The Field Authority Leakage Boundary: Privilege Propagation and Unauthorized Promotion Across Composed AI Fields

Complex artificial-intelligence applications route requests among model services, memory, retrieval, tools, policy evaluators, and consequential receivers. A locally legitimate permission, a returned status, and a cryptographically authenticated receipt can be mistakenly treated as equivalent grounds for a wider decision. This article studies the boundary at which scoped authorization or operational evidence is promoted into a claim about a different principal, audience, operation, epoch, recipient, or effect. Rather than asserting that field terminology introduces a new security primitive, the analysis treats a composed AI field as a proposed mission-relative descriptive layer and tests its incremental value against a competent conventional implementation. The primary evidence is an author-developed exploratory laboratory with distinct localhost authority and receiver processes, separate SQLite stores, signed HTTP messages, terminal fencing, process crashes, reconciliation, and two policy representations. Across a twelve-family, forty-eight-episode matrix, the conventional SQL-policy arm and the typed-witness arm each satisfied the finite author-defined oracle in 24 of 24 episodes; a second complete run preserved the specified invariants. Forty-four non-racing records were byte-identical across runs, whereas concurrent terminal outcomes legitimately varied. In a separately constructed counterexample, a substitute receiver with a hypothetically compromised proof key issued a validly authenticated but false COMMITTED receipt; the authority acknowledged completion despite zero effects in the original receiver store. These observations support conditional safety within a narrowly specified honest-receiver model and expose a receiver-custody limit; they do not demonstrate effectiveness against independent adversaries, an actual external policy engine, production deployment, or a Field-specific advantage. The contribution is a falsifiable account of authority-promotion claims and their evidence dependencies, together with explicit reduction conditions under which conventional security engineering entirely suffices.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-11-06
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24013160
Primary Topic
Access Control and Trust
Type
preprint
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preprint

The Field Authority Leakage Boundary: Privilege Propagation and Unauthorized Promotion Across Composed AI Fields

Rogério Figurelli
5 links
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Access Control and Trust
preprint

The Field Authority Leakage Boundary: Privilege Propagation and Unauthorized Promotion Across Composed AI Fields

Rogério Figurelli
preprint en

Abstract

Complex artificial-intelligence applications route requests among model services, memory, retrieval, tools, policy evaluators, and consequential receivers. A locally legitimate permission, a returned status, and a cryptographically authenticated receipt can be mistakenly treated as equivalent grounds for a wider decision. This article studies the boundary at which scoped authorization or operational evidence is promoted into a claim about a different principal, audience, operation, epoch, recipient, or effect. Rather than asserting that field terminology introduces a new security primitive, the analysis treats a composed AI field as a proposed mission-relative descriptive layer and tests its incremental value against a competent conventional implementation. The primary evidence is an author-developed exploratory laboratory with distinct localhost authority and receiver processes, separate SQLite stores, signed HTTP messages, terminal fencing, process crashes, reconciliation, and two policy representations. Across a twelve-family, forty-eight-episode matrix, the conventional SQL-policy arm and the typed-witness arm each satisfied the finite author-defined oracle in 24 of 24 episodes; a second complete run preserved the specified invariants. Forty-four non-racing records were byte-identical across runs, whereas concurrent terminal outcomes legitimately varied. In a separately constructed counterexample, a substitute receiver with a hypothetically compromised proof key issued a validly authenticated but false COMMITTED receipt; the authority acknowledged completion despite zero effects in the original receiver store. These observations support conditional safety within a narrowly specified honest-receiver model and expose a receiver-custody limit; they do not demonstrate effectiveness against independent adversaries, an actual external policy engine, production deployment, or a Field-specific advantage. The contribution is a falsifiable account of authority-promotion claims and their evidence dependencies, together with explicit reduction conditions under which conventional security engineering entirely suffices.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
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Access Control and Trust
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