Sovereign 2.0: Control-Plane Sovereignty for Cloud Systems Under Disruption

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 15 Apr 2026] Sovereign 2.0: Control-Plane Sovereignty for Cloud Systems Under Disruption Justin Stark, Scott Wilkie Cloud sovereignty can no longer be defined by data residency or infrastructure location alone. Under conditions of geopolitical disruption, legal exposure, and expanding service boundaries, sovereignty must be understood as enforceable control over how digital services are governed, operated, and recovered. This paper introduces Sovereign 2.0, a control-plane-centric model that extends sovereignty beyond localisation to include governance authority, privileged access, cryptographic trust, data lifecycle control, observability, and incident response across federated environments. We define management sovereignty as the sovereign ability to govern, operate, evidence, and recover services regardless of underlying infrastructure dependencies. To operationalise this model, we propose a three-layer risk-assurance framework spanning governance, operational, and technical controls, enabling sovereign outcomes to be specified and continuously evidenced under both steady-state and crisis conditions. We further position post-quantum-ready cryptographic control, particularly TLS and key custody, as foundational to long-term sovereign trust. These contributions reframe sovereignty as an evidence-backed control system rather than a property of location, with implications for cloud architecture, procurement, and resilience design. Comments: 10 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables. Preprint of conference paper for discussion Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computers and Society (cs.CY) Cite as: arXiv:2604.14242 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.14242v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.14242 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Justin Stark [view email] [v1] Wed, 15 Apr 2026 04:48:24 UTC (19 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.CY References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)