Ephemeral Integrity Substrate with Dual-Chain Protocol and Hardware-Rooted Volatile State
Integrity Substrate Ephemeral · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
This specification defines a stateless execution environment in which everystate transition (action) is cryptographically bound to a single-use, non-reproducible tuple of time, location, device identity, and a volatile countervector. No persistent authorization state is stored. Integrity is enforcedsolely through cryptographic commitments and a physically unclonable function(PUF), not through identity or reputation assumptions. The architectureintroduces two chained event logs (operative and storage chain), a set of sixmonotonic, hardware-bound counter gears, and an ephemeral node life cycle.The document provides a complete mathematical model, a worked numeric example,a reference implementation in Rust (chosen for memory safety and suitabilityfor TEE deployment), a discussion of physical hardening techniques for ASICrealization, and an overview of open research challenges including both afull-protection variant and a mitigated, more practical variant. Additionally,a novel "Worm Mode" for passive redundancy and self-healing chain liveliness ispresented. Finally, a practical build plan using open, patent-free FPGAcomponents is provided.