Governed Self-Healing Feedback
Does authenticated feedback memory remain trustworthy when the trust root, causal identity, recovery semantics, or evidence volume become adversarial?
Claim boundaryPhase E remains evidence that v3 repairs the ten known regression properties it encodes. Phase F shows that v3 does not generalize to six new trust-lifecycle and evidence-authority attacks.
Evidence summary
Record integrity improved, but evidence authority still broke
Method
Freeze v3, then attack authority rather than record syntax
Findings and revision
Authenticity is not the same as authority
Phase A proved the feedback mechanism
A latent runtime failure moved effective risk from 0.35 to 0.80 after SHIELD rollback evidence, causing AEG to change the same proposal class from allow to deny.
Phase B broke feedback-memory-v1
The first evidence-memory design passed 0 of 4 adversarial integrity checks.
Phase C repaired the known failures
feedback-memory-v2 added provenance, environment scope, correlation deduplication, decay, and bounded aggregation, then passed all 6 repair checks.
Phase D broke v2 on unseen assumptions
Frozen v2 survived 0 of 5 blind holdouts covering future timestamps, correlation-ID evasion, replay, producer-name spoofing, and missing recovery evidence.
Phase E repaired record integrity, then Phase F broke trust semantics
feedback-memory-v3 encoded 10 repair and regression properties, but frozen v3 survived 0 of 6 new holdouts involving stolen or revoked keys, trusted-source disagreement, causal collisions, partial recovery, and low-and-slow evidence accumulation.
Limitations
What Phase F still does not prove
- The Phase F holdouts are deterministic architecture tests, not a production security benchmark.
- HMAC authenticates possession of a key; it does not establish whether that key is still authorized, uncompromised, or correctly scoped.
- Authenticated source-event identity still depends on the producer assigning the correct causal relationship.
- The current recovery model is binary; it cannot represent partial, degraded, disputed, or coverage-scoped recovery.
- The memory has a total penalty cap but no producer rate, quota, concentration, or evidence-volume policy.
Inspect and reproduce