Memory-Driven Trust: A Unified Foundation for Self-Verifiability in Digital Infrastructure
Abstract
The Internet's critical infrastructure relies on centralized trust authorities, and their repeated failures expose a structural fragility: these systems lack self-verifiability — the property that any party relying on a claim can independently verify that event or state claim without depending on any third-party authority. Here we propose the Memory-Driven Trust Paradigm, which endows digital infrastructure with self-verifiability through verifiable memory, shifting the fundamental question of trust from "whom to trust" to "what to verify." We define verifiable memory as cryptographically committed, independently verifiable traces of discrete events and states, and formalize it as an "Accumulate–Anchor–Verify" triadic structure: a unified framework neutral to the underlying commitment mechanism, revealing that previously fragmented self-verifiable schemes — blockchains, certificate-transparency logs, and verifiable storage — share the same deep logic. We characterize necessary and sufficient conditions for verifiable memory and give a constructive proof: an epoch hash chain with geometric staged scheduling reduces the worst-case membership witness from Θ(√n) to Θ(n¹ᐟ³) even under unbounded append; we further establish a mechanism-dependence boundary across verification dimensions, closure of constructions under composition, and a verification-baseline reset via anchoring. We instantiate the framework as four kinds of memory — blockchains for transaction memory, message…
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