Connectivity is not admission.
Living Cipher treats trust as an architectural question: what evidence, device, component, workload or execution state is allowed to participate in consequential computation—and under what conditions that permission continues.
Integrity is necessary. Admission is broader.
Cryptographic integrity can establish important properties about data and execution, but integrity alone does not determine whether an input, device or workload should be trusted to participate in a consequential system.
Living Cipher therefore separates the computation itself from the policy and evidence that govern participation.
From identity to authorized participation.
Know what is participating
Components, devices and execution environments must be distinguishable before policy can determine whether they are allowed to participate.
Know what is allowed to influence the system
A connected source is not automatically an admissible source. Evidence quality, provenance, freshness and policy matter.
Know what may execute
Approved software, hardware state and workload policy determine whether consequential computation is permitted.
Trust can change
Revocation, quarantine, updates and policy changes remain active lifecycle functions rather than one-time provisioning events.
Policy has to reach the machine.
A trust architecture is incomplete if policy can be observed but cannot constrain computation. Living Cipher's architectural approach carries trust state to the points where participation, data movement and execution can actually be permitted or denied.
Evidence. Machine. Result.
Does the evidence deserve admission?
Source veracity, provenance, physiological or physical plausibility, freshness and policy can matter before a downstream model sees the input.
Does the machine deserve participation?
Identity, approved software or hardware state, lifecycle policy and execution authorization determine whether a component participates.
Can the result be traced?
A consequential output should preserve enough context to establish how, when and under what authorized state it was produced.
Can trust survive deployment?
Trust must remain meaningful across embedded systems, accelerators, datacenters and heterogeneous infrastructure—not only in a laboratory prototype.
A deployed component is not trusted merely because it connects.
Whether the execution target is an embedded device, FPGA, accelerator, chiplet or future ASIC, the same architectural principle applies: physical or logical connectivity does not confer participation rights.
The mechanism can vary by device, SoC, accelerator or infrastructure environment. The architectural invariant is admission before participation.
Admission requirements belong upstream of tapeout.
Living Cipher treats deployment trust as an architecture input rather than a post-silicon compliance exercise. Identity, lifecycle control, authorization, provenance and infrastructure admission can affect interfaces, memory paths, firmware boundaries, host integration and physical architecture.