🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the challenge of ensuring execution validity in partially observable environments, where existing mechanisms—focused solely on verifying computational and state integrity—fall short. The paper introduces the Reconstruction-based Authority Model (RAM), which formulates execution validity as a coverage reconstruction problem. RAM explicitly distinguishes between known states, asserted hypotheses, and unobservable residuals to dynamically assess the sufficiency of execution coverage and accordingly adjust or deny permissions. Integrating formal modeling, reconstruction-gated logic, coverage envelope analysis, and a trusted attestation mechanism, RAM transcends the limitations of traditional integrity-centric approaches. Empirical evaluation demonstrates zero invalid executions across 100,000 synthetic trials, whereas pure attestation mechanisms exhibit a 23.3% invalid execution rate even under full coverage conditions.
📝 Abstract
Autonomous systems increasingly operate under partial observability where execution-relevant state is never fully accessible. Existing governance mechanisms -- trusted execution environments, oracle-signed state proofs, cryptographic attestation -- enforce the integrity of computation and state projections. We show this is structurally insufficient: an authenticated projection of state is necessary but never sufficient for execution validity.
We introduce the Reconstructive Authority Model (RAM), which separates integrity from coverage. RAM defines a reconstruction gate that reasons over an explicit coverage envelope -- comprising proven state, declared assumptions, and an acknowledged unobservable residual -- and permits execution only when coverage is adequate for the action class. When coverage is insufficient, RAM narrows privileges dynamically or fails closed. Attestation proves trust in measurement; RAM proves adequacy of what is measured.
We formalize RAM, prove necessity via two theorems (attestation insufficiency and RAM necessity) and three corollaries, and present a hybrid RAM+Attestation architecture with privilege-narrowing. Synthetic experiments (N=100,000, seed=42) show RAM achieves zero invalid execution rates at all coverage levels. Attestation-based systems exhibit IER=0.423 at low coverage and IER=0.233 even at full coverage, the latter arising from undefined-state handling failures undetectable by integrity checks alone.
This reframes execution validity as a coverage reconstruction problem, distinct from and complementary to integrity guarantees provided by attestation.