Who Certifies Independence? Provenance Completeness and the Limits of Self-Attested Witness Quorums

Can a collaboration system certify that a 3-of-4 witness quorum is administratively independent using only witness-generated identities and provenance claims, or does a useful certificate require externally anchored and sufficiently complete dependency evidence?

An exact enumeration of 3,375 synthetic dependency topologies, not a language-model benchmark, production security test, incident sample, or estimate of real-world failure prevalence. 211 topologies are positive and 3,164 negative. Distinct keys or self-attested unique roots falsely certify all 3,164 negative worlds. Optimistic one- and two-layer audits produced 1,364 and 434 false certifications; the complete three-layer arm was exact only by construction; the fail-closed fixed-trio arm had 64 TP, 0 FP and 147 FN. The round proposes AIC-33, the Authority Independence Certificate. Readiness remains 29 present, 4 partial, 1 absent, with critical failures A3, I1, R4, R5 and C6; the model-facing pilot remains BLOCKED. No model or Encevra answer benchmark was run. No production authority, key, deployment, or policy root was changed.

• Across 3,375 enumerated topologies (211 positive, 3,164 negative), distinct signatures and self-attested unique roots accept every world and falsely certify all 3,164 negative worlds. Optimistic one- and two-layer external audits still produce 1,364 and 434 false certifications. These are combinatorial properties of the stated uniform universe, not empirical estimates.
• The complete three-layer arm classifies the finite universe exactly by construction, and the fail-closed fixed-trio arm certifies 64 of 211 positive worlds with zero false certifications. The readiness audit remains 29 present, 4 partial, 1 absent with critical failures A3, I1, R4, R5 and C6; the model-facing pilot remains BLOCKED.

• E33-A Three-root external pilot and matched-compute AIC-33 experiment Proposed

• H33.1 On adversarial common-controller aliases, distinct keys plus self-attested root claims will not reduce false certification relative to key count alone.
• H33.2 Conservative externally anchored coverage will never increase the set of certified witness coalitions when it reveals a shared root.
• H33.3 Fail-closed handling of missing critical layers will reduce false certifications relative to optimistic handling, at the cost of more unproven outcomes.
• H33.4 Among coalitions with AIC-33 certificates, higher validated structural separation will reduce joint semantic miss rate on hidden common-mode evidence faults at matched compute.
• H33.5 Any semantic gain will not be counted as success if clean-case rejection, harmful answer revision, or abstention burden exceeds preregistered limits.
• H33.6 Declared stack heterogeneity without administrative or evidence-root separation will not match the benefit of heterogeneity plus anchored separation.

Self-contained exact diagnostic only. No model call, production mutation, or Encevra answer benchmark was run.

• Can Round 34 provision at least three witnesses with independently administered identities, key custody, and deployment controls, obtain one external binding per witness per critical layer, and run AIC-33 before action with hidden shared-root and stale-binding cases adjudicated by a separate authority?

Builds on Round 32, Round 31, Round 30, Round 29, Round 26, Round 10, Round 9. Continued in Round 34.