IF.TTT Failure Mode Analysis v1 (Why traceability is not optional)

Author: Danny Stocker (ds@infrafabric.io)
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Subject: Failure mode analysis of removing cryptographic chain-of-custody from an AI governance stack
Protocol: IF.SEC.threat.model.v1
Status: FORENSIC ASSESSMENT (not evidence; not certification)
Date (UTC): 2025-12-21

This document answers one question:

What actually breaks when you replace IF.TTT (Traceable/Transparent/Trustworthy) with “standard logs”?

This is not hypothetical theatre. This failure pattern has already harmed people at scale.

1) The compromise (how it really happens)

An organization removes cryptographic signatures + immutable audit chaining and replaces it with mutable JSON/text logging (Splunk/Datadog/etc).

The rationales are not “2ms latency”. The rationales are organizational:

“Compliance says monthly audit exports are sufficient.”
“We don’t want key management in the hot path.”
“We can’t afford per-request signing costs at current volume.”
“The new CTO comes from a startup background; they optimize for speed, not forensics.”

The shift is simple:

From proven identity (key-based, non-repudiable)
To asserted identity (string-based, deniable)

2) Immediate effects (technical)

Removing cryptographic binding causes immediate epistemic collapse:

Identity spoofing
Any actor can write {"actor":"admin"} into a log stream. Without signature verification, “admin” is a string, not a proof.
Repudiation becomes cheap
An operator can deny actions. The system has no mathematical contradiction to present.
Post-hoc editing becomes indistinguishable from “cleanup”
Even honest operators edit logs during incident response (redaction, dedupe, “fix formatting”). Without a hash chain, edits are invisible.
Time becomes an argument, not evidence
Wall-clock timestamps are not cryptographic time. A system clock can drift or be altered. If the log is mutable, time is now a narrative.

3) Cascade failures (systemic)

IF.TTT is the load-bearing wall. When it fails, upstream components lose their ability to prove they acted correctly.

IF.GUARD failure
An actor bypasses governance and injects a fake “Approved” record later. Without non-repudiable signatures and an immutable chain, the council cannot prove they did not approve it.
IF.emotion corruption
Retrieval context can be poisoned (bad document inserted) and the retrieval log can be edited to look “clean”. The system produces harmful output; the investigation cannot recover the root cause.
Swarm communications collapse
Inter-agent trust degrades: a message “from Swarm B” is no longer provably from Swarm B. Man-in-the-middle and replay confusion become operationally plausible.

4) Real incident scenario (how you lose in court)

The “hot patch” liability event

An LLM system is integrated into a support workflow (medical, legal, crisis, finance).
Under pressure, an engineer hot-patches a prompt/config (“make it more helpful”).
The system produces harmful guidance.
A user captures the harmful output (screenshot, screen recording, saved HTML, exported conversation).
During investigation, the engineer “cleans up” the deployment log line (panic, shame, or misguided privacy redaction).

Outcome:

The organization produces logs claiming the system used safe configuration.
The plaintiff produces the harmful output.
The discrepancy becomes indefensible because the chain-of-custody is missing.

In high-liability domains, “we have logs” is not a defense. It is a liability amplifier.

5) Historical precedents (pattern, not analogy)

These are different domains. The shared mechanism is always the same: mutable records + privileged access + institutional denial.

UK Post Office Horizon scandal — forensic dispute about ledger truth and privileged system access.
- Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
Boeing 737 MAX / MCAS — catastrophic outcomes coupled to opaque system behavior and disputed control/alerting assumptions.
- Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings
Wells Fargo fake accounts scandal — incentive pressure plus record-keeping failures and downstream denial dynamics.
- Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scandal
Volkswagen emissions scandal — engineered “compliance theatre” in software, with auditors unable to trust vendor assertions.
- Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

IF.TTT is designed to prevent the mechanism, not to claim these incidents had identical root causes.

6) Defense validation (what IF.TTT prevents)

IF.TTT prevents the “mutable record” class of failure by enforcing:

Non-repudiation
Actions are signed by keys. “Who did it” becomes a proof, not a debate.
Tamper-evident history
Events are hash-chained; deletions/edits break verification.
Bounded completeness (within boundary)
Requests that cross the witness boundary are witnessed in REQ_SEEN with inclusion proofs.
Portable evidence
Incidents can be exported as bundles with manifests + verifier commands, enabling third-party review without trusting the operator.

This turns disputes into verification.

7) Residual risks (what IF.TTT does not magically solve)

Even with IF.TTT deployed, real risks remain:

Key compromise
If a private key is stolen, an attacker can sign bad actions that verify as “valid”. Mitigation requires hardware-backed keys, rotation, and incident response.
Rubber-stamp governance
The audit trail can be perfect while the decision is wrong (fatigue, negligence, incentives). Mitigation requires IF.GUARD diversity + escalation rules + post-incident review.
Boundary gaps
Events dropped before the witness boundary (edge, network) may be outside scope unless edge witnessing is enforced.

Conclusion

Removing IF.TTT turns the system from high-assurance intelligence into a black-box liability generator.

The cost of “not having receipts” is not measured in milliseconds. It is measured in ruined investigations, regulatory exposure, and human harm.

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