EMILIA QUORUM

The two-person rule for AI actions.

Some actions are too consequential for one signature. EMILIA Quorum holds a high-stakes, irreversible action until a quorum of named humans — M-of-N or in strict order, each bound to the exact action — has signed. The result is a cryptographic, offline-verifiable proof that the rule held for this exact action.

It is additive over single signoff: where one accountable human is enough, use FinGuard or GovGuard. Where the stakes demand more than one, require a quorum.

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WHO IT’S FOR

Where one approval is too small a target for the stakes.

Defense & national security

Actions that already mandate two-person control — release authority, taskings, weapons-adjacent decisions. The rule made cryptographic, with evidence an inspector general can verify offline.

Treasury & large-value payments

Dual control on the wire desk: the largest transfers and account changes require two distinct, named approvers — not a policy memo, a fail-closed predicate.

Government benefit integrity

Disbursement approvals and caseworker overrides that move public money require a quorum, so a single forged approval cannot redirect a payment.

Critical infrastructure & production

Irreversible deploys, infrastructure and IAM changes with real blast radius — held until the quorum signs.

WHAT “SATISFIED” MEANS

A quorum either holds or it doesn’t.

A policy document that says “two people must approve” is only as strong as the system that enforces it. EMILIA Quorum makes the rule a fail-closed predicate, checkable by anyone:

1

Threshold or order. M-of-N (any two of three controllers) or a strict sequence (program officer → authorizing official → inspector general). The policy names which.

2

Each signer bound to the exact action. Every approval covers the same action hash — the same destination, amount, and parameters. No one signs a summary; everyone signs the bytes.

3

Distinct humans — and distinct keys. Separation of duties is enforced, not assumed: one person cannot fill two seats, the initiator cannot approve their own request, and no single device key can fill two seats under two names.

4

Bounded window. Signatures must land close enough in time to describe one decision, not a stale collection.

5

Provable order, not just timestamps. In strong ordered mode each approval is cryptographically chained to the one before it — so the sequence is proven by the signatures themselves, and no one, including the operator, can reorder or backdate an approval undetected.

6

Fail-closed. If any element is missing, mismatched, or unverifiable, the quorum is not satisfied — and the action does not proceed.

VERIFIABLE BY ANYONE

Evidence, not testimony.

A decision log that says “three people approved” is testimony, controlled by the party who acted. A quorum receipt is evidence: an auditor, regulator, or counterparty can verify it offline, with open-source code, without trusting the system that issued it. To earn that, the verification is unambiguous enough that independent implementations agree — EMILIA ships three reference verifiers (JavaScript, Python, Go) that pass the same adversarial quorum vectors identically, on every change.

See it without trusting us. One command issues a dual-approval receipt, then verifies it offline — with EMILIA disconnected — and rejects a forged copy:

npx -y @emilia-protocol/crash-test

Run the demo Read the primer IETF spec (EP-QUORUM)Read the paper

HONEST STATUS

What’s real today.

Multi-party quorum is a verifiable protocol capability today: the three-language reference verifiers agree on it, the server-side enforcement that holds an action until the quorum is satisfied is built and merged into the authorization path, and a live in-browser demo runs an ordered three-party signoff and rejects a duplicate signer in front of you.

It is also verified end-to-end: an automated test drives three independent devices through an ordered signoff and proves a quorum-gated action cannot be consumed until every required human has signed. What is deliberately still ahead: a production deployment of that flow and — for defense — an accredited environment. We would rather state that plainly than overclaim a control this consequential. We are taking design partners now.

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