Encrypted storage systems increasingly rely on governance mechanisms such as delegation, revocation, key updates, and policy evolution. While existing approaches provide strong guarantees for access enforcement, integrity, and transparency, they do not address a fundamental question: under which conditions can an observed sequence of governance events be accepted as a semantically valid evolution of authorization state? This work introduces a formal semantic framework for governance validity based on observable evidence. Governance is modeled as an admissibility-constrained state transition system in which events are accepted only if they satisfy explicit authorization, reference, temporal, revocation, and evidence conditions. The framework defines valid governance histories as sequences of admissible events; characterizes the conditions for deterministic state reconstruction; and establishes invariants capturing correctness properties such as revocation soundness, policy-constrained evolution, evidence completeness, non-equivocation, and temporal coherence. It also defines event-specific evidence obligations that support independent verification. The proposed approach is architecture-independent and does not prescribe specific enforcement or logging mechanisms, focusing instead on the semantic conditions required for accepting governance histories as valid from observable evidence. In addition, the framework can be instantiated as an independent verification layer that operates over observable governance traces without requiring access to internal system states.
Rodríguez-Aragón et al. (Wed,) studied this question.