Semantic Non-Assembly: Privacy by Architectural Inertness Under Component Exposure

Summary

Existing privacy frameworks emphasize confidentiality, access control, appropriate information flow, or statistical disclosure limitation. We introduce a complementary class of privacy guarantee (Semantic Non-Assembly) in which privacy is characterized not by the difficulty of achieving exposure but by the information yield of exposure when it occurs. SNA prevents evaluation of a designated predicate by preventing any sub-threshold coalition from assembling a sufficient assignment to its input domain. An architecture satisfies Semantic Non-Assembly when no coalition of fewer than a defined threshold of components can assemble such an assignment: complete exposure and decryption of any sub-threshold component yields no actionable data. In the base protocol, the guarantee is structural: it operates through architecture, not policy, and its privacy properties degrade predictably under component compromise rather than collapsing at a single point. The reference instantiation combines this structural guarantee with audited organizational constraints, as characterized in Appendix A. This paper formalizes the guarantee and establishes four ProVerif-verified properties: Device Non-Correlation, Registry Observer Non-Identification, Submission Server Blindness, and Active Defense Gate correctness, the first three through a two-channel provenance architecture. The Birthmark Standard instantiates the guarantee on constrained capture hardware, demonstrating deployability where ZK-based approaches are computationally infeasible. All formal properties and scope limitations are documented in Appendix A.