draft-helmprotocol-tttps
The TLS TimeToken Secure Protocol (tttps://)
This document specifies the TLS TimeToken Secure Protocol (tttps://),
a protocol extension that augments TLS 1.3 [RFC8446] with
cryptographically verifiable temporal ordering.
Internet infrastructure assumes that channels are passive: noise is
random and channel operators have no ordering preferences. This
assumption is structurally violated when ordering has economic value
-- NTP servers, BGP routing authorities, DNS resolvers, and
transaction sequencers all have incentive to misrepresent ordering.
This document formalises the problem as the Strategic Channel
Controller Problem (SCCP), absent from classical information theory.
Temporal ordering attacks are structurally more acute for autonomous
AI agents than for human participants: as agent reaction times
converge toward symmetry, ordering advantage can no longer be earned
through superior human latency. No existing protocol -- including
O(n^2) BFT consensus, which tolerates but does not eliminate
Byzantine nodes -- provides a cryptographic pre-ingestion defense for
this case.
TTTPS introduces Proof-of-Time (PoT): a multi-source synthesised
timestamp protected by the GRG integrity pipeline (Golomb-Rice ->
Reed-Solomon -> Golay(23,12,7) -> HMAC), whose stage ordering is
mathematically necessary (Theorems 1-3 of the companion paper
[POT2026]). PoT achieves Byzantine temporal elimination at O(1) per
record, independent of network size. An AdaptiveSwitch mechanism
makes ordering manipulation economically self-defeating; the
equilibrium threshold is derived in closed form and empirically
calibrated from deployed data (Section 6.4).
Deployment on Base Sepolia produces 70,000+ verified records; 55% are
generated by autonomous AI agents -- an unanticipated finding that
confirms the structural severity of the ordering problem in agent
economies.
This document has Experimental status. The GRG pipeline
specification will be published upon conclusion of pending patent
proceedings (Section 12).