Integrity and Cryptographic Protection Across the Fabric

Paper 7 of the ten-paper aZTF Research Series. Version 1.0-preprint. A consequential workflow can preserve its bytes while leaving its authority, effects or engineering meaning unestablished. This paper applies the author's aZTF framework to a synthetic two-site comparison of actuator-housing revisions and develops separate assurance obligations for transport, content/version binding, current authorization and genuine issuance, provenance, and engineering quality. Interrupted movement, postcommit exposure and validly protected wrong results make those distinctions concrete. Existing cryptographic and systems research supplies mechanisms with explicit trust and access limits; none is treated as proof of an unselected product integration. Physical hardware and network constraints precede logical narrowing. Operational models receive no discovery or query route to deployment-specific protected administration, and every model remains inside externally fixed rails. The proposed inventory distinguishes ordinary cryptographic use from human-only rail maintenance and separately authorized recovery. Required failures close affected future effects while in-flight outcomes retain their evidence and uncertainty. The evaluation separates finite conformance from a population comparison, gives a conventional arrangement equivalent key custody, observation and quality opportunities, and makes economic ranking conditional on supported accepted engineering work. No deployment, control test, reconstruction or comparative experiment is reported as executed. The contribution is a proposed protection and evidence contract whose implementation and incremental value remain open to falsification.