Step Zero: The Cryptographic Inventory Imperative — Doctrine Summary
Simel E. Jenkins Bey · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
Every mandate to migrate, secure, or attest to cryptography presumes an inventory of the cryptography in question. In most organizations that inventory does not exist at the completeness the mandate assumes. This record states the doctrine that follows from that condition — that complete enumeration is a precondition for, rather than a phase of, cryptographic work — and defines four terms arising from it: discovery theater, discovery output that is authoritative in form and silent about its own coverage; the honest residual, the set of assets a methodology could not reach, named explicitly and delivered alongside the inventory; structural independence, the condition in which the party performing enumeration holds no commercial interest in the remediation that follows; and the distinction between automable collection and non-automable coverage, which holds that an instrument cannot establish the completeness of its own output. The doctrine is asserted to hold independent of sector, regulatory regime, or the specific mandate that made the gap visible. The doctrine summarized here was developed in the course of writing Step Zero: The Cryptographic Inventory Imperative (Volume One), a manuscript substantially completed in April 2026; the terms defined in this record were formalized in a July 2026 revision. This record is published separately to provide a short, freely citable statement of the doctrine for readers and drafters who require a referenceable source without recourse to the full volume. The author also publishes under the name S. E. Jenkins; both names resolve to the ORCID iD attached to this record.