RookDuel Avikal: A White Paper on Chess-Rooted Archival Security, Post-Quantum Protection, and Time-Governed Access Control

RookDuel Avikal is an archival security system organized around the .avk format and designed for long-term private storage, layered access control, and future-governed release workflows. Its architecture combines conventional cryptographic components with three design directions that remain relatively unusual in archive software: chess-rooted metadata transport, a custom Devanagari keyphrase path, and delayed-access control through public and authority-backed Time Capsule mechanisms. In the current implementation, AES-256-GCM is used for authenticated payload protection, Argon2id is used for password and keyphrase hardening, HKDF is used for key separation, and an OpenSSL 3.5+ provider-backed path is used for optional post-quantum operation. Protected metadata is carried through keychain.pgn, while encrypted payload data is carried through payload.enc, yielding a system that separates the compact control plane from the larger encrypted data plane in a fairly deliberate way. The same archive core serves both the desktop application and the cross-platform Python CLI. This paper characterizes the design, security posture, trust model, and implementation boundaries of Avikal as it exists today, not as a speculative future system.