Ephemeral Integrity Substrate with Dual-Chain Protocol and Hardware-Rooted Volatile State - EmMa
Integrity Substrate Ephemeral · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
This specification defines a stateless execution environment in which every state transition (action/execution) is cryptographically bound to a single-use, non-reproducible tuple of time, location, device identity, and a volatile counter vector. No persistent authorization state is stored. Integrity is enforced solely through cryptographic commitments and a physically unclonable function (PUF), not through identity or reputation assumptions. The architecture introduces two chained event logs (operative and storage chain), a set of six monotonic, 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, a discussion of physical hardening techniques for ASIC realization, and an overview of research challenges including a full-protection variant, a mitigated variant, and a novel "Worm Mode" for passive redundancy and self-healing chain liveliness. A dedicated network layer is specified that uses self-certifying addresses derived from the same PUF and counter material, combined with a distributed hash table (DHT) over a mesh topology. This eliminates central address authorities, certificate authorities, and static infrastructure, rendering the network as long as at least one powered device remains. An optional channel hopping extension allows communication to switch deterministically across multiple physical networks. A decentralized time synchronization mechanism based on median filtering of trace-embedded timestamps is introduced to maintain a global clock without relying on any external time source. A practical build plan using open, patent-free FPGA components is provided.