AI Supply Chain Security: MBOM-PQC Provenance, PQC Attestation, and a Maturity Model for Quantum-Resistant Assurance

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly depend on complex, multi-stage supply chains that incorporate pre-trained models, third-party datasets, open-source libraries, and automated training pipelines. This dependency creates a rapidly expanding attack surface in which model poisoning, dependency compromise, and provenance manipulation can undermine system integrity long before deployment. Existing AI governance frameworks—including the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and NIST’s Secure Software Development Framework—acknowledge supply chain risks but do not define a verifiable model provenance structure or cryptographically durable integrity guarantees. Simultaneously, the transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) introduces new requirements for long-lived AI artifacts: classical digital signatures used to verify model lineage, dataset integrity, and pipeline attestation will become vulnerable to quantum-enabled forgery within the expected operational lifetime of many AI systems. This paper synthesizes evidence from policy, standards, and benchmark sources to characterize the emerging AI supply chain threat landscape and identify cryptographic dependencies that the PQC transition disrupts. We propose a formal Model Bill of Materials with PQC-safe extensions (MBOM-PQC), a unified signing and attestation pipeline integrating ML-DSA and hybrid signature modes, and a five-level Supply Chain Assurance Maturity Model (SCAMM) supporting repeatable organizational evaluation. Together, these contributions aim to provide a structured foundation for AI supply chain integrity, supporting verifiable model lineage, authenticity, and trustworthiness through the PQC transition and beyond. The framework is presented as a design-science contribution comprising three integrated artifacts and is extended with operational guidance for continuous-learning pipelines (§6.5), a formal scoring methodology for organizational assessment (§7.3.5), and a hardware-root-of-trust migration cost matrix (§8.3.6).

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Publication Details

Journal
Systems
Published
2026-05-21
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/systems14050593
Primary Topic
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

AI Supply Chain Security: MBOM-PQC Provenance, PQC Attestation, and a Maturity Model for Quantum-Resistant Assurance

Robert Campbell
Systems
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
article

AI Supply Chain Security: MBOM-PQC Provenance, PQC Attestation, and a Maturity Model for Quantum-Resistant Assurance

Robert Campbell
article en

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly depend on complex, multi-stage supply chains that incorporate pre-trained models, third-party datasets, open-source libraries, and automated training pipelines. This dependency creates a rapidly expanding attack surface in which model poisoning, dependency compromise, and provenance manipulation can undermine system integrity long before deployment. Existing AI governance frameworks—including the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and NIST’s Secure Software Development Framework—acknowledge supply chain risks but do not define a verifiable model provenance structure or cryptographically durable integrity guarantees. Simultaneously, the transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) introduces new requirements for long-lived AI artifacts: classical digital signatures used to verify model lineage, dataset integrity, and pipeline attestation will become vulnerable to quantum-enabled forgery within the expected operational lifetime of many AI systems. This paper synthesizes evidence from policy, standards, and benchmark sources to characterize the emerging AI supply chain threat landscape and identify cryptographic dependencies that the PQC transition disrupts. We propose a formal Model Bill of Materials with PQC-safe extensions (MBOM-PQC), a unified signing and attestation pipeline integrating ML-DSA and hybrid signature modes, and a five-level Supply Chain Assurance Maturity Model (SCAMM) supporting repeatable organizational evaluation. Together, these contributions aim to provide a structured foundation for AI supply chain integrity, supporting verifiable model lineage, authenticity, and trustworthiness through the PQC transition and beyond. The framework is presented as a design-science contribution comprising three integrated artifacts and is extended with operational guidance for continuous-learning pipelines (§6.5), a formal scoring methodology for organizational assessment (§7.3.5), and a hardware-root-of-trust migration cost matrix (§8.3.6).

SystemsVol. 14(5)
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Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
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