Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanisms, foundational to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, rely on computational difficulty to secure the network. However, this reliance introduces vulnerabilities. Traditional PoW systems are susceptible to targeted attacks where adversaries strategically generate blocks designed to disrupt consensus. This paper proposes a novel approach – adversarial training – to mitigate these vulnerabilities. We introduce a framework where a generator, mimicking an attacker, attempts to craft malicious blocks, while a discriminator learns to identify these blocks. Through iterative training, the system strengthens its defenses against such attacks, promoting robust consensus. This represents a significant departure from conventional PoW security strategies and offers a potentially more resilient approach to distributed ledger technology. We demonstrate the core principle through a conceptual model and outline a possible implementation strategy, highlighting the potential for future research and development.
ASSAY is a general agent harness built so that an LLM agent reasons its way through an unfamiliar world, learns that world from interaction at test time, and carries what it learns into later runs. A world is attached through one small adapter and a registry of permitted actions, and the agent is never told what its actions do: it discovers each by predicting its effect and paying for the answer. The single governing rule is that there is no action without a prediction, and every prediction is graded in code against the world's own response. That discipline is what forces the agent to build a world model under scarcity, which is where the reasoning and the test-time learning come from. The agent internalizes what it learns through self-declared instruments over its observations and through knowledge that carries across runs, demoted to hypothesis until re-earned, a tested capability whose measurement is the next phase. A by-product of the same discipline, not its aim, is a fully auditable record: every event lands on a hash-chained journal that a standalone public tool re-verifies from the artifacts alone, and a single ungated action invalidates a run. We evaluate the same harness on three worlds. On the ARC-AGI-3 public set it scores RHAE 96.54, confirmed by the benchmark server on a public scorecard, winning 24 of 25 games under hard action caps at a measured 8.0% exploration overhead and approximately zero capability cost over completed games. On the Factorio Learning Environment the same design fail-closes the sanctioned-interface bypass a published agent fell to. On the OOLONG long-context benchmark an early sweep places it in the same band as mature general harnesses across a 128K to 4M token ladder. The ARC-AGI-3 campaign also produced an epistemic finding: on six occasions the agent proved a level impossible, each proof consistent with every recorded transition and wrong exactly where none had gone, and a three-step audit of each proof's unexercised rules converted five into wins within existing budgets.
Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for training machine learning models on decentralized data, offering enhanced privacy and reduced communication costs. However, the inherent distributed nature of FL introduces significant challenges regarding trust, security, and model accuracy. This paper presents a formal verification framework for FL systems, leveraging secure multi-party computation (SMPC) and formal verification techniques to rigorously analyze data flow and model updates. The framework aims to provide guarantees about privacy, security, and model accuracy, addressing the unique vulnerabilities present in FL architectures. We define a mathematical model of an FL system, incorporating key elements such as clients, servers, and communication protocols. This model is then subjected to formal verification, utilizing techniques like model checking and symbolic execution to identify potential security breaches and inaccuracies. The results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of applying formal verification to FL, offering a robust approach to ensuring the trustworthiness of these systems. Key performance metrics, including privacy loss, communication overhead, and model accuracy deviations, are quantified and analyzed within the verification process. The framework contributes to the development of more reliable and secure FL applications, particularly in sensitive domains such as healthcare and finance.
PRE-GHR XXXIX v5.0 (2026-08-28) — release version closing all six objections of an adversarial pre-submission review. PRE-GHR XXXVIII gave the series its first formal definition of the irreducible governance residue δ0μ(P) := inf over admissible P' of ||residue(P')|| and proved a bit-level lower bound. This paper builds the property theory. The mathematics is a domain-order theory: every inequality follows from how the admissible domain D(P) behaves under enlargement or composition of protocols. We prove monotonicity of δ0μ in the erasure surface, an exact composition law δ0μ(P1 ∘ P2) = δ0μ(P1) + δ0μ(P2) − |T(P1) ∩ T(P2)| under explicit hypotheses (segment autonomy, joint attainability, cross-segment cleanliness), and positivity δ0μ(P) > 0 whenever T(P) is non-empty as a purely normative fact, with Landauer's principle confined to the physical interpretation. We then ask what a running system's audit ledgers can measure. The answer is stratified: the ordering structure is measurable in principle — conditional on a fixed normalization and full retention — while the absolute value is stated relative to a fixed code-point measure, and the aggregate-to-single-protocol bridge remains open. No interception statistic is claimed to equal δ0μ; where the wall cannot be built, the gap is marked, not papered over. Changes in v5.0 (six revision tickets, R01–R06, each closing one reviewer objection): R01 — Theorem 4 unilateralized: the safe direction (T(P) non-empty ⇒ δ0μ > 0) remains a theorem; the converse is demoted to Observation 4.1 under an explicit complete-erasure assumption. A witness-reading remark records that δ0μ is a minimum witness cardinality in the sense of why-provenance, inherited and not claimed as new. R02 — ledger counts restricted to lower witnesses only: the ordering claim is measurable solely under a fixed normalization and full retention, stated as an explicit condition rather than an implicit assumption. R03 — the uniform-sampling remark now carries an explicit finite-sample bound (Hoeffding's inequality in its standard form), two-sided: “holds in expectation” is no longer used as if it held for a sample. R04 — four empirical mappings corrected: schema-field disjointness is separated from retained-trace intersection; the approximate join reports both false-negative and false-positive error (the earlier “directionally safe, never over-counting” claim is withdrawn); the overlap-error direction is declared two-sided and governed by an error budget rather than assumed away; and the retention ratio is restated as an interception-event ratio in matched units. R05 — measure-relative notation throughout: bits and code points are two measures on one trace universe, so every ordering claim is stated at a fixed μ and changing μ defines a new quantity rather than restating the old one. R06 — subject classification reassessed and Related Work rebuilt. The paper contains no multiagent model and no coordinated-interaction result; the earlier cs.MA classification is withdrawn as unsupported by the technical content, and the classification adopted here is cs.CR primary with cs.DB cross-list. Related Work now separates the lineage the paper inherits from — linked timestamping and distributed witnesses (Haber & Stornetta 1991; Bayer, Haber & Stornetta 1993), split-view detection and the undefined gossip layer (Certificate Transparency, RFC 6962 / RFC 9162), existence-not-authenticity timestamping (OpenTimestamps), provenance and lineage (W3C PROV; Buneman, Khanna & Tan 2001; Cui, Widom & Wiener 2000), record linkage (Fellegi & Sunter 1969), trace semantics (Hoare 1978; Brookes, Hoare & Roscoe 1984), and measure and order (Halmos; Davey & Priestley) — from adjacent recent lines cited for comparison only. Where a construction of this paper rediscovers an existing one, priority is assigned to the source and no originality is claimed. Honesty notes. Citations to Hoeffding, Fellegi & Sunter, Halmos, Davey & Priestley and the CSP literature are made at the level of the standard statement of each framework only, pending full-text verification. Two candidate references were deliberately excluded because their primary sources could not be verified. Two gaps are inherited rather than closed: the hash-chain anchor has no consistency-proof comparison mechanism, and the anchor-propagation (gossip) layer is undefined in the source standard as well. Open questions Q5.1, Q5.3 and Q5.4 remain declared open.
Blockchain-based credential verification provides durable integrity and decentralized validation, but the persistence of blockchain commitments can make premature disclosure of sensitive attributes difficult to reverse. This study developed a pre-commitment privacy risk intelligence framework that assessed potential information leakage before credential commitment and used the estimated risk to guide adaptive protection. Synthetic credential records and simulated attacker-side information were employed to characterize privacy exposure through uniqueness, re-identification susceptibility, cross-source linkage, attribute inference, and attributeinteraction effects. These indicators were transformed into predictive features and evaluated using machinelearning models for continuous privacy-risk estimation and categorical risk assessment, followed by an optimization stage that considered privacy reduction and retained utility. In the reported training experiment, the gradient-boosted regression model achieved a mean absolute error of 0.03290, root mean square error of 0.04645, and coefficient of determination of 0.84398. Logistic regression provided the strongest classification performance, attaining 85.63% accuracy, 81.33% recall, an F1-score of 82.44%, and a privacy false-negative rate of 18.67%. A subsequent evaluation of 1,100 records reduced the mean privacy-risk score from 0.81826 to 0.67337, corresponding to a 17.71% relative reduction, while maintaining a mean utility score of 0.84227. The findings indicated that pre-commitment privacy assessment could support risk-sensitive protection decisions while retaining substantial utility for verifiable credential processing.
Federated learning (FL) has emerged as an important distributed machine learning paradigm allowing many users to train a model together without sharing raw data. However, FL’s decentralized design makes it very susceptible to both Byzantine and coordinated model poisoning attacks, where a few malicious rounds of gradients are strategically inserted to reduce the overall integrity of the model. Even the existing Byzantine-resilient aggregation methods such as geometric median, Krum, and trimmed mean are vulnerable to sophisticated, coordinated poisoning attacks that leverage statistical gaps in outlier detection. In this article, we present FedSentinel, a novel Byzantine-resilient federated learning framework that combines cryptographic gradient attestation with adaptive trust-weighted aggregation to protect against coordinated model-poisoning attacks, which are among the most serious challenges. Three key innovations are introduced in FedSentinel Cryptographic Gradient Attestation Protocol (CGAP) that utilizes commitment schemes and zero-knowledge range proofs to ensure the integrity of the gradients and verify that submitted updates satisfy predefined norm and direction constraints; in the current protocol configuration, CGAP provides gradient integrity verification rather than full gradient confidentiality from the server Dynamic Trust-Weighted Robust Aggregation (DT-RoA): the computation and updating of per-client trust scores based on historical gradient consistency and cross-validation signals; and Coordinated Attack Detection Engine (CADE): based on spectral analysis of the gradient covariance matrices, it detects and isolates colluding Byzantine clients. By participating in up to 100 clients on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, FEMNIST, and Sentiment140 datasets, extensive experiments conducted under up to 30% Byzantine adversaries reveal that FedSentinel achieves 91.36% average global accuracy, whereas state-of-the-art defenses such as FLTrust, FLAME, RoFL, ShieldFL, and DnC achieve 83.83–86.94%. FedSentinel outperforms these defenses by 4.42–7.53% in terms of accuracy, while decreasing attack success rates by 53.2% under coordinated Byzantine backdoor attacks. The proposed framework offers a promising approach for federated learning that is verifiable and trustworthy in adversarial environments.
Internet of Vehicles (IoV) security mechanisms often classify isolated messages or assign node-level trust scores, yet these decisions do not explain whether a malicious but authenticated event has distorted the intended evolution of traffic. This paper proposes IntentProv-IoV, a causally grounded provenance framework for traffic-intent preservation in V2X environments. Traffic intent is modeled as the short-horizon collective state expected under non-adversarial conditions, and deviation is measured between predicted and observed traffic states. The framework constructs temporal provenance graphs linking vehicles, roadside units (RSUs), cooperative perception outputs, prediction nodes, and traffic-control decisions. To remove the ambiguity of marginal contribution, node contribution is formalized as an interventional effect in a structural causal model and estimated through Monte Carlo counterfactual edge-weight attenuation, with a linear sensitivity fallback for real-time edge deployment. A calibrated composite score integrates anomaly evidence, traffic-intent deviation, trust risk, and provenance contribution. The evaluation design compares IntentProv-IoV with detection, trust, blockchain trust, graph anomaly, Granger causal, structural causal, and counterfactual GNN baselines and includes predictor sensitivity, adaptive adversaries, prediction noise, packet loss, trajectory-only real-data validation, and edge overhead. Simulation-scale results indicate improved attribution precision, stronger traffic-intent deviation reduction, and edge-suitable latency. By shifting V2X security from message-level detection to causally explainable traffic-intent assurance, IntentProv-IoV provides a more accountable security objective for cooperative vehicular systems.
The classical taxonomy of remote voting security requirements is organized into two levels: basic and counter-attack requirements. This classification has remained largely unchanged over a decade, even through scheme innovations such as verifiable re-voting, tally-hiding, and post-quantum protocols. However, this stability does not survive the new threat model of adversarial artificial intelligence (AI). A security requirement is considered promoted when AI raises the adversarial grade at which it must be defended above its original assumption. In this paper, we introduce requirement promotion as a framework for re-evaluating the classical taxonomy, contending that the destabilizing factor is not new cryptography but the emergence of a new adversary. We analyze five requirements under both AI-amplified threats and AI-enabled defenses, demonstrating that promotion fires selectively. Basic requirements such as privacy, fairness, and eligibility undergo tier promotion to counter-attack grade, driven by machine-learning-based deanonymization, pre-tally outcome inference, and synthetic-identity fraud. Incoercibility undergoes supra-tier promotion, surpassing the existing counter-attack toolkit, as deepfake-generated coercion evidence compromises the fake-credential assumptions of classical coercion-resistant schemes. Verifiability, where AI-based defense is robust, resists headline promotion but acquires a new sub-requirement at its seam with software independence: verifying the opaque machine-learning components in the audit pipeline itself. We then propose a reference architecture, integrating existing primitives such as lattice-based zero-knowledge proofs, deniable re-voting, statistical election forensics, and time-lock decryption into a layered design that addresses the promoted requirements, with explicit analysis of residual gaps.