Agentic Forensic Reasoning for Technical Due Diligence: The Sovereignty Protocol and Infrastructure Risk (F) Quantification

This research paper introduces Veridence, an agentic forensic reasoning engine designed for high-stakes Technical Due Diligence (TDD) in M&A transactions. It defines the "Sovereignty Protocol," a stateless architecture utilizing ephemeral memory enclaves to audit codebases without persistent data retention. The work establishes the Forensic Fragility Index (F) to quantify technical debt, dependency volatility, and institutional risk. Initial benchmarks demonstrate an 88% detection rate of "silent liabilities" compared to 12% in traditional static analysis tools.