Sovereign Personal Evidence

Abstract

Sovereign Personal Evidence is a defensively disclosed local-first architecture for preserving externally issued, high-assurance signed assertions and their verification transactions as durable, user-controlled evidence artifacts. The architecture extends the deterministic provenance engine first disclosed in Sovereign v1.0 (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19056811) to a new evidence class: externally issued personal assertions such as verifiable credentials, selective-disclosure presentations, zero-knowledge identity proof results, and passport- or NFC-derived verification artifacts. The disclosed system ingests an external assertion, validates it according to its native trust model, cryptographically binds it to the specific request context and a local holder anchor, records it as a typed event in an append-only hash-chained personal provenance ledger, and exports a portable proof bundle for later independent verification — without requiring continued access to the original verification platform. This document constitutes a public defensive disclosure establishing prior art for the disclosed combination of elements, including composite assertion-to-context binding, a two-mode verification-engine fork, timestamped status and revocation evidence preservation, minimal-disclosure evidence packaging, and a personal evidence threat model. Publication is intended to prevent future patent claims covering the same or substantially similar system design.