Attestation Regime - Bryant McGill

# Attestation Regime **Entity class:** Concept or analytic term **Domain:** Identity / Trust / Platform Governance **Doc Type:** Canonical Bridge Concept **Maturity:** Developed **Concept Status:** Interpretive synthesis developed in this corpus ## Definition An **attestation regime** is the technical, institutional, and legal arrangement that determines which claims about identity, authority, origin, integrity, or permission will be accepted as actionable. Attestation becomes economically central when artifacts are easy to generate but trusted access remains scarce. The scarce object is then the warrant: who stands behind an agent or replica, which capability it may invoke, what liability attaches, and whether the permission can be revoked. ## Architecture Cryptographic signatures, key discovery, identity bindings, agent cards, credential issuers, registries, policy engines, audit trails, rights holders, and relying parties form the regime. The signature proves control of a key; the larger regime assigns meaning and consequence to that proof. ## Governing Variable Attestation governs **recognized permission**: which actor or artifact may cross a boundary, spend resources, use a likeness, access data, or act for a principal. ## Agent and Person Boundary Agent authentication and proof of personhood solve neighboring but different problems. One establishes accountable machine identity and delegated authority. The other establishes that a participant is a distinct human without necessarily disclosing civil identity. Both become critical in a [[wiki/Post-Sybil Commons|post-Sybil commons]]. ## Failure Modes Failures include issuer monopoly, identity-authority conflation, non-revocable delegation, unverifiable liability, key compromise, hidden policy, and credentials that become mandatory identity infrastructure beyond their original purpose. ## Corpus Role [[articles/The Skeuomorphic Interval|The Skeuomorphic Interval]] joins provable identity to sellable permission and treats the regime as the successor to artifact scarcity. ## Related Ontology [[wiki/Forensic Identity Attestation|Forensic Identity Attestation]] · [[wiki/Permissioned Capability|Permissioned Capability]] · [[wiki/Authentication Power|Authentication Power]] · [[wiki/Registry Sovereignty|Registry Sovereignty]] · [[wiki/Representational Authority|Representational Authority]] ## Relationships  This entry is routed through [[collections/Consciousness Continuity|Consciousness Continuity]], [[collections/Neurotech|Neurotech]], and [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]]. Its source context is developed in [[articles/Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta|Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta]] and [[articles/Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer|Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer]]. Status-qualified source edges are preserved in the terminal Research Edges section.  ## Read First in the Wiki  - [[wiki/Forensic Identity Attestation|Forensic Identity Attestation]] — supplies the related concept or analytic term context needed to place **Attestation Regime** within the wider system.  ## Research Edges  #### Host–residual infrastructure patch — 2026-09-10 **Collections:** [[collections/Consciousness Continuity|Consciousness Continuity]] · [[collections/Neurotech|Neurotech]] · [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] **Canonical source article:** [[articles/Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta|Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta]] **Related acquisition source:** [[articles/Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer|Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer]] **Relationship source:** [[research/Mind Uploading and AI Host-Residual Ecosystem Relationship Graph - 2026-09-10|Mind Uploading and AI Host-Residual Ecosystem Relationship Graph — 2026-09-10]] #### Outgoing typed edges - **HR-0287 — `wiki_links_to` → [[wiki/Forensic Identity Attestation|Forensic Identity Attestation]]** — **EXISTING WIKI EDGE**; evidence `WIKI_ARCHIVE`. Direct internal link currently present in `Attestation Regime.md`.