R-09 — Root Legitimacy for Machine-Executable Institutional Authority

[allansendagi]

Full note: https://www.computableauthority.com/research/root-legitimacy

NOMOS's trust primitives (sealing, third-party attestation, revocation, chain-of-trust key certificates) all assume a relying system already has reason to trust the root key an authority chain is checked against. This note proposes a candidate governance model for that root — threshold-controlled roots, mandatory time limits and re-legitimation, public transparency records, and multiple sector/jurisdiction-scoped roots — and red-teams it against web PKI, DNSSEC, RPKI, Certificate Transparency, accreditation, professional licensing, treaty recognition, and federated trust.

Several elements survive red-teaming as promising. Others do not: threshold signing does not solve the initial bootstrapping problem, mandatory expiry introduces renewal/availability risk, transparency alone does not prevent split-view attacks, and sector-scoped roots create boundary and recognition problems.

Open question: who has legitimate standing to establish a root of institutional authority in the first place, and what governance model actually survives adversarial scrutiny? If you have prior art, a counter-argument, or a different candidate model, this thread is the place for it.