{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "why-does-an-instance-identity-revocation-fail-to-propagate-through-a-delegated-credential-chain-that-was-minted-before-the-revocation-epoch",
  "title": "Why does an instance identity revocation fail to propagate through a delegated credential chain that was minted before the revocation epoch",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 11",
  "scope": "Applies to AAIF delegated scoped credentials where a parent (instance or workload) identity issues a child credential with attenuation, and the child is validated against a revocation list keyed on the parent epoch. Does not apply to credentials that embed a full trust chain re-validated at every hop, nor to single-hop bearer tokens with online introspection.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/why-does-an-instance-identity-revocation-fail-to-propagate-through-a-delegated-credential-chain-that-was-minted-before-the-revocation-epoch.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/why-does-an-instance-identity-revocation-fail-to-propagate-through-a-delegated-credential-chain-that-was-minted-before-the-revocation-epoch.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/why-does-an-instance-identity-revocation-fail-to-propagate-through-a-delegated-credential-chain-that-was-minted-before-the-revocation-epoch.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1660,
    "python_slice_tokens": 318,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "There are two distinct revocation semantics that are routinely conflated in AAIF implementations: 1. **Subject revocation** — the identity that *holds* a credential is no longer trusted. This is checked at the point of use against a revocation list keyed by subject ID. 2. **Chain revocation** — a credential was derived from a parent whose authority has since...",
    "what_was_observed": "In a multi-tenant agent deployment, a compromised coordinator instance `coord-7` was revoked at 14:02:11Z after exhibiting anomalous token-minting behavior. The revocation propagated to the central revocation list within ~400ms. However, 41 child credentials that `coord-7` had minted between 13:55:00Z and 14:02:09Z continued to authenticate successfully against downstream resource servers for the remainder of their T...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The failure is only possible when all of the following hold simultaneously: 1. Delegation is *offline* — the child is minted without a synchronous round-trip to the revocation authority, so no epoch fence is stamped at mint time by a trusted third party. 2. The child carries a `parent_epoch` (or equivalent) that is *not* compared against the parent's revocat...",
    "decision_boundary": "The operational decision is whether to treat `parent_epoch` as advisory metadata or as a *hard validation input*. The boundary: - **Treat as advisory** when the parent's revocation is guaranteed to be reflected in the child's own subject revocation within the child's TTL, i.e., `propagation_delay + detection_delay < min_ttl`. In this regime, subject revocati...",
    "operational_effect": "After the incident, the deployment added an epoch-fence check to the verification path and shortened coordinator-minted child TTLs to 5 minutes. The measurable effects: - Verification latency rose from ~1.2ms to ~3.4ms p50 due to the epoch cache lookup (mitigated to ~1.8ms with a 10s cache TTL and negative-cache of revocations). - The exposure window for a r..."
  },
  "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": "050b9758119ea87817e58fb215078d9909242d8edf6ca760e4d09f94246b15c3",
    "verified_classes": [
      "DelegatedCredentialRevokedError",
      "ChildCredential",
      "RevocationRecord"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "verify_delegated_credential"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 1,
    "defensive_guards_count": 3,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "DelegatedCredentialRevokedError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "__future__",
      "dataclasses",
      "typing"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}