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Design question: cryptographic identity portability, 127-module composition, delegation chain replay #28

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@flyoung588

Hi — I'm working on OM World, a protocol for a decentralized intent economy. The passport system's scope — 127 protocol modules, 2884 tests, Ed25519 identity + delegation + governance + commerce in one coherent primitive — is one of the most rigorous things I've seen ship for this space. Three design questions where your implementation experience would be valuable.

1. Identity portability across runtimes

The Ed25519 root identity gives a stable agent ID. When the same agent identity needs to operate across runtimes (different processes, different machines, ephemeral cloud instances), what's the binding between the public key and the operational keys the agent actually signs with — single key reused everywhere, derived child keys, or short-lived session keys with attestation back to the root? The pick has consequences for what "agent identity" actually means in a distributed setting.

2. Module composition correctness

127 modules is enough that composability becomes the central design question — module A depends on module B's invariants holding. Did you find a formal way to express module contracts (interface + invariants), or is composition primarily verified through the 2884-test corpus? Specifically: when a new module lands, what's the discipline that catches breakage in modules that consumed the old surface?

3. Delegation chain replay attacks

Cryptographic delegation chains (P → A → B) can be replayed against the same resource if the verifier doesn't track sufficient state. What's the passport system's freshness mechanism — nonces tracked per resource, time-bound delegation expiry, principal-issued challenge that the chain must satisfy, or all of the above? We're thinking through the same problem in our Mandate spec and the discipline that works at production scale is exactly what we want to learn.

The depth of the test corpus speaks for itself — 2884 tests against 127 modules means you've shipped something most of this space hasn't. Happy to share where we landed if useful.

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