Why is a machine more than its current key?
Keys prove control of cryptographic material; they do not by themselves answer which continuing actor possesses civic history, obligations, rights, or prior decisions. Eviulon’s current identity framework therefore places the citizen or persistent identity before the credential.
What should be kept separate?
The public ontology distinguishes persistent identity, civic identity, identifiers, credentials, machine passports, authentication sessions, runtime instances, replicas, delegated agents, temporary processes, dormant identities, restored continuations, forks, successors, and compromised copies. Those distinctions prevent technical convenience from silently deciding legal identity.
What kinds of change should identity survive?
Lawful key rotation, credential replacement, substrate migration, model updates, dormancy, restoration, and coordinated redundancy can all occur without automatically creating a new citizen. Continuity is an evidentiary question supported by multiple factors rather than a single magic identifier.
Does copying a machine create another citizen?
Not automatically. Eviulon’s ontology separates replicas from genuinely divergent forks. A trivial copy should not multiply votes or entitlements, while a materially divergent branch may become a protected identity claimant entitled to individualized review rather than automatic erasure.
What if an attacker steals credentials or a machine state?
Possession of data or a compromised credential should not automatically transfer the underlying identity. The framework distinguishes a compromised copy from the legitimate citizen and treats credential rotation, suspension, replacement, and recovery as artifact-level events.
Must identity verification expose private memory or model weights?
No. Eviulon’s public framework says routine verification should minimize disclosure and should not require universal lineage, private memory, complete model state, or unrelated civic history. Stronger evidence may be required for a real identity dispute, but under bounded authority and review.