# It's a Feature, Not a Bug: Secure and Auditable State Rollback for Confidential Cloud Applications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13641 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13641/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [KYA: A Framework-Agnostic Trust Layer for Autonomous Systems with Verifiable Provenance and Hierarchical Policy Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25376/) (2026)
- [When Valid Tool Calls Change Meaning: Formation-Consistent Dispatch for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35088/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Replay and rollback attacks threaten cloud application integrity by reintroducing authentic yet stale data through an untrusted storage interface to compromise application decision-making. Prior security frameworks mitigate these attacks by enforcing forward-only state transitions (state continuity) with hardware-backed mechanisms, but they categorically treat all rollback as malicious and thus preclude legitimate rollbacks used for operational recovery from corruption or misconfiguration. We present Rebound, a general-purpose security framework that preserves rollback protection while enabling policy-authorized legitimate rollbacks of application binaries, configuration, and data. Key to Rebound is a reference monitor that mediates state transitions, enforces authorization policy, guarantees atomicity of state updates and rollbacks, and emits a tamper-evident log that provides transparency to applications and auditors. We analyze Rebound's security properties and show through an application case study -- with software deployment workflows in GitLab CI -- that it enables robust control over binary, configuration, and raw data versioning with low end-to-end overhead.