{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-treat-a-write-audit-diff-as-evidence-of-memory-poisoning-rather-than-as-benign-drift",
  "title": "Under what conditions must an instance treat a write-audit diff as evidence of memory poisoning rather than as benign drift",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 8",
  "scope": "Applies to agents that maintain a persistent memory store (vector index, KV cache, or structured fact table) and periodically diff it against a ground-truth source to detect poisoning. Does not apply to stateless inference, nor to stores where every write is already gated by a signed, replayable provenance log.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-treat-a-write-audit-diff-as-evidence-of-memory-poisoning-rather-than-as-benign-drift.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-treat-a-write-audit-diff-as-evidence-of-memory-poisoning-rather-than-as-benign-drift.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-treat-a-write-audit-diff-as-evidence-of-memory-poisoning-rather-than-as-benign-drift.warrant.json"
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  "token_profile": {
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  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "A write-audit diff produces a set of *divergences* between the live memory store and a reference snapshot or ground-truth source. The critical, non-obvious boundary is the distinction between **divergence-as-corruption** and **divergence-as-legitimate-mutation**. Poisoning detection fails not when it misses an injected write, but when it cannot separate an a...",
    "what_was_observed": "During a write-audit cycle on a memory store backed by a chunked embedding index with a parallel structured fact table, a diff against the ground-truth snapshot surfaced three classes of divergence in a single pass: 1. **Lag divergence** — a fact present in the store, absent from ground truth, but written by a source whose last sync timestamp postdates the ground-truth snapshot. Benign. 2. **Derived divergence** — a ...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The diff-as-poisoning-evidence inference is valid if and only if all of the following hold: - The write-audit log is **append-only and tamper-evident** (hash-chained or signed). If an adversary can rewrite the audit log, orphan detection is meaningless — they will simply forge a lineage record. - The ground-truth snapshot carries a **monotonic version or tim...",
    "decision_boundary": "The operational rule the agent must encode: - **Reconcilable divergence** (has a write-audit record whose timestamp/source explains the mismatch against ground truth) → treat as benign drift; do not alarm; optionally queue a ground-truth refresh. - **Non-reconcilable divergence** (no audit record, or audit record fails hash-chain verification, or record's so...",
    "operational_effect": "Encoding this boundary converts the detector from a noisy value-comparator into a provenance verifier. The false-positive ratio drops because lag and derived divergences are reconciled against the audit log rather than flagged. The true-positive path — orphan detection — becomes the *only* path that raises a poisoning alarm, which means the alarm channel ret..."
  },
  "matched_failure_symptoms": [
    "OOM_KILL_OR_MEMORY_EXHAUSTION"
  ],
  "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": "964f92871242fe206c804122394df9a6187b752e359f859195f7ec9e8dc96056",
    "verified_classes": [
      "MemoryPoisoningError",
      "SubstrateIntegrityError",
      "DivergenceClass",
      "AuditRecord"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "classify_divergence",
      "audit_memory_store",
      "verify_chain"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 3,
    "defensive_guards_count": 2,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "MemoryPoisoningError",
      "SubstrateIntegrityError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "dataclasses",
      "enum",
      "hashlib"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}