An append-only, locally verifiable cryptographic chain that localizes tampering to an exact record.
The evidence layer is realized as a single append-only, hash-chained audit trail held in the system's own local database, deliberately not a distributed consensus ledger and not an external notarization service.
That choice is what makes the mechanism air-gap capable: verification requires no network, no third-party validators, and no external clock. In disconnected and contested environments, a guarantee that depends on reaching a remote service is not a guarantee.
Each record is bound to its predecessor by a cryptographic digest that commits to both the previous record's digest and a canonical serialization of the current record's meaningful content. The chain is anchored by a fixed genesis constant.
Serialization is deterministic by construction: canonical ordering, no incidental whitespace, stable encoding, so replaying an identical governance state reproduces byte-identical input and therefore identical digests. Wall-clock time is recorded as metadata but deliberately excluded from the hashed content, which is what allows a replay performed at a different time to reproduce the same chain.
Verification recomputes the chain in order and performs two independent checks per record: that the stored link to the predecessor matches the running value, and that the stored digest matches the recomputed one.
The practical consequence is that a retroactive edit to any single record cannot be concealed without recomputing that record and every record after it. Tampering is therefore not merely detected but localized to the exact sequence position where it occurred.
Records are added, never revised in place.
No network, validators, or external clock required.
Identical state reproduces identical digests.
Alteration identified at an exact sequence position.