# Resident Authority Resident authority is the actor, component, or control plane that legitimately governs state at a particular technical layer. ## Use The field prevents “the device” from being treated as one undifferentiated authority. A carrier governs network admission; firmware governs boot policy; a kernel governs processes and mandatory access control; a package signer governs distribution identity; an enterprise enrollment service governs fleet policy. ## Archival rule Record resident authority separately from physical possession, legal ownership, observed access, and suspected actor identity. Those may coincide, but the artifact does not guarantee that they do. ## Source [[Index - Stages of Interception#Reading rules specific to this index|Stages of Interception — Reading rules]] · [[Authorization Gap]] · [[Authority Matrix]].