notes: research/papers/papers-security-threats-mitigations-sedi

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research/papers/papers-security-threats-mitigations-sedi Security Threats & Mitigations for Persistent State Issued Citizen Entitlements (SEDI): trade-space walk through summary v0.1 — 2026-10-15: drafted by Claude from the PDF slide deck (all 234 slide titles, slides 1-25 and 42-46 in full); unread by Mark; marked partner on Mark's word 2026-10-21, paraphrase only partner 500 # Security Threats & Mitigations for Persistent State Issued Citizen Entitlements (SEDI): trade-space walk through **Abstract.** A 234-slide deck by Samuel M. Smith dated 2025/10/01 on its title slide (the PDF was created in January 2026), walking through threats to a state system that issues long-lived citizen entitlements and the mitigations KERI (Key Event Receipt Infrastructure) and ACDC (Authentic Chained Data Container) offer. It extends the "SEDI Policy and Technology Trade Space" deck with threat statistics, signing-infrastructure attacks and proof-of-age options. For policy makers and practitioners. ## Summary The deck begins with the properties that set state-issued entitlements apart: life-long persistence, millions of issuances, high value (economic assistance, health care), and the potential to become a citizen identity assurance root of trust. It reasons that the highest return to attackers means the highest susceptibility, so every vulnerability will eventually be exploited. It compares closed-loop and open-loop models for verifying entitlements, describes conventional enterprise signing infrastructure, and shows attacks on signing authorization, edge attacks and insider exploits, citing 2024 identity-attack statistics from a CrowdStrike report. It calls issuer signing infrastructure a single point of failure for the whole ecosystem. As in the trade-space deck, it argues that compromise of signing infrastructure is the hard problem, that unanchored or unlinkable issuances prevent specific recovery, and that mass revocation is impractical. It proposes preventing subornment through horizontally scalable signing at the edge, non-repudiable accountability of each employee, anchored issuances that make forgeries detectable, and maker-checker-supervisor key management. On privacy it repeats that unlinkable is not untrackable and covers contextual re-identification and three-party exploitation. A new section compares proof-of-age options: ZKP (zero-knowledge proof) predicate proofs, which it says need little storage but much computation and defeat detection of issuer key compromise, against SMT (sparse Merkle tree) predicate proofs, which need more storage but little computation and keep compromise detectable. It then presents ACDC disclosure mechanisms, the GLEIF vLEI (verifiable Legal Entity Identifier) example, identifier delegation, IPEX, chain-link confidentiality, TSP (Trust Spanning Protocol) and pseudonymity, followed by a long appendix shared with the trade-space and SPAC decks. ## Key terms persistent entitlement, susceptibility, signing infrastructure, subornment, anchored issuance, specific recovery, maker-checker-supervisor, sparse Merkle tree, contextual linkability, chain-link confidentiality ## Claims and their evidence - Issuer signing infrastructure is a single point of failure whose compromise could cause rampant impersonation fraud. [informative] - Average attacker breakout time fell to 48 minutes and voice phishing rose 442% in 2024, per CrowdStrike's 2025 report. [unverified] - A sparse Merkle tree age-predicate proof preserves detectability of issuer key compromise, where a ZKP predicate proof does not. [informative] - Maker-checker-supervisor key management with anchored issuances per employee prevents subornment of the issuer. [informative] ## Related SEDI Policy and Technology Trade Space; ACDC specification; KERI specification; SPAC; Sustainable Privacy; Security Deep Dive: Why KERI is Necessary and Sufficient. ## Provenance Drafted by Claude on 2026-10-15 from the PDF in Smith's Papers repository: all 234 slide titles, slides 1-25 and 42-46 read in full as extracted text. Not yet read by Mark.

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