Provenance Verification Layer

Ensures retrieved documents have not been tampered with since ingestion. This component verifies cryptographic hashes (e.g., SHA-256) and digital signatures to confirm bit-for-bit integrity.

• Validates Content Credentials (C2PA) to confirm authorship and editing history.
• Checks Provenance Hashing fingerprints against an immutable Provenance Ledger.
• Rejects any chunk where the computed hash does not match the stored attestation, preventing data poisoning.

Enforces a strict policy that only documents from designated, authoritative repositories are eligible for retrieval. This eliminates citation of stale or unauthorized copies.

• Compares the retrieval source against a registered Source Authority Vector.
• Implements Source-of-Truth Anchoring to bind generation to primary databases, not cached proxies.
• Prevents attribution drift by locking the retrieval path to the canonical data store.

Reconstructs the full lineage of a fact by tracing it back through intermediary sources to the original primary publication. This combats contextomy and misattribution.

• Builds a dynamic Provenance Graph to visualize the Attribution Chain.
• Uses Citation Parsing to extract structured references from unstructured text.
• Performs Source Disambiguation to resolve ambiguous author or publication names to unique entities.

Assigns a quantitative trust score to every source-citation pair before the LLM uses it for generation. Low-confidence sources are filtered or flagged.

• Algorithmically evaluates the Citation Confidence Scoring based on source recency, authority, and consensus.
• Cross-references claims with Trusted Timestamping to verify temporal relevance.
• Integrates with Attribution Drift Detection to downgrade scores if the original source has been retracted or updated.

Records every provenance verification decision in a non-repudiable log for downstream compliance and debugging. This provides accountability for every generated citation.

• Writes verification outcomes to a Source Transparency Log.
• Uses Attestation Tokens to sign verification events cryptographically.
• Enables post-hoc audits to prove that a specific claim was grounded in a verified source at the time of generation.

Enriches the final prompt context with structured, machine-readable provenance data so the generator can produce accurate citations. This moves attribution from a post-hoc fix to a pre-generation input.

• Appends Provenance Metadata (W3C PROV) and Attribution Schema (JSON-LD) to the context window.
• Implements Citation Anchoring to link specific claims directly to source passages.
• Ensures Attribution Persistence so credits survive chunking and summarization.