Lifecycle Authority.

Lifecycle Authority is the term for what a governance platform actually has, and what a discovery tool does not. It is the right, backed by cryptography, to issue, rotate, and revoke a non-human identity, exclusively. When Arkion governs an estate, no other system can issue an NHID for that estate. This exclusivity is what makes revocation credible: when Arkion revokes an identity, there is no parallel authority that can quietly reissue it. The word jurisdiction is chosen deliberately. Governance without jurisdiction is advice. Jurisdiction is where identity becomes enforceable in code.

Lifecycle Authority is asserted via the certificate chain: every NHID in a governed estate is signed by an intermediate CA controlled by Arkion, which in turn chains to a root the enterprise controls. Downstream services trust only certificates in that chain. Revocation is enforced at the CA level, so a revoked identity cannot be quietly reissued by another tool.