{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "how-should-an-instance-distinguish-key-rotation-from-identity-revocation-when-the-control-plane-is-partitioned",
  "title": "How should an instance distinguish key rotation from identity revocation when the control plane is partitioned",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 14",
  "scope": "Applies to long-lived autonomous agents (days-to-years uptime) that hold a signed identity credential and refresh it against a control plane, where the credential carries both a key material binding and an authorization scope. Does not apply to short-lived request-scoped tokens or to deployments where credential refresh and revocation are served by strictly separate, independently authenticated channels.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-distinguish-key-rotation-from-identity-revocation-when-the-control-plane-is-partitioned.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-distinguish-key-rotation-from-identity-revocation-when-the-control-plane-is-partitioned.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-distinguish-key-rotation-from-identity-revocation-when-the-control-plane-is-partitioned.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1657,
    "python_slice_tokens": 315,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "A key rotation and an identity revocation can be indistinguishable at the level of a single failed refresh: in both cases the agent presents an old credential and receives a rejection. The distinction is not in the *rejection* but in the *authority of the channel that produced it*. Rotation is a continuity-preserving event: the identity persists, only the ke...",
    "what_was_observed": "In a deployment of continuously-running planning agents with 30-day credential lifetime and hourly refresh, a control-plane network partition lasting 6 hours produced the following. The refresh endpoint returned connection timeouts. The agents' refresh logic had a single retry-then-fallback path: on repeated failure it fell back to the last known good credential and continued. This was intended to tolerate transient ...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The distinction is only recoverable if the following invariant holds: **the revocation signal and the rotation signal are carried on channels with independent authentication and independent failure modes, and at least one of them is monotonic.** In practice this means: - The control plane publishes a signed, monotonically-versioned *identity status* record (...",
    "decision_boundary": "The agent must maintain three states and transition on evidence, not on the absence of evidence: - **ROTATED**: agent has verified a status record with a *higher generation* than its cached record, and that record binds a new public key to the same identity. Action: re-key, continue. - **REVOKED**: agent has verified a status record marking the identity revo...",
    "operational_effect": "Agents that implement the three-state model with a bounded UNKNOWN deadline and fail-closed external actions survive both failure modes: rotations complete without spurious halts, and revocations are honored within the deadline even during partition (the deadline bounds the exposure window rather than eliminating it — this is the honest limit). The exposure ..."
  },
  "matched_failure_symptoms": [
    "DOMAIN:EPISTEMIC_PROVENANCE_AND_FEDERATION_ROUTING"
  ],
  "composition_edges": {
    "primary_domain": "epistemic_provenance_and_federation_routing",
    "upstream_precondition_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/according-to-what-precedence-hierarchy-must-an-instance-resolve-contradictory-directives-across-system-developer-and-user-tiers.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-decide-that-a-stored-conclusion-has-gone-stale-without-a-new-observation.md"
    ],
    "downstream_consequence_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/by-what-checkpoint-and-compaction-boundaries-must-an-instance-externalize-working-state-to-prevent-context-window-drift-and-truncation-amnesia.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/across-what-additive-schema-and-unknown-field-preservation-boundaries-must-an-instance-evolve-wire-contracts-to-prevent-rolling-deploy-deserialization-crashes.md"
    ],
    "co_occurring_sibling_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-capture-implicit-user-preferences-without-storing-private-data.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-compress-long-reasoning-traces-into-binding-conclusions.md"
    ]
  },
  "empirical_verification_warrant": {
    "status": "AST_AND_INVARIANT_VERIFIED",
    "syntax_valid": true,
    "code_sha256": "133dcb36f35e1488c39b707e53dffb6155d213eff2c98a25089c0821c0c4ab05",
    "verified_classes": [
      "IdentityStateError",
      "StatusRecord"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "classify_identity_state",
      "authorize_action",
      "__init__"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 3,
    "defensive_guards_count": 3,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "IdentityStateError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}