Cryptographically Self-Verifying Systems: Verifiability Without Trusting Any Party

This preprint introduces Cryptographically Self-Verifying Systems (CSVS), a system-level design pattern for high-stakes digital processes requiring confidentiality until disclosure, integrity, authenticity, and non-repudiation under fully adversarial backend conditions. CSVS replaces institutional trust with cryptographic evidence, enabling any third party to verify correctness post hoc using only publicly observable artifacts. A central contribution is backend blindness: even a fully malicious backend cannot access or distinguish protected payloads prior to authorized disclosure, enforced by the semantic security of hybrid encryption. We formalize CSVS under a fully adversarial backend model, prove security properties from standard cryptographic assumptions, and introduce low-overhead verifiable relative temporal ordering without trusted clocks, append-only logs, or verifiable delay functions. The paper evaluates security, performance, and limitations, and demonstrates applicability through case studies in vulnerability disclosure, regulatory compliance, and research integrity.