Adversarial Sufficiency: A Structural Analysis of Governance Failure and a New Standard for Assurance

Existing governance frameworks produce evidence that controls operated. They do not establish whether those controls remain correct under adversarial conditions or conflicting institutional incentives. This paper identifies that limitation as a structural feature of current assurance regimes and introduces adversarial sufficiency as a new class of governance evidence standard. The standard requires demonstrable correctness under defined adversarial conditions, external to the governed entity, and validated through falsifiable evidence artefacts. A four-domain validation methodology and a cross-layer incentive inversion test are presented to operationalise the standard. A V1.0 implementation demonstrates that adversarial sufficiency can be established through manual execution with documented results, prior to automation. The result is not a refinement of existing frameworks, but a definition of the evidentiary boundary they do not address.