Delegation Without Escalation: Capability tokens, attenuation discipline, and the patterns that survive in production

Delegation chains in production silently grow scope, extend time, and lose revocation visibility. Each individual hop is correct in isolation, but the composed chain authorizes what no single hop intended. Capability tokens with attenuation discipline at every hop, time-bounded forward chains, and revocation propagation that survives the chain are the only architecture where delegation depth does not compound risk.Paper #4 of the Non-Human Identity Series.