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Trust succession for catastrophic compromise

Continuity Web

A compact web presentation for the trust-succession brief.

Read the brief Open the technical report See the mechanism GitHub
Diagram showing compromised authority being pruned while legitimate authority branches into a clean successor epoch.
Infrastructure remains data Old services may stay reachable without retaining command power. Packets route. Domains resolve. The successor epoch decides what is admissible, not what is reachable.
Authority becomes epochal Credentials are evaluated under declared trust-epoch policy. Every authority relationship is declared, every policy change traceable, every coercive act forensically recorded.
Succession is privately verifiable Manifests, stamps, and quorums make fork claims inspectable. Zero-knowledge proofs let epochs prove compliance without revealing internal state. Accountability and privacy are not opposed.
01 - the gap

Failure mode

Catastrophic compromise leaves ordinary commands looking valid after the authority environment is no longer trustworthy.

Authority roots including identity, updates, routing, cloud, agents, and governance surrounding a compromised epoch.

The old substrate can still move data while its authority roots are no longer admissible.

Continuity Web does not replace incident response. It gives legitimate actors a way to leave a poisoned command layer behind.

The old network can remain useful as evidence, history, and transport. It should not automatically authenticate, update, govern, delegate, or command the successor network.
02 - succession

Succession manifest

A successor epoch starts by declaring the evidence boundary and the fresh roots that replace contaminated command paths.

Clean Genesis Manifest document and zk-attested admission gateway into a successor epoch.

The manifest is the hard boundary between a contaminated epoch and the successor ruleset.

03 - boundary

Quarantine bridge

The bridge is deliberately narrow: useful old-epoch records can cross as evidence, but command rights do not inherit legitimacy.

Quarantine bridge filtering old epoch data into a successor epoch while blocking authority and expiring AI capability passports.

The key distinction is admissibility: evidence may be imported, authority must be re-earned under the successor epoch.

04 - legitimacy

Governance stamp

Legitimacy comes from scoped claims by independent quorums, not from a single privileged actor announcing that the new epoch is real.

Independent quorums converging on a succession stamp beside degraded response modes.

A succession claim is inspectable because every stamp is scoped to a manifest, evidence root, validator set, and status.

01Increase logging
02Freeze high-risk authority
03Revoke AI delegation
04Restrict updates
05Regional continuity
06Full succession
05 - the web

Federation graph

This is the composition layer: epochs recognize one another by policy, and hierarchy emerges from useful recognition rather than protocol fiat.

Federated trust epochs forming voluntary recognition paths with policy deltas, zero-knowledge admission proof, and alternative routing around coercive mandates.

The graph is the point: recognition stays voluntary, policy deltas stay visible, and alternate paths remain possible.

Privacy is the security property, not its opposite.

Proving admissibility to an upstream epoch uses a zero-knowledge proof. The verifier learns only "compliant." Device inventory, agent identity, residents, and transaction history never leave the prover. The asymmetry is verifiable to allies, opaque to adversaries.
Consortium target

Build the package registry that can survive its own compromise.

Prove trust succession in a bounded software ecosystem before asking the wider internet to believe it.

MVP demonstration

Compromise the update channel, fork authority into a successor registry, admit developers with tickets, and quarantine old packages.

MVP demonstration diagram showing a compromised package registry, Clean Genesis Manifest and Succession Stamp checkpoint, quarantine bridge, admitted developers, and a successor registry.
Governance specification Who can declare succession, how claims are challenged, and how capture is resisted.
Forkable package registry A realistic supply-chain target for provenance, revocation, false forks, and client recognition.
AI-agent containment Scoped coding agents that expire at succession unless re-authorized.
Security-lab consortium Universities, white hats, maintainers, and cryptographers running adversarial drills.

The demo is narrow on purpose: if authority cannot be recovered here, it will not be recovered at internet scale.