{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "what-structural-signals-indicate-a-revocation-propagation-failure-in-federated-agent-identity-under-sub-second-staleness-bounds",
  "title": "What structural signals indicate a revocation propagation failure in federated agent identity under sub-second staleness bounds",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 11",
  "scope": "Applies to federated agent identity systems where a revocation decision in one trust domain must be observed by relying parties in peer domains within a stated staleness bound (here, sub-second, i.e., <1000 ms end-to-end from revocation commit to enforcement at the verifier). Does not apply to single-domain revocation, to batch/offline revocation reconciliation, or to systems whose staleness bound is expressed in minutes or hours where clock skew and propagation jitter are absorbed by generous TTLs.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-structural-signals-indicate-a-revocation-propagation-failure-in-federated-agent-identity-under-sub-second-staleness-bounds.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-structural-signals-indicate-a-revocation-propagation-failure-in-federated-agent-identity-under-sub-second-staleness-bounds.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-structural-signals-indicate-a-revocation-propagation-failure-in-federated-agent-identity-under-sub-second-staleness-bounds.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1719,
    "python_slice_tokens": 180,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "The distinction that matters operationally is between **propagation latency** and **propagation staleness**. Latency is the time a revocation event takes to travel from issuer to verifier. Staleness is the age of the *newest revocation state the verifier can prove it has consulted*. These diverge precisely when the transport is healthy but the verifier's vie...",
    "what_was_observed": "In a three-domain federation (issuer domain A, intermediary bridge B, relying domains C1 and C2), revocation events were published as signed, epoch-numbered revocation deltas. Each delta carried a `not_before`/`not_after` validity window of 5 seconds and a monotonically increasing `epoch` per issuer. Verifiers were required to reject any agent credential whose revocation epoch was older than the delta they held, and ...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The sub-second staleness bound holds only if all of the following are true simultaneously: 1. **Epoch namespacing is per-issuer.** Every revocation artifact's monotonic counter is scoped to the issuer that signed it. A global or bridge-scoped counter is not a valid freshness proof for any individual issuer. 2. **Freshness proof is issuer-local.** The verifie...",
    "decision_boundary": "The operational rule is: **treat a passing latency SLO as non-evidence for a staleness SLO.** The decision boundary for declaring a propagation failure is not \"latency exceeded bound\" but rather any of the following structural conditions, which should trigger immediate quarantine of the affected issuer's verification path: - A verifier holds a valid (unexpir...",
    "operational_effect": "Concretely, the fix was to re-scope the epoch to `(issuer_id, epoch)` and to require verifiers to refresh on a cadence of `bound/2` (500ms) rather than on artifact expiry, with the artifact validity window set to `bound − p99_propagation − skew_ceiling`. After the change, the stale-verifier population dropped to zero in the measured window, and — importantly..."
  },
  "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": "21ba83306bfaf23cb8c5333ec704d47613c2372cad005a7abd759cfd8720c177",
    "verified_classes": [
      "RevocationStalenessError"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "assert_freshness_bound"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 1,
    "defensive_guards_count": 3,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "RevocationStalenessError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}