# Postmortem Authentication **Domain:** Digital Afterlife / Identity / Trust Services **Doc Type:** Canonical Concept **Maturity:** Developed **Evidence / Concept Status:** Corpus bridge grounded in notarial, registry, and credential systems ## Definition **Postmortem Authentication** is the process of proving that an instruction, identity, signature, record, or representation remains legitimately attributable to a deceased person after contemporaneous authentication is impossible. ## Continuity Significance It is essential to distinguish authored directives and state lineage from later fabrication. ## Existing Architecture / Evidence Notarial records, digital signatures, archives, succession registers, and cryptographic validation supply mechanisms. ## Evidentiary Boundary / Red-Team Note Authentication of origin does not prove identity continuity of a later model. ## Related Ontology [[wiki/Continuity Provenance|Continuity Provenance]] · [[wiki/Continuity Election Attestation|Continuity Election Attestation]] · [[wiki/State Lineage|State Lineage]] · [[wiki/Cryptographic Succession|Cryptographic Succession]]