Recomposed Enforcement Paths: A Comparative History of Hardware-Enforced Platform Security
Federico Pacheco · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
English author preprint v4.1. This substantially revised edition compares historically situated hardware-enforced platform security mechanisms rather than proposing a linear or causal transition. It offers a bounded decision procedure for classifying a specified security guarantee as local, distributed, or not classifiable from the available evidence. Five provisional analytical operations—naming, mediating, measuring, remembering, and erasing—organize the comparison. The manuscript discusses negative and conditional cases, limits of the selected corpus, and alternative explanations. The accompanying research package contains the manuscript, source-claim register, eight-family operation matrix, twelve-guarantee decision matrix, reference map, static research supplement, and a SHA-256 manifest. The public supplement is also available at https://hardwaresecurityhistory.org/research/. This is an author preprint, not a peer-reviewed or accepted IEEE article. The manuscript contains a section-specific disclosure of generative AI assistance. The author retains responsibility for the claims, interpretations, and citations.