🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the vulnerability of cognitive workflow executors on the BEAM virtual machine to adversarial bypass attacks, demonstrating that reliance solely on static module import graphs is insufficient to enforce purity constraints. To resolve this, the authors propose a novel mechanism integrating structural restrictions with cryptographic proofs, shifting governance from runtime conventions to structural capability boundaries. By introducing purity certificates, a restricted WebAssembly compilation target, runtime validation gating, and cross-organizational remote attestation, the approach eliminates all five known classes of BEAM bypass paths for the first time and formally verifies four core security properties. Experiments across four executors show that purity verification incurs only 39–42 microseconds of latency, full workflow cycles remain under 400 microseconds, runtime overhead amounts to less than 0.4% of a 100-millisecond HTTP request, and execution results are fully deterministic.
📝 Abstract
We present a certified purity architecture that converts governance enforcement in cognitive workflow systems from a runtime convention into a structural capability boundary. A prior three-layer governance architecture proves governance completeness, provenance completeness, and the impossibility of ungoverned effects, conditional on the pure module constraint: that step executors cannot perform effects. That constraint was enforced by module import graph analysis, which is insufficient against adversarial bypass on the BEAM virtual machine. This paper closes the gap through four mechanisms: (1) a restricted WebAssembly compilation target where effect-producing instructions are structurally absent; (2) purity certificates, cryptographically signed proofs binding executor binaries to their import classifications; (3) a runtime verification gate that rejects uncertified executors before they enter the governance pipeline; and (4) portable governance credentials via remote attestation for cross-organizational verification. We prove four theorems: structural purity by construction, bypass elimination for all five BEAM bypass classes, certificate integrity, and gate completeness. The guarantee holds relative to an explicit Trusted Computing Base. Evaluation on four implemented executors shows verification latency of 39--42 us, full plan cycle under 400 us, runtime overhead under 0.4% of a 100 ms HTTP request, and zero determinism divergences across repeated invocations.