



Internet Engineering Task Force                          J. van de Meent
Internet-Draft                                                  Humotica
Intended status: Informational                                9 May 2026
Expires: 10 November 2026


                      TIBET Causal Time Substrate
                 draft-vandemeent-tibet-causal-time-00

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.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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   This Internet-Draft will expire on 10 November 2026.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.





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   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
   license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
   Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
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   provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Status of This Memo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Problem Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   4.  Design Goals  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   5.  Model Overview  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   6.  Relation to Lamport and Related Work  . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   7.  Forward-Only Property . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   8.  Event Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   9.  External Time Anchors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   10. Drift and Alignment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   11. Processing Model  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     11.1.  Local Event  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     11.2.  Incoming Causal Reference  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     11.3.  Recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     11.4.  Time Anchoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   12. Example Flows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     12.1.  Snapshot and Resume  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     12.2.  Transfer Pair  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     12.3.  Semantic Surface Mismatch  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   13. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   14. Interoperability Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   15. Relationship to the Broader Humotica Stack  . . . . . . . . .   7
   16. Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   17. Questions for Future Revisions  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   18. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   19. References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   Appendix A.  Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9

1.  Status of This Memo

   This memo is an Internet-Draft working document derived from
   operational architecture notes, prototype implementations, and
   forensic delivery work produced in the Humotica / TIBET stack during
   May 2026.





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   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.






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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.

6.  Relation to Lamport and Related Work

   This document is directly aligned with Lamport's logical-time model
   and the later vector-clock tradition associated with Fidge and
   Mattern.

   TIBET extends that tradition by binding logical ordering to
   cryptographic identity, append-only lineage, and explicit fork,
   merge, and tombstone semantics.

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




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   *  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.






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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.

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.



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   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.




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   *  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),
              1978.

   [RFC3161]  Adams, C., "Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Time-
              Stamp Protocol (TSP)", RFC 3161, August 2001,
              <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, June 2017,
              <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].





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   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
   Email: info@humotica.com
   URI:   https://humotica.com/








































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