Attestia: A Hardware-Rooted Zero-Trust Deployment Architecture for CI/CD Pipelines

Modern Continuous Delivery pipelines operate on a stochastic trust model that conflates possession of a session token with the conscious intent of a human operator. This assumption is critically flawed in the presence of Advanced Persistent Threats such as those demonstrated by the SolarWinds, Codecov, and Log4j incidents, where the trust boundary of the endpoint or the build server is compromised. This monograph presents Attestia, a novel deployment-authorization architecture rooted in physics-based security. By shifting the root of trust from software identity (IAM sessions) to hardware intent (FIDO2 challenge-response on an air-gapped embedded device), the architecture eliminates the attack surfaces of session hijacking, malware proxying, and server-side artifact injection. We detail the system's evolution through five architectural versions: a WebAuthn-based cloud MVP (v1), a physically isolated approval sentinel built on ARM64 hardware (v2), a forensic black-box leveraging cloud-native WORM storage (v3), a context-aware neural risk-scoring engine with a covert duress protocol (v4), and a Merkle-manifest supply-chain verifier anchored to a public blockchain (v5). Comparative analysis against Sigstore, in-toto, and SLSA demonstrates that Attestia uniquely provides physical isolation of the approval environment, contextual risk scoring, and covert duress signaling, capabilities absent from all surveyed frameworks. Analytical performance modelling estimates an attestation overhead of approximately 1.5-3.5 seconds per deployment, representing less than 3% of typical CI/CD pipeline duration. The complete v1-v5 stack was implemented in approximately 80 working hours, validating the thesis that constraint-driven engineering yields higher architectural velocity than requirement-driven enterprise approaches.