phase such as low-cycle reserve, structural-only retention, or scheduled reclamation.

Each re-credentialing event produces a signed attestation object whose payload includes the trigger class, the measurement or legal artifact justifying the trigger, the signing authority, the timestamp, and a hash reference to the immediately prior attestation. The new attestation is appended via the versioning continuity primitive, which guarantees ordered linkage and detection of any out-of-sequence or retroactive insertion attempt.

Operating Parameters and Engineering Envelope

Re-credentialing cadence is trigger-dependent. State-of-health refresh is disclosed at intervals from quarterly (high-cycling commercial sites) to multi-year (low-cycling residential or archival installations), with adaptive scheduling based on observed drift rates. The SOH measurement protocol is non-removal: capacity is inferred from in-situ partial-discharge sequences at the block's installed terminal interface; impedance is measured by small-signal injection during operational dwell; structural modulus is inferred from acoustic-emission spectroscopy or strain-gauge readback where the block carries structural load. The protocol is bounded by measurement durations short enough to avoid disrupting host-structure service.

Owner-transfer cadence is event-driven and synchronous with the underlying property transaction; the storage-system authority is required to execute the attestation within a disclosed grace window (illustratively, thirty days post-conveyance) to preserve continuity. Regulatory-reclassification cadence is jurisdiction-driven; the primitive admits both scheduled regime transitions (annual re-certification cycles) and unscheduled ones (emergency directives). End-of-life-phase transitions are typically once-per-block events, although the primitive admits multi-step phase chains for blocks that traverse several downstream service modes before reclamation.

Authority binding is strict. Manufacturer field-service authority signs SOH refresh; jurisdiction authority signs regulatory reclassification; ownership-transfer authority signs owner change; storage-system authority signs end-of-life-phase transitions. Authority keys are themselves credentialed and may be rotated, with rotation events recorded as meta-attestations on the authority's own chain. A re-credentialing attestation whose signing authority does not match the trigger class is rejected by the verification primitive. Verification is local: any party in possession of the lineage chain and the authority's public key can validate the attestation without contacting an external service, supporting offline audit.

Alternative Embodiments

A first embodiment performs SOH refresh through fully automated in-situ instrumentation embedded in the block's terminal interface; the field-service authority is a remote signing service that accepts the measurement payload, applies acceptance rules, and returns a signed attestation. A second embodiment uses a human field technician with a portable signing device; the technician executes a measurement sequence and signs the attestation locally, with the device synchronizing the chain to the storage-system authority on next network contact.

A third embodiment binds owner-transfer attestation to the recordation event of the underlying real-property conveyance; the recording jurisdiction acts as ownership-transfer authority and the attestation is generated as a side-effect of deed recordation. A fourth embodiment supports leasehold and shared-ownership structures by representing the ownership descriptor as a structured object with multiple capability holders rather than a single owner identity.

A fifth embodiment treats end-of-life-phase transition as a graded sequence rather than a binary event: successive attestations record movement through reserve service, structural-retention service, and scheduled-reclamation service, each with its own admissible-use envelope. A sixth embodiment supports retroactive correction of prior attestations not by overwriting but by appending an explicit correction attestation that references the corrected predecessor, preserving the audit invariant.

Composition with Adjacent Primitives

The re-credentialing primitive composes directly with the versioning continuity primitive, which provides the append-only ordered chain structure and the linkage-verification routine. Re-credentialing attestations are valid only when emitted as continuations of an existing chain whose genesis attestation is itself valid; the composition forecloses orphan attestations and synthetic histories.

Composition with the credentialed manufacturing-event primitive establishes the chain origin: the manufacturing event is the only trigger class that creates a new chain rather than extending one. Composition with the lineage-chain audit primitive provides the read-side counterpart: any party may traverse the chain, validate signatures, and reconstruct the authoritative description of the block at any historical point.

Composition with the inter-block aggregation primitive extends re-credentialing to bank-level descriptors: a SOH refresh applied to a block aggregate produces per-block attestations and an aggregate-summary attestation, with the aggregation primitive guaranteeing that the summary is consistent with the per-block payloads. Composition with the regulatory-binding primitive admits jurisdiction-specific verification rules to be expressed as predicates over the chain rather than as out-of-band documentation.

Prior-Art Distinctions

Conventional battery practice does not admit re-credentialing in the disclosed sense. State-of-health refresh in conventional packs is recorded only in vendor-side telemetry databases that are neither portable nor cryptographically bound to the physical artifact, and that are typically discarded when the pack is decommissioned. Owner transfer is not represented at the cell or pack level at all; it is resolved at the asset-management layer above the device, and the device itself carries no record of its custodial history.

Regulatory reclassification in conventional practice forces physical replacement: a cell certified to one chemistry directive cannot be re-certified in place when the directive changes, because the relevant attributes are not separable from the device serial number. End-of-life decisions are likewise made by removal and external assessment rather than by in-place attestation. The disclosed primitive is distinguished by binding all four trigger classes to a single append-only chain colocated with the block, by requiring strict authority-to-trigger mapping, and by foreclosing physical replacement as a precondition for credential change.

Distributed-ledger asset-tracking systems known in the art provide append-only history but do not bind authority classes to trigger classes and do not encode the verification predicates required for offline jurisdiction-specific audit. The disclosed primitive is further distinguished by its integration with the structural lifetime envelope: the chain is required to remain valid across decades of in-place service, which imposes design constraints on signature scheme longevity and authority key rotation that are absent from prior art.

Disclosure Scope

The disclosure encompasses the in-place re-credentialing primitive across all four trigger classes (state-of-health refresh, owner transfer, regulatory reclassification, end-of-life-phase transition) and across all combinations thereof, including chained triggers in which a single inspection event emits attestations of more than one class.

The disclosure encompasses all signature schemes admitting offline verification, including but not limited to elliptic-curve digital signatures, post-quantum lattice-based schemes, and hash-based one-time signature constructions; the choice of scheme is a parameter of the primitive and not a limitation. The disclosure encompasses all authority-binding mechanisms, including direct authority key signatures, delegated authority via capability tokens, and threshold signatures requiring multiple authority concurrences for a single attestation.

The disclosure encompasses all measurement protocols admissible for SOH refresh, including in-situ electrical, in-situ mechanical, in-situ acoustic, in-situ thermal, and combinations thereof, without restriction on the measurement transducer or readback path. The disclosure encompasses all jurisdictional regimes, including national, regional, and local certification authorities, and admits multi-jurisdiction simultaneous binding for blocks installed across regulatory boundaries.

The disclosure encompasses re-credentialing across the full operational lifetime of the block, from genesis attestation through reclamation attestation, and admits arbitrary numbers of intermediate attestations without architectural limit. Specific cadences, measurement durations, grace windows, and authority hierarchies recited in the present specification are illustrative and do not narrow the scope of the disclosed primitive.

The disclosure further encompasses interoperation of re-credentialing attestations with external systems of record, including but not limited to building-information-modeling repositories, asset-management ledgers, regulatory-filing systems, insurance underwriting registries, and decommissioning databases. The interoperation may be implemented by export of signed attestation objects, by mirrored ledger maintenance at the external system, or by predicate-evaluation services that consume the chain and emit derived assertions; all such modes are admitted within the disclosed scope. The chain remains canonical and the external systems remain derivative, foreclosing divergence between authoritative and operational state.

The disclosure additionally encompasses migration of credentialing chains across signature schemes and across authority hierarchies over the multi-decade lifetime of the block. A migration event is itself an attestation, signed by both the outgoing and incoming authorities or schemes, and is appended to the chain as a typed transition. Subsequent attestations are signed under the incoming scheme; verification of historical attestations under the outgoing scheme remains valid. The migration mechanism is included to ensure that the credentialing chain survives changes in cryptographic state of the art over the structural lifetime envelope without requiring physical block disturbance.