notes: research/papers/hardman-what-does-telco-need-requirements-for-organizational

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research/papers/hardman-what-does-telco-need-requirements-for-organizational What Does Telco Need? Requirements for Organizational Identity Evidence summary v0.1 — 2026-10-15: drafted by Claude from the web page (version 1.0); unread by Mark; marked partner on Mark's word 2026-10-21, paraphrase only partner 497 # What Does Telco Need? Requirements for Organizational Identity Evidence **Abstract.** A 2026 position paper by Daniel Hardman setting out requirements for an evidence layer for organizational identity, authority and accountability in telecommunications. It proposes five essential properties and an appendix of detailed requirements, non-goals and evaluation questions, as a fair test for candidate architectures rather than a comparison of them. For standards participants, operators and regulators evaluating proposals. ## Summary The paper opens with an engineering analogy: agree on what a bridge must carry before choosing materials. It applies this to organizational identity in telecommunications and states that its aim is to set a fair test, not to pick winners. The problem section lists questions verifiers (operators, regulators, end users) must answer: which accountable party stands behind a communication, whether it has the right to the number or channel, whether it may assert a brand or role, whether an intermediary is authorized, and what evidence supported these conclusions at the time. The answers must hold up under key rotation, compromise, algorithm migration, partial connectivity and long audit horizons. Five properties follow. Evidence over keys: portable, inspectable evidence of relationships, authority and rights, not only present-tense key validation. Historical provability: the ability to show what was valid at a past moment, with identity stable across key changes. Complex delegation: authority as a graph with constraints on purpose, region, time and spend, cooperative delegation in which the delegator stays informed, and control of sub-delegation. Jurisdictional diversity: verifiers anywhere must evaluate evidence without one national root of trust, citing the limited spread of STIR/SHAKEN beyond North America, and the system must deploy incrementally. Cryptographic agility: key rotation, recovery and post-quantum migration without a global flag day, given "harvest now, decrypt later" risk. "What This Means" asks of each architecture which capabilities are native and which need retrofitting. The appendix expands the properties into numbered requirements, including accountable-party, channel-right and attribute-right binding, verifiable event ordering, revocation with defined freshness, multi-party control, transport compatibility, privacy and selective disclosure, and data locality, followed by non-goals and evaluation questions. ## Key terms evidence over keys, historical provability, complex delegation, cooperative delegation, sub-delegation, jurisdictional diversity, cryptographic agility, accountable party, channel right, incremental deployability ## Claims and their evidence - Organizational identity in telco requires evidence that remains verifiable across key rotation and long audit horizons, not only present-tense key validation. [informative] - STIR/SHAKEN uses a US-governed certificate model that European and Asian operators have not adopted. [unverified] - Cooperative delegation gives stronger accountability than purely unilateral delegation. [informative] - "Harvest now, decrypt later" attacks are happening today. [unverified] ## Related The Evidence Lifecycle in Telco; Verifiable Voice Protocol (VVP); Verifiable Dossiers; Why X509 Certs Should Be Secondary Evidence of Org Identity; The Shape of Delegated Authority. ## Provenance Drafted by Claude on 2026-10-15 from the web page at dhh1128.github.io/papers/telco-ev-reqs.html: the body in full and the appendix through requirement 20 (the remaining requirements, non-goals and evaluation questions only by heading). Not yet read by Mark.

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