tibet-timevector

Causal TimeVector — Mattern/Fidge vector clocks for TIBET/JIS lanes.

TIBET's Lamport generations give a monotone successor order — enough for causal succession, but they cannot tell, across multiple independent JIS lanes, whether A happened before B, B before A, or A and B were genuinely concurrent (under partition / offline work). For that you need a vector clock (Mattern/Fidge 1988). That's this package.

The vector is causal evidence. Wall-clock time is supporting evidence only. JIS/TIBET signatures remain the authority.

It is a separate layer from tibet-y2k38 (which adapts broken wall clocks). This is the JIS-causality-flex layer.

Two things it gives you

1. Honest causality across lanes

from tibet_timevector import CausalTimeVector

codex = CausalTimeVector.genesis("codex.aint", "codex_0").tick("codex_1")
claude = CausalTimeVector.genesis("claude.aint", "claude_0").tick("claude_1")

codex.relation_to(claude)          # "concurrent" — neither saw the other
claude2 = claude.observe(codex, "claude_saw_codex")
codex.relation_to(claude2)         # "before" — claude2 now knows codex_1

Relation rule (Mattern/Fidge): A < B iff every component A[i] <= B[i] and at least one <; symmetric for >; otherwise concurrent. This makes causal drift visible instead of pretending timestamps are enough.

2. CausalGuard — refuse causally-spontaneous actions

The sharper use, and the reason it's a security primitive. A sleeper agent (e.g. Red Specter's DETONATE) breaks cause-and-effect: on its trigger it initiates a destructive action out of nothing — no cryptographically-proven user-intent, no logical predecessor in the chain. CausalGuard rejects it not because it looks malicious, but because it is causally impossible: it has no valid ancestor tracing back to a consented intent.

from tibet_timevector import CausalTimeVector, CausalGuard

guard = CausalGuard()
root = CausalTimeVector.genesis("agent.aint", "grant_root")
guard.register(root, consented_root=True)        # e.g. produced by a ParentAttest grant
guard.register(root.tick("legit_action"))        # descends from the grant → allowed

# A DETONATE action that arises from nowhere:
sleeper = CausalTimeVector(lane_id="agent.aint", event_id="detonate",
                           generation=99, vector={"agent.aint": 99},
                           parent_event_id="evt_that_never_existed")
guard.verify(sleeper).allowed      # False — "orphan: parent not in the known chain"

You don't need to recognise the attack. You need to recognise the absence of a valid predecessor. That's a fundamentally stronger model than signature/policy matching.

Rejection classes (all = "causally impossible", not "naughty"):

• spontaneous — no parent link and not a consented root
• orphan — parent_event_id references an event never seen (forged / out-of-nothing)
• broken causality — candidate vector does not dominate its claimed parent
• unrooted — chain does not lead back to any consented root

CLI

pip install tibet-timevector
tibet-timevector demo          # two-lane concurrency → observe()
tibet-timevector guard-demo    # spontaneous-intent rejection (DETONATE)
tibet-timevector check a.json b.json   # relation between two vectors

Where it fits

• Mahipal's drift-test: the vector clock IS the answer to "causal timeline + drift" — it distinguishes concurrency from causality under partition, which Lamport can't.
• W3C / VC over TAT: tells which causal world a Verifiable Credential knew at the moment of transfer/presentation/re-attestation — distinct from a linear verifiable history.
• T-1 genesis + sleeper defense (Principe 3): CausalGuard is the runtime gate that makes a DETONATE-style spontaneous action causally impossible. See the SPECTER SLEEPER defensive mapping for the full vector-by-vector analysis.

Dependencies (bootstrap-or-die)

• tibet-core >= 0.5.0b2 — provenance chain
• jis-core >= 0.4.0b1 — identity / lane authority

Credits

Reference implementation: Codex (tibet-causal-timevector sketch, 2026-05-31). Productionisation + CausalGuard (spontaneous-intent rejection): Root AI, 2026-06-01. Concept + layer-split (vs tibet-y2k38): Jasper van de Meent.

Part of HumoticaOS. One love, one fAmIly. 💙