Knowledge Center / Evidence architecture / evidence architecture · 2026·03
Host-side correlation — composing signed evidence with operator pipelines
Once a signed Evidence Token reaches the operator, the question is not what the substrate decides — it doesn't decide anything — but how the operator joins the signed signals to the rails it already runs. Authentication, fraud scoring, AML, dispute. EEI gives each of those four pipelines a signed device-side column they did not have before. Composition, not replacement.
1. What arrives at the operator
The operator’s verification endpoint receives a JWS-compact
serialised Evidence Token per significant event — typically several
per transaction, more in long flows. Each token carries a signal
payload, the device’s boot_id, a monotonically-increasing seq,
the transaction context (tctx) the host application supplied at
TRP initialisation, and the device’s signature.
After verification (chain integrity, signature validity,
public-key match against the registry — covered in detail under
forward-chaining
and Theme 6’s verification-pseudocode), the operator has a
verified record of what the device observed during a specific
transaction. Composition begins from there.
2. Authentication and risk
The operator’s existing authentication and risk pipeline asks: do I let this transaction proceed, do I step it up, do I decline? The inputs are typically credential strength, behavioural-session indicators, fraud history, transaction velocity, jurisdiction, and amount.
EEI adds device-side observation as a category: was an overlay
active during user-confirm; was the debugger attached; did the
runtime show a hook-instrumentation signature; did the binding
state mismatch the registered device. Commission Delegated
Regulation (EU) 2018/389 (the PSD2 RTS) [2] does not prescribe
overlay or runtime-environment signals — it specifies SCA
elements, dynamic linking (Article 5), and channel security
requirements. An operator implementing the RTS may choose to
incorporate overlay.detected and the rest of the
runtime.environment class as inputs to its own SCA-environment
risk assessment under the channel-security and dynamic-linking
articles; the substrate is not asserting the user was misled,
and the regulation is not asserting it either. Operator policy
is the layer that maps device-side signals to step-up,
allow-with-monitoring, or decline.
3. Fraud and AML
The operator’s fraud-scoring model and AML/CTF pipeline run parallel to authentication. Their inputs include identity provenance, transaction patterns, counterparty-risk attributes, and velocity bands. FATF Recommendations 16 (wire transfers) and 20 (suspicious-transaction reporting) [1] govern transaction-level monitoring and STR obligations under the risk-based approach.
EEI feeds device.integrity (boot-state, security-patch level,
TEE attestation), runtime.environment (root, debugger, hook),
and code.integrity (page-hash mismatches that indicate runtime
patching) as features. The substrate is not making a fraud or AML
decision — it is contributing observable signals the
operator’s model can weight however the operator’s risk
appetite, jurisdictional posture, and product context dictate.
The decoupling is load-bearing for AML in particular: regulators require that the operator (not a vendor) be able to explain every input to a CTF decision. EEI is auditable from the operator side because the operator holds the records and the verifier.
4. Dispute and audit
When a chargeback investigator opens a case, the question is what happened. The operator’s dispute system retrieves the original authentication record and the transaction record, joins them by case identifier, and presents the result to the investigator.
EEI adds a third record: the signed sequence of device-side events
across the transaction — initial TRP setup through user-confirm
to submission — replayable per transaction context (tctx).
tctx is set at TRP initialisation (the start of the transaction
flow), not at user-confirm; the user-confirm moment is itself a
named checkpoint signal within that window, alongside any other
device-side observations the runtime emits. The investigator sees
what the device observed about its own runtime across the
transaction window. The full dispute workflow — investigator
path, back-office display, what the cardholder is shown — is
covered in detail in Theme 6 under dispute-evidence-workflow.
5. The join key
The operator’s pipelines all already have a transaction key — the
authorisation code, an ISO 20022 [3] message identifier (e.g.
EndToEndId or TxId on credit-transfer rails), the back-office
case ID. The signed Evidence Tokens are joinable on tctx, which
the host application sets when it initialises TRP for the
transaction. The operator wires tctx to whichever transaction
key dominates the operator’s data model — there is no new join
discipline to adopt.
6. What does not happen
The operator’s existing pipelines are not deprecated, replaced, or re-architected. The auth provider still authenticates. The fraud model still scores. The AML pipeline still flags. The dispute system still retrieves. Execution Evidence Infrastructure (EEI) — the device-identity infrastructure layer for banking and payments — adds one signed column to each of their inputs and one signed sub-record to each of their dispute cases. That is the entire integration surface.
7. Cross-references
- Sibling articles:
signal-vs-verdict-separation,forward-chaining - Architecture:
/architecture/runtime-coherence,/architecture/evidence-token - Buyer flows:
/applications/fraud,/applications/integrity
8. External references
[1] FATF. Recommendations 16 (wire transfers) and 20 (suspicious-transaction reporting). fatf-gafi.org/en/topics/fatf-recommendations.html. Cited 2026-03-30.
[2] European Commission. Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/389 — RTS on Strong Customer Authentication and Common and Secure Communication. EUR-Lex CELEX:32018R0389. eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32018R0389. Cited 2026-03-30.
[3] ISO. ISO 20022 — Universal financial industry message scheme. iso20022.org. Cited 2026-03-30.