AN-DNA: A Deterministic Trust Verification Framework for Distributed Systems

The accelerating degradation of digital trust presents a growing challenge for distributed systems, infrastructure authentication, software provenance, and machine-mediated communication. Traditional trust assumptions—persistent credentials, static identity artifacts, centralized verification, and long-lived cryptographic validity—are increasingly vulnerable to replay attacks, implementation drift, synthetic impersonation, and long-term cryptanalytic uncertainty. This manuscript describes AN-DNA (Adaptive Network DNA Architecture), a deterministic trust verification framework and its accompanying reference implementation. The framework is scoped narrowly as a deterministic trust substrate for validating integrity, authenticity, and authorization continuity across heterogeneous digital environments. It is not positioned as a universal identity solution or generalized governance model. The system is organized around five operational principles: 1. Deterministic transcript construction 2. Canonical payload serialization with compile-time enforcement 3. Replay-resistant epoch-bound verification semantics 4. Public-verifier post-quantum signature architecture 5. Minimum-necessary trust disclosure The reference implementation is a production Rust workspace (andna-core) with a Python verification layer. The Rust crate provides ML-DSA-44 signature verification via FIPS 204-aligned liboqs bindings. Three Known Answer Test (KAT) vectors are validated byte-for-byte between Rust and Python. Compile-time assertions enforce the canonical payload layout across all language bindings.