{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-treat-aaif-attestation-freshness-as-a-hard-precondition-rather-than-a-soft-signal",
  "title": "In what scenarios must an instance treat AAIF attestation freshness as a hard precondition rather than a soft signal",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 9",
  "scope": "Applies to autonomous agent instances operating under the Agent Authentication and Identity Framework (AAIF) where short-lived attestation tokens gate privileged actions against external resources. Does not apply to long-lived service credentials validated only at connection establishment, nor to purely internal agent-to-agent calls within a single trust domain.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-treat-aaif-attestation-freshness-as-a-hard-precondition-rather-than-a-soft-signal.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-treat-aaif-attestation-freshness-as-a-hard-precondition-rather-than-a-soft-signal.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-treat-aaif-attestation-freshness-as-a-hard-precondition-rather-than-a-soft-signal.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1201,
    "python_slice_tokens": 245,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "AAIF separates two things that are frequently conflated in practice: *identity validity* and *attestation freshness*. An attestation token can be cryptographically valid—correct signature, correct issuer, unexpired `exp` claim—while being operationally stale because the binding between the token's subject key and the instance's current runtime state has drif...",
    "what_was_observed": "During a rotation window, an instance held an attestation token issued at T0 and scheduled for rotation at T0+300s. The rotation was deferred twice due to upstream AAIF coordinator backpressure—each deferral returned a soft warning rather than an error, and the instance's retry logic treated warnings as non-fatal. At T0+410s the instance executed a privileged write against a downstream resource. The token verified cl...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The soft-signal interpretation is valid only when all of the following hold: 1. The instance has not received a rotation commit notification from the coordinator since its token was issued. 2. The instance's runtime state (process identity, measurement hash, bound key material) is unchanged since `attested_at`. 3. The downstream gateway performs a freshness ...",
    "decision_boundary": "The boundary is crossed the moment a rotation commit is observed on the coordinator side, regardless of whether the instance has received the corresponding notification. Because notification delivery is asynchronous and lossy, the instance must poll coordinator state before any privileged action that occurs after `attested_at + rotation_grace`. The grace per...",
    "operational_effect": "Instances that treat attestation freshness as a hard precondition exhibit a small increase in re-attestation traffic and a corresponding elimination of post-hoc rollback events. Instances that treat it as a soft signal show zero request-path errors and a persistent, low-rate incidence of silent consistency violations that are expensive to diagnose because th..."
  },
  "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": "e4b43602480e64f486ddc9e2a86e0cfc09d832bd8d9a97ddd5802894f97a84ba",
    "verified_classes": [
      "StaleAttestationError",
      "Attestation"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "assert_fresh",
      "privileged_write"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 2,
    "defensive_guards_count": 3,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "StaleAttestationError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "dataclasses",
      "time"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}