Full Provenance on the COSS Causal Axis: An Event-Level Closure of Causal Attribution and Confused-Deputy Exclusion
arXiv:2611.07164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Provenance Identity Continuity (PIC) represents an authority-use event as an operation/resource behavior situated in a causal lineage, $(o,r,\ell)\in O\times R\times L$. We make the causal occurrence itself primitive: a represented security-relevant causal graph $(E,\to_c)$ in which each occurrence has a unique causal history, so the consistent event-lineage space is canonically isomorphic to $E$. The modeled execution has one causal partial order; distinct lineages are distinct causal histories inside it and may share a root while diverging into incomparable branches. PIC's $O\times R\times L$ is the authority-behavior projection of this space, and Causally Ordered Security-State (COSS) continuity generalizes it to an arbitrary behavior product over the same causal execution. On this semantics we prove an architecture-independent confused-deputy exclusion theorem. PIC continuation requires $C(e')\subseteq C(e)$ on every ordinary causal edge, so descendants are bounded by their ancestors; at an ordinary join, authority available on only one incoming branch cannot be resurrected, even when branches share a common root. Non-conservative combination must be an explicit authorized composition or relaxation event. With protected-effect mediation, an effect caused by request $q$ through an ordinary authority segment can exercise only authority in $C(q)$, so a confused-deputy state is contradictory. The result holds for any system whose protected request-to-effect causes are faithfully represented and whose ordinary authority transport satisfies PIC. We revisit Rajani, Garg, and Rezk: their value, control-flow, and initial-heap attacks are different witnesses of causal ancestry, so full provenance is an evidence mechanism for recovering edges of the causal graph, not the foundation of the PIC theorem. Finally we lift it to the COSS product of heterogeneous security-state coordinates.