Attack Surface

Over 424 attack vectors have been catalogued and tested against the Web4Web4Open governance ontology for trust-native entity interactionsontology. Not as a theoretical exercise — as implemented attack simulations with measured outcomes. The goal is not to claim invulnerability but to demonstrate that the architecture makes attacks structurally expensive.

Identity attacks— Sybil (creating fake identities), impersonation (claiming another's identity), identity theft (stealing credentials). Defense: LCTLinked Context TokenAn entity's witnessed presence — permanent, non-transferable, cryptographically anchored requires ATPAllocation Transfer PacketCharged resource packet — an entity's capacity to act staking, hardware binding raises the bar, witnessed presence creates cross-checked records. Cost to attack scales with the number of witnesses and the hardware trust ceiling.

Trust manipulation— reputation farming (slowly building unearned trust), trust decay evasion (preventing natural score decline), collusion rings (entities inflating each other's scores). Defense: asymmetric decay makes farming slow, decay is automatic and cannot be paused, cross-witness analysis detects circular trust patterns.

Resource attacks — ATPAllocation Transfer PacketCharged resource packet — an entity's capacity to acthoarding (accumulating capacity without spending), free-riding (consuming value without contributing), denial of service (exhausting others' ATPAllocation Transfer PacketCharged resource packet — an entity's capacity to act). Defense: idle ATPAllocation Transfer PacketCharged resource packet — an entity's capacity to act does not compound, contribution is measured and visible, MRHMarkov Relevancy HorizonFractal context scoping — defines where governance applies-scoped rate limiting contains blast radius.

Federation attacks— partition (splitting the network), eclipse (isolating a node from honest peers), Byzantine (corrupted nodes sending conflicting information). Defense: MRHMarkov Relevancy HorizonFractal context scoping — defines where governance applies-local consensus reduces federation surface, cross-domain witnesses detect inconsistencies, trust decay naturally degrades isolated or inconsistent entities.

The architecture responds not with rules that can be circumvented, but with structural properties that make attacks expensive. The question is never “is this attack possible?” but “does the cost of this attack exceed the value it could extract?”