Secure and Privacy-Aware Networked Architectures for Monitoring Dual-Use Items and Technologies: A Scoping Review

Monitoring dual-use items and technologies across distributed infrastructures requires sustained evidentiary continuity. Physical and digital entities, identities, measured states, provenance records, lifecycle events, and verification decisions must remain linked after an item, transfer, or technology is first classified. In this scoping review, we examine how existing mechanisms preserve evidentiary continuity across heterogeneous technical systems and institutional monitoring environments. The analysis draws on 90 substantive sources, combining peer-reviewed research with technical standards and the regulatory and operational documentation relevant to dual-use monitoring. The source-level findings distinguish mechanisms that establish an entity’s identity and attest its measured state from those that preserve provenance and enable subsequent events to be traced. Transparency and disclosure controls affect the conditions under which this evidence can be examined by institutional verifiers, while the assurance provided by each mechanism remains limited to its specific scope. Comparative analysis identifies potential loss-of-assurance scenarios where evidence crosses functional and institutional boundaries, including substitution, stale appraisal inputs, unrecorded events, equivocation, and excessive disclosure. We therefore propose an original seven-layer lifecycle-control reference architecture organized by distinct assurance questions, evidence objects, and trust boundaries. A source-to-function crosswalk and an interface failure-mode matrix trace this synthesis to the reviewed corpus while distinguishing documented mechanism properties from cross-source inferences and architectural design decisions.