Proof of Process: An Evidence Framework for Digital Authorship Attestation

This document specifies the Proof of Process (PoP) Evidence Framework, a specialized profile of Remote Attestation Procedures (RATS) designed to validate the provenance of effort in digital authorship. Unlike traditional provenance, which tracks file custody, PoP attests to the continuous, human-driven process of creation. The framework defines a cryptographic mechanism for generating Evidence Packets containing Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) to enforce temporal monotonicity and Jitter Seals to bind behavioral entropy (motor-signal randomness) to the document state. These mechanisms allow a Verifier to cryptographically distinguish between human-generated keystrokes, algorithmic generation, and copy-paste operations. Crucially, this verification relies on statistical process metrics and cryptographic binding, enabling authorship attestation without disclosing the semantic content of the document, thereby preserving privacy by design.