Provenance Identity Continuity proves confused-deputy exclusion in causal security graphs
Original title: Full Provenance on the COSS Causal Axis: An Event-Level Closure of Causal Attribution and Confused-Deputy Exclusion
PIC and COSS generalize security-state continuity over causal execution graphs, proving authority cannot be resurrected across branches.
The paper defines Provenance Identity Continuity as authority-use events in causal lineages. It models execution as causal partial orders where distinct lineages may share roots but diverge. The authors prove an architecture-independent confused-deputy exclusion theorem: at joins, authority on one branch cannot be resurrected. Full provenance recovers causal edges but is not the foundation of the PIC theorem.
- PIC continuation requires C(e')⊆C(e) on every ordinary causal edge.
- Non-conservative authority combination must be explicit authorized composition.
- Result holds for any system with protected request-to-effect causes and PIC-compliant authority transport.
From the original article
1 min read at arxiv.orgProvenance Identity Continuity (PIC) represents an authority-use event as an operation/resource behavior situated in a causal lineage, $(o,r,\ell)\in O\times R\times L$. We make the causal occurrence itself primitive: a represented security-relevant causal graph $(E,\to_c)$ in which each occurrence has a unique causal history, so the consistent event-lineage space is canonically isomorphic to $E$.
By Nicola Gallo · arxiv.org
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