Tyche Labs · measurement · 25 August 2026
The map of published trust
A trusted list is a state saying, in machine-readable form, whom it vouches for. The European Union publishes a list of those lists, and that document is well known. What is less known is the shape of the whole thing: who points at whom, which pointers answer a strict client, and whether anyone is obliged to check.
Open the interactive graph → — the full instrument, with every node clickable for what was measured about it.
What the numbers say
The European hub carries 43 pointers, and that is the figure usually quoted. It is not a count of countries. Eleven of them point at a human-readable PDF of a list that is already present in machine-processable form, and one points at the hub itself. The denominator that matters is 31.
| measurement | result | reading |
|---|---|---|
| European machine-processable lists that answer | 30 of 31 | healthy, with one specific fixable fault |
| European pointers published without TLS | 1 of 31 | signed list, unencrypted channel |
| MERCOSUR national pointers that answer | 3 of 4 | same standard, same fault class as Ireland's |
| Copies of the MERCOSUR list that are current | 1 of 4 | the other three identical, 110 days lapsed |
| Edges between the two hubs | 0 | the regions do not know about each other |
Four things worth saying plainly
The European list is in good health. Thirty of thirty-one machine-processable lists answer a strict client, and all but one are current or correctly terminal. An instrument that only ever reports problems is campaigning rather than measuring, so the healthy result is stated first. The exception is Ireland's, whose server does not send the intermediate certificate needed to build a chain; a browser repairs that silently, and the automated clients that actually consume trusted lists do not. It has failed in every observation in the series.
That health is a property of that list, not of the idea. The Americas publish a regional list in the same format under the same standard. One of its four national pointers cannot be chain-verified — the same class of fault as Ireland's, in a different hemisphere — and Chile appears in the graph only through Argentina's national list, not through the regional hub at all.
Signatures do not carry freshness. The regional list is served from four addresses across three states. All four answer, all four carry a signature block, and three are byte-for-byte identical at a sequence whose declared next update passed 110 days ago. The only field separating the current copy from the lapsed ones is the one no rule requires anybody to read.
Some lists are structurally invisible. Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom's live list, Moldova and Serbia publish trusted lists that no hub points at. Ukraine's was reissued the day before this measurement — the freshest list anywhere in the graph, and one nothing references. Moldova's carries no trust-service-provider section at all; its single pointer goes back to Brussels. Montenegro is reachable only through Serbia.
What this is not
This measures whether a published endpoint answers a strict client, and what each list says about its own currency. It is not signature validation, not supervision, not a legal determination, and not a vulnerability assessment. A failing pointer means an artefact could not be retrieved from one vantage point at one moment; where an endpoint refused us specifically, it is recorded as refusing us rather than as broken, because a single vantage cannot tell those apart. Where a named operator is involved we write to them before we publish, and a fix before publication is the outcome we prefer to report. We do not route around a refusal: a result obtained by evading a block would no longer be a measurement of what a client sees.