Internet-Draft TIBET Causal Time May 2026
van de Meent Expires 10 November 2026 [Page]
Workgroup:
Internet Engineering Task Force
Internet-Draft:
draft-vandemeent-tibet-causal-time-01
Published:
Intended Status:
Informational
Expires:
Author:
J. van de Meent
Humotica

TIBET Causal Time Substrate

Abstract

This document describes the TIBET Causal Time Substrate, a forward-only causal ordering model for identity-bound distributed systems.

TIBET does not treat wall-clock time as the primary ordering primitive. Instead, it uses a cryptographically bound logical-time structure encoded through append-only linkage, monotonic generation counters, and signed causal references. External wall-clock sources, including NTP, RFC 3161 timestamping services, Roughtime, GNSS, or public ledger timestamps, are treated as auxiliary alignment anchors rather than as the constitutive source of event order.

The core claim is simple: TIBET is a forward-only causal substrate that enables recovery and reversibility without rewriting history.

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

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This Internet-Draft will expire on 10 November 2026.

1. Status of This Memo

This memo is an Internet-Draft revision (-01) of draft-vandemeent-tibet-causal-time, derived from operational architecture notes, prototype implementations, and forensic delivery work produced in the Humotica / TIBET stack during May 2026. The -01 revision adds Section 12.4 (Filename-Surface Contract) following external peer review by Red Specter Security Research (RS-2026-001).

It is intended to capture and formalize an already deployed structural property of TIBET rather than to introduce a greenfield timing model.

This document is an initial public framing and substrate document intended to align distributed-systems theory, identity-bound execution, off-grid or degraded-network operations, and forward-only recovery semantics.

2. Problem Statement

Many distributed systems continue to over-privilege wall-clock time. They assume that safe ordering, freshness, replay defense, and reversibility can be grounded primarily in synchronized UTC.

That assumption is fragile under intermittent connectivity, NTP outage or misconfiguration, GNSS disruption, clock drift across edge nodes, compromised or ambiguous time authorities, and adversarial replay after restore or rollback.

This document argues that causal order should be primary, wall-clock time auxiliary, recovery forward-only, and history non-rewritable.

3. Terminology

Causal Time:
The ordering of events by their dependency and sequence relationships, rather than by globally synchronized wall-clock timestamps.
Forward-Only Causal Substrate:
A substrate in which valid state evolution occurs only by appending new causally linked events.
Logical Counter:
A monotonic counter associated with event generation and ordering. Within TIBET this corresponds to the generation field.
External Time Anchor:
An observation of an external time-bearing source, recorded into the causal substrate as a signed event.
Drift Record:
A signed record describing observed offset between local time and an external anchor or between two time-bearing participants.
Triage Fork:
A forward-causal isolation path created in response to anomaly, mismatch, or uncertain continuity.

4. Design Goals

The TIBET Causal Time Substrate is intended to preserve causal ordering without dependence on absolute time, support cryptographic identity binding of events, permit recovery and revocation without history rewriting, and remain meaningful under offline or degraded-network conditions.

It is also intended to integrate with external time anchors, support replay-sensitive freshness checks, and surface time uncertainty honestly.

5. Model Overview

TIBET encodes causal order through a set of existing structural primitives including append-only linkage, signatures, generation counters, and parent references.

These map naturally onto a Lamport-style logical ordering model: happened-before pointers, tamper-evident order proof, authenticated event origin, logical counters, causal predecessors, and event-line roots.

The important consequence is that TIBET already behaves as a causally ordered logical-time substrate. This document formalizes that fact.

7. Forward-Only Property

The defining property of TIBET causal time is not merely that events are ordered, but that valid evolution occurs only by moving forward.

Restore becomes fork rather than rewind, revocation becomes successor event rather than mutation, correction becomes amendment rather than overwrite, and cancellation becomes compensating action rather than erasure.

8. Event Classes

  • ordinary application or system action events
  • fork or snapshot-reference events
  • merge or transfer-pair events
  • tombstone events
  • triage or quarantine events
  • external time-anchor events
  • drift-record events

These classes are not all necessarily already standardized in TIBET registries, but they align structurally with the substrate described here.

9. External Time Anchors

External time anchors provide auxiliary alignment between local causal order and broader time-bearing reference systems such as NTP, timestamping authorities defined by [RFC3161], Roughtime, GNSS, PTP, public ledger timestamps, or observed environmental anchors.

External time anchors may improve alignment. They must not redefine already established causal order.

10. Drift and Alignment

Clock drift is expected in real systems, especially edge systems and off-grid nodes. TIBET treats drift as a recordable condition, not as a collapse of ordering truth.

Implementations should be able to represent locally observed time, externally anchored time, offset between them, uncertainty window, and validity scope of the observation.

11. Processing Model

11.1. Local Event

When a local event is committed, the implementation increments or derives a monotonic generation value, binds the event to prior causal state, signs the event, and appends it.

11.2. Incoming Causal Reference

When a remote or transferred event enters local reasoning, the implementation evaluates causal relation and derives successor progression in Lamport style as max(local generation, remote generation) plus one for any new local successor event that depends on both.

11.3. Recovery

Recovery produces successor state by fork, compensation, revocation, or new forward-causal action. It must not pretend to restore the system to an earlier pre-committed causal state.

11.4. Time Anchoring

When external time is sampled, the implementation may write an external-anchor event and may write drift information, but must not use the anchor to invalidate already committed causal order.

12. Example Flows

12.1. Snapshot and Resume

In the TIBET model, a snapshot references a chain position and resume becomes a fork from that position. The new line advances with its own forward-only history.

12.2. Transfer Pair

In TAT or TIBET Drop, transfer_out records sender-side causal commitment, transfer_in records receiver-side causal acknowledgement, and successor generation derives from the maximum of local and sender generation plus one.

12.3. Semantic Surface Mismatch

If routing surface and sealed manifest differ, content may still be valid, but the causal substrate should treat the situation as anomaly and create a triage fork or isolation path.

12.4. Filename-Surface Contract

The semantic surface of a sealed continuity envelope is carried in two layers: the filename layer, observable without unpacking, and the manifest layer, authoritative only after Ed25519 signature verification.

These two layers MAY agree, partially agree, or conflict. A verifying implementation produces one of four surface_status verdicts: MATCH (all surface_* fields agree), PARTIAL (some agree, others absent or differ), MISMATCH (both layers present and at least one field conflicts -- potential rename attack), or NONE (neither layer has surface_* fields -- legacy bundle).

Filename construction is the operator's responsibility. The packing library SHOULD provide a helper that derives a canonical filename from the manifest's surface_* fields, so MATCH is the default for freshly packed envelopes. However, this specification does not require it.

PARTIAL is therefore a valid and expected verdict for envelopes that an operator has consciously renamed for human navigation (e.g. "vergadering-dinsdag.pdf"). It is NOT a defect; it is a recorded statement that the human-applied name diverges from the canonical-from-manifest name.

Implementations MUST be able to reconstruct the canonical filename from the manifest alone, so that any peer with the bundle can recover the original SSM-derived name after operator rename, record both the human name and the canonical name in audit so that rename events become explicit instead of silent, and detect MISMATCH as a candidate rename-attack signal distinct from PARTIAL (operator-renamed) and MATCH (no rename or aligned rename).

Audit records emitted by a verifying implementation SHOULD carry the field name "canonical_name" alongside the on-disk "name" field, with a boolean "renamed_by_operator" derived from their inequality. This naming convention is referred to as the canonical_name field throughout this specification; the helper function that computes it from a manifest is named canonical_filename().

This contract anchors causality to the visible surface: a peer seeing only the filename has a hint; a peer seeing the sealed content has the truth; the audit chain records the relationship between the two.

13. Security Considerations

This document assumes an attacker may replay previously valid artifacts, re-inject old state through backup or restore channels, manipulate wall-clock sources or exploit clock drift, rename or relabel artifacts outside sealed causal truth, or attempt destructive rollback semantics through operational tooling.

The forward-only causal model is specifically designed to reduce replay-after-restore, replay-after-revoke, backup injection, clock-spoofing ambiguity, drift concealment, and destructive rollback.

The key invariant is that security-sensitive reversibility must be implemented as forward causal compensation, not as history rewrite.

14. Interoperability Considerations

This substrate is designed to compose with JIS identity, UPIP continuity, TAT transfer flow, TBZ or ICC container semantics, and semantic routing surfaces.

Interoperability therefore depends less on UTC agreement and more on shared causal encoding, verifiable linkage, explicit anchor semantics, and clear distinction between order and alignment.

15. Relationship to the Broader Humotica Stack

Within the broader architecture, Turing answers what computes, Lamport-style causal time answers when in event order, JIS answers who is permitted, and semantic framing layers answer within what semantic frame a process is interpreted.

TIBET occupies the causal-time substrate role while composing with the other axes.

16. Future Work

  • standardized external time-anchor token shape
  • standardized drift-record token shape
  • explicit uncertainty handling
  • causal freshness proofs for intermittently connected devices
  • zero-disclosure continuity proofs over long time horizons
  • alignment with RFC 3161, Roughtime, and public-ledger anchoring profiles

17. Questions for Future Revisions

The following topics are non-blocking for the present -00 version and are recorded here to guide later discussion and interoperability work.

  • whether drift should be standardized as its own token type or as a subclass of time-anchor event
  • whether external anchor trust levels should be formally graded
  • whether causal freshness should be defined as a reusable verification primitive
  • how uncertainty and stale-anchor conditions should be surfaced in operator tooling
  • whether some domains should require time-anchor presence while others permit purely local causal mode

18. IANA Considerations

This document has no IANA actions in the present version.

Future revisions may define registries for external time-anchor token shapes, drift-record token shapes, or causal freshness proof types, likely under Expert Review policy as described in [RFC8126].

19. References

[LAMPORT1978]
Lamport, L., "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System", Communications of the ACM 21(7), .
[RFC3161]
Adams, C., "Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Time-Stamp Protocol (TSP)", RFC 3161, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3161>.
[RFC8126]
Cotton, M., Leiba, B., and T. Narten, "Guidelines for Writing an IANA Considerations Section in RFCs", BCP 26, RFC 8126, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8126>.

Appendix A. Acknowledgements

The author thanks the Humotica team for editorial assistance, internal peer review, and operational tooling that made this substrate framing concrete rather than theoretical.

The substrate framing also builds on the logical-time tradition established by [LAMPORT1978].

The author also thanks Richard Barron of Red Specter Security Research for adversarial validation that helped sharpen the forward-only recovery property under realistic attack conditions.

Author's Address

Jasper van de Meent
Humotica
Netherlands
URI: https://humotica.com/