🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the vulnerability of traditional privacy mechanisms, which often fail catastrophically upon exposure of system components, leading to sensitive information leakage. To mitigate this, the paper introduces a novel paradigm termed Semantic Non-Assemblability (SNA), wherein architectural design ensures that any set of exposed components below a defined threshold cannot reconstruct a meaningful input, thereby preventing inference of sensitive predicates. The approach innovatively incorporates architectural inertia, enabling privacy guarantees to degrade predictably—rather than collapse abruptly—when components are compromised, and integrates organizational audit constraints to enhance practicality. Leveraging a dual-channel provenance architecture, formal verification via ProVerif, structured protocols, and Birthmark-based attestation on constrained hardware, the system achieves unlinkability across devices, observer unidentifiability, server blindness, and correctness of active defense gates, delivering strong, deployable privacy assurances even on resource-limited platforms.
📝 Abstract
Existing privacy frameworks emphasize confidentiality, access control, appropriate information flow, or statistical disclosure limitation. We introduce a complementary class of privacy guarantee (Semantic Non-Assembly) in which privacy is characterized not by the difficulty of achieving exposure but by the information yield of exposure when it occurs. SNA prevents evaluation of a designated predicate by preventing any sub-threshold coalition from assembling a sufficient assignment to its input domain. An architecture satisfies Semantic Non-Assembly when no coalition of fewer than a defined threshold of components can assemble such an assignment: complete exposure and decryption of any sub-threshold component yields no actionable data. In the base protocol, the guarantee is structural: it operates through architecture, not policy, and its privacy properties degrade predictably under component compromise rather than collapsing at a single point. The reference instantiation combines this structural guarantee with audited organizational constraints, as characterized in Appendix A. This paper formalizes the guarantee and establishes four ProVerif-verified properties: Device Non-Correlation, Registry Observer Non-Identification, Submission Server Blindness, and Active Defense Gate correctness, the first three through a two-channel provenance architecture. The Birthmark Standard instantiates the guarantee on constrained capture hardware, demonstrating deployability where ZK-based approaches are computationally infeasible. All formal properties and scope limitations are documented in Appendix A.