Witnessd: Proof-of-process via Adversarial Collapse
David Condrey

TL;DR
Witnessd introduces a novel proof-of-process system that uses jitter seals and layered trust boundaries to provide falsifiable evidence of document authorship, addressing limitations of traditional digital signatures.
Contribution
It presents a new architecture combining jitter seals, delay functions, and trust layers to produce verifiable, falsifiable evidence of document creation process.
Findings
Deterministic rejection of invalid proofs in 31,000 trials
Layered trust boundaries complicate forgery attempts
System converts vague doubt into falsifiable allegations
Abstract
Digital signatures prove key possession, not authorship. An author who generates text with AI, constructs intermediate document states post-hoc, and signs each hash produces a signature chain indistinguishable from genuine composition. We address this gap between cryptographic integrity and process provenance. We introduce proof-of-process, a primitive category for evidence that a physical process, not merely a signing key, produced a digital artifact. Our construction, the jitter seal, injects imperceptible microsecond delays derived via HMAC from a session secret, keystroke ordinal, and cumulative document hash. Valid evidence requires that real keystrokes produced the document through those intermediate states. We propose the Adversarial Collapse Principle as an evaluation criterion: evidence systems should be judged by whether disputing them requires a conjunction of specific,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPhysical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security · Digital and Cyber Forensics · Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
