ruvnet--RuView/docs/research/soul/security.md

Soul Signature — Security, Privacy, and Threat Model

Status: Research Specification (Pre-Implementation) Date: 2026-05-24 Author: ruv

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1. Scope

This document defines the threat model, mitigations, cryptographic primitive choices, privacy architecture, and open security research items for the Soul Signature system. It is intended to be reviewed by a security engineer or privacy counsel before any production deployment.

The soul signature is a passive biometric system. The security bar is: attacker cost to achieve a false accept must exceed the value of the protected resource for the relevant threat model. The soul signature does not claim to be unbreakable. It claims to be hard enough.

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2. What We Explicitly Do NOT Claim

• Not equal to fingerprint scanners on FBI-tier datasets in EER terms. RF biometrics are a younger discipline. No independent benchmark with the soul signature's specific multi-channel fusion exists yet.
• Not legal evidence. Passive RF biometric identification has no established legal precedent in any jurisdiction.
• Not a replacement for explicit consent in regulated contexts (healthcare, employment, border control).
• Not unbreakable under a nation-state adversary with full physical access to the sensing infrastructure.
• Not validated at scale beyond the constituent ADR baselines. The AETHER channel (ADR-024) targets >80% mAP at 5 subjects; at 100+ subjects the false-accept rate is open research.

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3. Threat Model

3.1 Attacker: Passive Eavesdropper on the WiFi Medium

Capability: An attacker near the WiFi sensing zone can observe CSI of any person who passes through. With enough CSI, the attacker could construct an unauthorized soul signature enrollment of an unconsenting bystander.

Impact: Unauthorized enrollment → unauthorized recognition → attribution of presence to a person who did not consent.

Mitigation:

• Ambient CSI capture does NOT trigger enrollment. Enrollment requires the explicit 60-second structured protocol. Ambient bystander CSI produces unauthenticated pose tracks tagged as person_id: NULL.
• Unauthenticated RVF nodes are pruned from the HNSW index after 24 hours.
• The enrollment protocol requires presence confirmation from at least two sensing nodes simultaneously, making drive-by enrollment geometrically harder to achieve without physical proximity.

Residual risk: An attacker who can be physically present in the scanning zone for 60 seconds, under the observation of the scanning protocol, can cause enrollment of a fake person. This requires physical co-location and is equivalent to the threat model for any in-person biometric registration.

3.2 Attacker: Active Replay

Capability: An attacker records a CSI stream from a legitimate enrollment or recognition event and replays it to a sensing node to impersonate the enrolled person.

Impact: False positive recognition; unauthorized access or presence attribution.

Mitigation:

• Each enrollment is bound to the room's ADR-030 field model eigenstate at enrollment time. The environment_id field in every vector node is a SHA-256 of the field model's eigenmode matrix. A replay in a different room produces a different environment_id and a dramatically different Subcarrier_Reflection_Profile — the cross-validation between these two signed fields fails.
• The Ed25519 witness chain (ADR-110) includes a monotonic timestamp (timestamp_ns). A replay of an old signature is detected by the timestamp freshness check at recognition time (configurable; default: reject any signature older than 7 days for high-assurance contexts).
• The ADR-030 field model continuously updates. Even if the replay is in the same room, the field model's eigenstate changes as furniture is moved or temperature shifts the propagation medium; cross-validation degrades over time.

Residual risk: Replay within the same room within a short time window (< 4 hours, before the field model rotates) by an attacker who has recorded the original CSI with high fidelity remains a plausible attack vector. This is not defended against by the current architecture. It requires a future ADR for challenge-response liveness detection.

3.3 Attacker: Phased-Array Vest / RF Body Emulator

Capability: An attacker wears a device capable of emitting RF signals that mimic another person's backscatter profile, allowing them to be recognized as the enrolled person.

Impact: The strongest impersonation attack; if successful, bypasses all electromagnetic biometric channels simultaneously.

Mitigation:

• The RuvSense adversarial.rs module (ADR-030 Tier 7) enforces four physics-based consistency checks:
  1. Multi-link consistency: a real body perturbs all mesh links passing through its location. A vest emitting signals affects only the targeted link(s). Detection: at least 4 links must show correlated perturbation.
  2. Field model constraints: the perturbation must lie within the span of the room's eigenmode structure. Artificially injected signals produce perturbations inconsistent with room geometry.
  3. Temporal continuity: real movement is smooth in embedding space; injected signals can produce discontinuities flagged by the embedding velocity monitor.
  4. Energy conservation: total perturbation energy across all links must be consistent with the number and geometry of bodies present.
• The adversarial detector fires FAIL_ADVERSARIAL_SIGNAL before the soul signature match is considered.

Residual risk: A sophisticated attacker with a calibrated phased-array system who also knows the room's eigenmode structure and the enrolled person's exact multi-link backscatter pattern could in principle construct a convincing emulation. This is a high-capability, high-cost attack. Practical countermeasure: require multi-node confirmation (ADR-029 multistatic) which raises the geometric complexity of the emulation exponentially with node count.

3.4 Attacker: Insider with Broker Access

Capability: A privileged operator or compromised service with read access to the stored .rvf files and the HNSW person_track index.

Impact: Exfiltration of biometric signatures; linkage of person_id to PII if linkage tables also accessible; replay or cross-site re-enrollment.

Mitigation:

• At-rest encryption: all .rvf files are encrypted with ChaCha20-Poly1305 using a key derived via Argon2id from a user-provided passphrase (or a FIDO2 hardware token binding). The Cognitum Seed appliance NEVER stores the decryption key; it is re-derived from the passphrase on each access.
• The opaque person_id (u64) in the .rvf file is not PII. PII linkage, if any, requires access to a separate application-layer database not stored on the sensing appliance.
• The HNSW index stores only the 128-dim AETHER embedding, not raw CSI or full soul signatures. Exfiltration of the index exposes the embedding but not the full biometric record.
• Differential privacy (ADR-106 DP-SGD) applies at training time when AETHER is fine-tuned on enrolled-person data, preventing membership inference attacks that could recover training samples from model weights.

Residual risk: If the passphrase is weak or the FIDO2 token is compromised, the at-rest encryption fails. Key management is a deployment responsibility.

3.5 Attacker: Manufacturer / Firmware Supply Chain

Capability: A malicious firmware update to the ESP32 node or Cognitum Seed appliance could silently exfiltrate soul signatures or CSI streams.

Impact: Large-scale passive surveillance; biometric data exfiltration across all installed appliances.

Mitigation:

• All firmware releases are signed with Ed25519 (ADR-100 cog packaging) and verified by the appliance before installation. A Dilithium-3 post-quantum co-signature is added in the transition window (ADR-109).
• The Ed25519 witness chain (ADR-110) signs each CSI frame bundle at the sensor level. A firmware change that alters the witness chain is detectable by downstream audit.
• Network egress from the Cognitum Seed in --privacy-mode is blocked for raw CSI and soul signatures by default. Only MQTT auto-discovery messages (ADR-115) and OTA metadata are permitted outbound.
• Open-source firmware. The ESP32 firmware and Cognitum Seed Rust crates are open source (this repository). Independent audit is possible.

Residual risk: A zero-day exploit in the ESP-IDF WiFi stack or the Rust codebase could bypass these controls. This is mitigated by regular security audits (run npx @claude-flow/cli@latest security scan per CLAUDE.md) but not eliminated.

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4. Consent Architecture

4.1 The Enrollment-vs-Recognition Distinction

The soul signature system enforces a hard distinction:

Action	Consent required	Mechanism
Enrollment	Explicit, active	60-second protocol with operator confirmation; produces signed .rvf
Recognition of enrolled person	Implicit (enrollment = consent for recognition)	Continuous mode; HNSW match
Ambient sensing of unenrolled person	No — but data is transient and pruned	Unauthenticated tracks; 24h TTL
Updating stored profile from continuous mode	Implicit (set at enrollment time)	Aggregator auto-refresh; configurable

The system operator is responsible for obtaining appropriate consent from persons before performing enrollment. The technical system enforces that enrollment cannot happen accidentally or from drive-by sensing.

4.2 Bystander Protection

Persons who pass through a sensing zone without being enrolled are sensed but not persistently identified. Their data flow:

1. Pose tracker produces a track tagged person_id: NULL.
2. AETHER embedding is computed for motion detection and occupancy counting (ADR-115 HA-MIND).
3. The embedding is written to the temporal_baseline HNSW index with a 24-hour TTL and authenticated: false.
4. After 24 hours, the entry is automatically pruned by the EmbeddingIndex::prune() method (ADR-024 §2.4).
5. No .rvf file is created. No persistent record exists.

This architecture satisfies the GDPR principle of data minimization (Article 5(1)(c)) for bystander data: the retention period is bounded, the data is not linked to an identity, and the storage is proportionate to the functional purpose (occupancy counting).

4.3 GDPR / HIPAA Mode

When --privacy-mode enabled (from ADR-115 HA-MIND §privacy):

1. Soul signatures are computed and stored locally only. They are NEVER published to MQTT topics, Matter clusters, or any external endpoint.
2. The local REST API for accessing soul signatures requires a valid bearer token (ADR-028 bearer_auth.rs). No unauthenticated endpoint exposes biometric data.
3. The JSON-LD sidecar is written to the local encrypted store only. It is not included in MQTT auto-discovery payloads.
4. The longitudinal drift metrics (ADR-030 Tier 4) are published to MQTT in aggregated form only (e.g., drift_detected: true, never raw metric values that could be used for medical inference).
5. A data deletion endpoint must be implemented: DELETE /api/v1/persons/{id} removes the .rvf file, the HNSW index entry, the JSON-LD sidecar, and all longitudinal Welford statistics for that person_id.

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5. Cryptographic Primitives

All primitives are chosen from NIST-approved or widely-audited standards.

Purpose	Primitive	Rationale
Content integrity (per-segment)	CRC32 (IEEE 802.3)	Already implemented in rvf_container.rs:line 70. Corruption detection, not security.
Content addressing	SHA-256	File name derivation; pre-image resistance prevents name collisions
Ed25519 signatures	Ed25519 (RFC 8032)	ADR-110 witness chain; 64-byte signatures; 128-bit security
At-rest encryption	ChaCha20-Poly1305 (RFC 8439)	AEAD; software-friendly; no timing-attack surface like AES-CBC; 256-bit key
Key derivation from passphrase	Argon2id (RFC 9106)	Memory-hard KDF; resistant to GPU/ASIC brute-force; recommended by NIST SP 800-132 draft (2024)
DP-SGD noise	Gaussian N(0, σ²C²I) per ADR-106	(ε, δ)-DP per Abadi et al. 2016 Moments Accountant
Post-quantum key exchange (future)	Kyber-768 (NIST FIPS 203, 2024)	ADR-108; ~AES-192 security; NIST CNSA 2.0 recommended
Post-quantum signatures (future)	Dilithium-3 (NIST FIPS 204, 2024)	ADR-109; hybrid mode with Ed25519 during transition window

5.1 Argon2id Parameters

Default parameters for soul signature key derivation:

m_cost = 65536 (64 MB memory)
t_cost = 3     (3 iterations)
p_cost = 4     (4 parallel lanes)
output_len = 32 bytes (256-bit key for ChaCha20-Poly1305)
salt = 16 random bytes stored alongside encrypted blob (NOT the person_id)

These parameters provide ~100ms KDF time on a Pi 5, which is acceptable for enrollment (one-time) and recognition (HNSW match precedes decryption, so decryption is only triggered after a candidate match).

5.2 Forward Secrecy

Old soul signature files are NOT keys for new ones. Compromise of a 90-day-old .rvf file does not unlock the current profile. The key is derived from the user's passphrase each time, not derived from the previous file.

Archived files (kept for audit purposes) are re-encrypted on passphrase rotation if the operator elects to do so via the soul-signature re-encrypt --all CLI command (not yet implemented; specified here for future ADR).

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6. Privacy Mode Integration (ADR-115)

The --privacy-mode flag defined in ADR-115 HA-MIND §9 is extended to cover soul signature data:

Privacy mode	MQTT publish	REST API	Local storage	HNSW index
disabled (default for home users)	Aggregated presence/count only	Authenticated bearer required	Encrypted at rest	Local only
enabled	Nothing biometric	Authenticated bearer required	Encrypted at rest	Local only
research (explicit opt-in)	Full soul signature nodes (anonymized person_id)	Open (for research deployments only)	Encrypted at rest	Exportable

The research mode requires a separate --research-consent-token flag and is intended for academic data collection under IRB approval. It must never be the default.

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7. Open Research and Outstanding Security Work

The following items are known security gaps or open research questions. Each warrants a future ADR before production deployment at scale.

7.1 Challenge-Response Liveness Detection Replay attacks within a short time window (see §3.2 residual risk) are not defended against. A future mechanism should issue a random challenge (e.g., "please raise your left hand") and verify the CSI response matches the challenge before accepting a recognition. This eliminates replay as a practical attack vector. Future ADR: ADR-120 (proposed).

7.2 False-Accept Rate at Scale (N > 20 subjects) The AETHER baseline (ADR-024) is tested at 5 subjects (>80% mAP). For household deployments this is sufficient. For building-scale deployments (50-500 subjects), the FAR is open research. Independent benchmarking on a dataset of 20+ subjects with the full 7-channel fusion is required before building-scale deployment can be recommended. Publication target: co-locate with ADR-027 MERIDIAN evaluation.

7.3 Side-Channel Leakage from Encrypted RVF Files The file size of an encrypted .rvf blob is observable by an attacker with filesystem access. File size is a function of the number of nodes present, which reveals whether the cardiac channel was captured (high-SNR enrollment vs low-SNR enrollment). This is a minor information leak. Mitigation: pad all .rvf files to a fixed 64 KB boundary. Future ADR: append to ADR-106.

7.4 Membership Inference in Continuous Mode In continuous mode, the AETHER model is fine-tuned on the enrolled person's data over months. An adversary with access to the model weights before and after a re-train cycle could infer that a specific enrollment occurred, even without the soul signature file, via membership inference (Shokri et al. 2017). ADR-106 DP-SGD mitigates this for federation round deltas but not for local single-device fine-tuning. Extension of DP-SGD to the local continuous-mode update is required. Future ADR: extend ADR-106.

7.5 Physical Access to Sensing Nodes An attacker with physical access to an ESP32 node can extract the firmware and attempt to reverse the Ed25519 signing key (if the key is stored in ESP32 NVS without protection). ADR-110 uses NVS for key storage. A future ADR should mandate secure element storage (e.g., ATECC608A co-processor on the Cognitum Seed) for the signing key. Future ADR: ADR-121 (proposed).

7.6 Federated Learning Linkability When AETHER is retrained via federated learning (ADR-105), the LoRA weight deltas carry information about enrolled persons. ADR-106 applies DP-SGD to these deltas, but the post-quantum migration path (ADR-108 Kyber-768) is not yet integrated with the federation protocol. Until ADR-108 Phase 2 ships, the federation link is classically encrypted and vulnerable to harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks by quantum-capable adversaries. Assessed risk: low until 2027.

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8. Summary Security Properties Table

Property	Status	Evidence
At-rest encryption	Specified (ChaCha20-Poly1305 + Argon2id)	This document §5
Ed25519 attestation	Implemented	ADR-110 witness chain
Replay resistance (cross-room)	Implemented	ADR-030 field model environment_id binding
Replay resistance (same-room, short window)	Open gap	§7.1
Anti-spoofing (single-link injection)	Implemented	adversarial.rs multi-link consistency
Anti-spoofing (phased-array vest)	Partial	adversarial.rs + energy conservation; residual risk documented
Bystander protection	Specified	24h TTL on unauthenticated tracks; §4.2
DP-SGD training privacy	Implemented (federation)	ADR-106
DP-SGD training privacy (local continuous mode)	Open gap	§7.4
GDPR data deletion	Specified	§4.3 DELETE /api/v1/persons/{id}
Post-quantum migration path	Specified (Kyber-768, Dilithium-3)	ADR-108, ADR-109
Firmware supply chain integrity	Implemented (Ed25519 cog signing)	ADR-100, ADR-109 hybrid
False-accept rate at scale	Open research	§7.2
Liveness detection	Open gap	§7.1
Secure element key storage	Open gap	§7.5