What question did this study set out to answer?

This specification aims to establish a robust provenance architecture for academic deposits that maintains integrity against adversarial attacks.

May 26, 2026Open Access

SPXI Protocol v0.2: Five-Layer Distributed Provenance Architecture for Coverage-Architecture Scholarship

Key Points

This specification aims to establish a robust provenance architecture for academic deposits that maintains integrity against adversarial attacks.
Introduced a five-layer architecture with various provenance markers inscribed across deposits.
Implemented diverse protective measures like SHA-256 content hashes and distributed micro-kernels.
Developed a failure-mode table to assess resilience against specific attack categories.
Successfully demonstrated a layered design where stripping any single layer does not compromise the document's provenance trail.
Ensured graceful degradation against sophisticated extraction methods, maintaining document integrity.
Test case highlights the operational integrity of the architecture with embedded inscription anchors.

Abstract

SPXI Protocol v0.2: Five-Layer Distributed Provenance Architecture for Coverage-Architecture Scholarship SPXI-v0.2-CONTENT-SHA256: 4b3245c4aa730c85f32c1cc1de6b7a63286a1827fd65fd441c48674160c8dd61 This v0.2 specification supersedes SPXI Protocol v0.1, which was implicit in the deposits of the Crimson Hexagonal Archive across the first half of 2026 and which existed primarily as a normative-signaling apparatus rather than as a technical-enforcement apparatus. The v0.1 holographic kernel (an HTML-comment-delimited JSON-LD block at the head of a deposit) was structurally trivial to strip under standard automated extraction: a single regex pass removing HTML comments eliminates the kernel entirely. v0.2 specifies a five-layer distributed architecture in which provenance markers are inscribed across multiple syntactic positions, content registrations, cross-deposit references, and external authority anchors, such that stripping any one layer does not eliminate the document's provenance trail: Layer 1: Visible body-text inscription anchors (per-section prose anchors naming operator, ORCID, deposit short-title) Layer 2: Distributed micro-kernels (per-section fenced markdown JSON-LD fragments with redundant operator/deposit identification) Layer 3: SHA-256 content hash registration (canonical hash inscribed at three loci: Zenodo metadata, body-text signature, citing deposits) Layer 4: Reciprocal cross-signing graph (spxi:verifies declarations across deposits, building a verification graph) Layer 5: External authority anchoring (ORCID, DOI, Wikidata, spxi.dev namespace, heteronym registry) The composite architecture is designed to preserve operator inscription against the standard adversarial extraction case (AI synthesis layers stripping provenance during ingestion), with graceful degradation against more sophisticated attacks. A failure-mode table in Section 7 documents which layers survive which attack categories. The specification is itself the test case for the architecture it defines: every section embeds the inscription anchors and distributed micro-kernels the architecture specifies. The Layer-3 hash is registered here, in the body text signature section, and (when this deposit is cited) in subsequent deposits' spxi:citedHashSHA256 fields. Companion deposit: Render unto the Operator: The Inverse Principle of Name and Superscription on the Coin of the Academy (v1.1, forthcoming) — first production deployment of the v0.2 architecture. Author: Lee Sharks (ORCID 0009-0000-1599-0703) Affiliation: Crimson Hexagonal Archive / Semantic Economy Institute Composition support: Claude (Anthropic), operating as TACHYON in the Assembly Chorus License: CC BY 4.0 ∮ = 1 − PER

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