Before I built Lorica, I was a NASA Parts & Reliability Engineering intern at Goddard Space Flight Center. My work touched the verification process for components destined for missions worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The work wasn’t glamorous. It was meticulous. Every component that goes into a spacecraft has a chain of custody — a documented trail showing who handled it, who tested it, who certified it passed, and when. Not “someone at the lab verified it.” A specific person. A specific timestamp. A specific test protocol.
If that component fails in orbit, there is no recovery.
You can’t send someone up to swap out a circuit board on a $500M satellite. The mission is over. And the first thing the failure review board does is trace the chain of custody backward — who certified this component, what test did they run, what were the results, and is there a record proving all of it?
That record has to exist before the launch, not after the failure.
You verify at the point of maximum consequence, not at the point of minimum risk. Aerospace got that math right thirty years ago. Finance still gets it wrong every day.
Aerospace verification is non-negotiable
At NASA, the concept of “we think the right person approved it” doesn’t exist. Every certification has a paper trail that answers three questions unambiguously: who certified the component, what specifically they certified, and when they certified it. The record is signed, timestamped, and independently auditable.
Nobody in aerospace would accept a system where a technician badges into the lab at 8 AM and every test result that day is attributed to them by default. That would be absurd. The certification happens at the moment of the test — not at the door.
Yet that’s exactly how software handles user authorization. A user authenticates at login, and every action in that session is implicitly attributed to them. There’s no verification at the moment the action happens. No chain of custody for user-initiated transactions.
Different stakes, same principle
| Aerospace | Fintech | |
|---|---|---|
| What’s at risk | $500M satellite | $50K unauthorized wire |
| Verification moment | At test execution | At login (hours before action) |
| Chain of custody | Complete, auditable | Nonexistent for actions |
| Recovery possible | No (in orbit) | Rarely (<30% for wires) |
| Proof format | Signed certification record | Session cookie |
The dollar amounts are different. A failed satellite mission and a fraudulent wire transfer operate at different scales. But the principle is identical: if something goes wrong, you need a verifiable record proving the right human approved the right thing at the right time.
Aerospace has had this for decades. Financial software doesn’t. A $50,000 wire transfer executes with less human verification than a $12 resistor going into a satellite power supply.
Why software doesn’t have chain of custody
The answer is surprisingly simple: nobody built it.
Identity verification companies verify users at signup. Authentication companies verify users at login. Nobody built a verification layer at the moment of the action — the equivalent of the aerospace certification at the moment of the test.
It’s not that the problem is unknown. Every compliance team, every fraud team, every risk team knows the gap exists. They compensate with transaction monitoring, behavioral analytics, device fingerprinting — layers of probabilistic signals that estimate whether the right person is present. But estimation isn’t proof.
At NASA, nobody estimates whether the right technician certified a component. They have a signed record.
A session token is a guess. A signed JWT with biometric verification is a record.
Building the record
Lorica exists because I saw the gap and recognized the pattern. At Goddard, the verification record contains who, what, and when — signed and auditable. Lorica’s JWT contains the same: the user identity, the action context, and the timestamp — signed and independently verifiable.
The verification happens at the moment of the action, not at some earlier boundary. A biometric check confirms a live human is present. The JWT becomes the chain of custody record that financial software never had.
The discipline isn’t new. Aerospace has practiced it for decades. The application is new — bringing that same rigor to every high-risk user action in software.
A $500M satellite and a $50K wire transfer. Different worlds. Same question: can you prove the right human approved it?
I brought the verification discipline I learned in aerospace to financial software.