Optimizing Credential Blast Radius Through Trust Boundaries and Delegation Under Post-Quantum Authentication Costs

Abstract: Partitioning interacting services into independently rooted trust domains limits issuer-compromise reach while increasing calls across trust boundaries. Post-quantum replacements for public-key authentication and key-establishment mechanisms can increase crossing latency on constrained or lossy paths. We formulate the joint selection of trust domains and credential-derivation structures under policy and latency constraints, linking separate service-interaction and credential-derivation graphs through domain assignment. Credential blast radius measures weighted service impact after compromise. A linear upper bound supports optimization, while a joint event model gives exact expected impact. For shared issuers, the bound is exact under nonoverlapping credential reach and otherwise requires explicit propagation. While the general problem is NP-hard, scalarized two-domain direct issuance reduces to a weighted minimum cut. Joint optimization yields lower blast radius than choosing boundaries first in 195 of 230 exhaustive synthetic comparisons, especially under chained delegation. A trace-derived replay used measured post-quantum costs, synthetic risk inputs, a fixed derivation family, and one to six trust domains. The best design found reduced expected impact by up to 36% relative to one domain within the latency budget. The framework turns risk assumptions and measured crossing costs into candidate trust-domain and credential-derivation designs.