Glossary

A severed agent's third option beyond halting at expiry or self-renewing: extend existing, unwidened authority for a bounded time on the signed word of a peer supermajority. Generic to whatever issued the original credential — a workload identity system, a physical-AI mission authority, or otherwise.

The agent whose credential is nearing or past expiry and whose issuer is unreachable.

A member of the requester's provisioned peer set that independently evaluates a renewal request and signs a PeerAttestation only if every check passes.

Any party — peer or otherwise — that receives a request after nominal expiry and must verify the presented RenewalChain before honoring it.

⌈2N/3⌉ of the provisioned peer set (N ≥ 4, the requester excluded) — the Byzantine supermajority threshold. Below it, a proof cannot be assembled; a malicious minority can withhold attestation but never authorize a grant on its own.

The maximum total peer-attested extension, measured from original issuance and fixed mesh-wide before any partition. A hard halt once reached, regardless of mesh health — tightened by the clock-skew bound below, so disagreement between mesh clocks never lets the true ceiling be exceeded.

The structural guarantee that scope can only be preserved, never widened: no field in the wire format is capable of carrying a wider claim than the original credential.

The provisioned tolerance for disagreement between mesh clocks. Mechanically enforced, not merely assumed: it tightens the ceiling itself, and one round's attestations that disagree on their own timestamp beyond the bound are refused together rather than trusted to agree.

The signed object a requester broadcasts: original credential hash, requested extension, a fresh nonce, and any prior chain.

The signed object a peer returns after every independent-evaluation check passes — binary, never a counter-offer, bound to the round's nonce.

The aggregation of ≥ quorum-many valid, distinct attestations for one request. Carries no signature of its own — its integrity is the sum of the attestations inside it.

The ordered sequence of RenewalProof entries covering one continuous partition, each extending the one before it, independently re-verifiable end to end.

The closed vocabulary an attester's observation is drawn from: heartbeat_current, task_participation, consensus_round, or other. Attester-asserted, not independently measured — health_observed_at below bounds when it was asserted, not what.

The timestamp of the actual observation backing health_evidence — distinct from the attestation's own signing time. Bounded against staleness, and checkable by any relying party directly from the wire, not merely trusted because an attester claims it.

The closed-vocabulary field naming the signature algorithm a signed object uses. ed25519 is the only conformant value today — reserving the field lets a future algorithm widen the vocabulary without changing any object's shape.

The central, stated limitation: a revocation issued during a partition cannot take effect until the partition heals. Bounded by the ceiling and priced by mandatory resync on reconnection — never eliminated.

The reconnection procedure: request a fresh issuer credential, transmit the full chain for audit, and resynchronize revocation state before honoring any further attestation. An issuer credential supersedes a chain on sight.

The reference implementation: build/sign/evaluate/verify for the full wire format, Ed25519 + RFC 8785 (JCS), a deterministic conformance corpus, and a runnable example.