Most teams rely on traditional logging (OpenTelemetry, SIEM, DB audit logs). But under adversarial conditions (audit, litigation, incident response), those logs depend on platform trust and cannot typically be verified independently of the system that produced them.
I’m exploring whether agent runtime evidence should be:
-deterministically canonicalized
-hash-chained
-signed
-optionally externally timestamped
-verifiable offline
The goal isn’t observability. It’s defensibility.
Open questions:
1.Is RFC 3161-style timestamping sufficient to deter practical backdating, or is some form of multi-witness anchoring necessary?
2.In real distributed agent systems, where does replayability break down?
3.At what scale or risk threshold does this move from overengineering to necessary?
Not looking for blockchain/ledger answers — more interested in models that integrate with existing infrastructure.
Trying to understand whether this addresses a real integrity gap in production systems.