Proof of Honesty, Not Proof of Fraud Asymmetric Trust Infrastructure for Smallholder Provenance

Abstract

Provenance technology is overwhelmingly built to answer the question "is this product fake?". We argue that this framing systematically disadvantages the producers it is nominally meant to protect. Anti-counterfeiting is an arms race in which the defender must be right every time, and, more importantly, it places the cost of proof on whoever must comply-which is why audit-based certification prices out smallholders, and why due-diligence regimes such as the EU Deforestation Regulation now put their market access at risk. We invert the objective. Rather than making forgery impossible, we make honesty cheap to demonstrate and differentially expensive to imitate. We present the design of Trace, an implemented and publicly available provenance system for smallholder farmers and artisan makers, and articulate its central architectural idea: asymmetric trust infrastructure. Key management is a burden proportional to institutional capacity, so Trace places it only where that capacity exists. Origin records are keyless and content-addressed, created offline on a commodity phone by a producer who has no keys to lose. Intermediate custody-carriers, warehouses, exporters-is cryptographically signed, because logistics firms can run a root key and delegate to staff devices. The final receipt at the last mile is keyless again, because a consumer will not enrol. Both human ends of the chain stay frictionless; signatures appear only in the institutional middle. We give a per-layer threat model that states precisely what each mechanism does and does not guarantee, and we are explicit that origin authenticity is not a cryptographic property of this system but a social one, resting on witnesses and accumulated multi-party history. We argue this is the correct place for it to rest. We conclude with a detailed evaluation protocol; the studies it specifies have not yet been run, and we present this as a design paper rather than an empirical one.