Provably Compliant Autonomous Actions: A Consensus Enforced, Dual Authority Certification Gate with Freshness Bound Per Action Proofs
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Regulated organisations are increasingly required to demonstrate compliance not at the level of policy documents but at the level of individual actions — every message sent, decision made, or transaction executed. This paper presents a certification gate that sits at the egress boundary of a regulated firm's outbound actions and produces, for each action, an independently verifiable proof that it satisfied the applicable rules before it occurred. The gate composes a regulator-aligned policy baseline with a tenant-controlled overlay (stricter-wins), evaluates the result deterministically, and requires a role-typed quorum of signatures — including a mandatory client-held signer — committed to a Byzantine-fault-tolerant, tamper-evident ledger. We state six security properties (non-bypass, hash-binding, composed-policy admissibility, refusal-code completeness and soundness, consensus-time non-admit, and freshness-binding) such that a permit cannot be issued, forged, replayed against stale reference data, or bypassed without detection, and any party — including the regulator — can recompute the decision from public evidence rather than trusting the operator. We describe the threat model, a working reference implementation validated through coordinated red-team and blue-team review, deployment in observe and enforce modes, and an honest account of current maturity and residual trust assumptions.
Author: Duke, Jason
Language: English
Topic: Access Control and Trust
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7163898258
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: