audit-core/docs/availability-recovery.md
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Implement AUDIT-WP-0008 T03, T06, T07, T08.
T08 fixes two defects in our own declaration. provider.R.available quoted a
30-day horizon audit-core does not solely control: at P1 the erasure horizon is
the instance maximum across co-residents, so a co-resident declaring longer
extends what a sender's records remain recoverable for, silently. Decision 4.5.4
names this for tiers; it applies to a provider quoting a number too, and the
provider block now says so. And user-engine, the only consumer, was notified
under Decision 6.1 -- what we declared, that E4 and R4 are unreachable here, and
that the retention number is a floor rather than a ceiling.

T03 writes docs/erasure-and-audit.md: the fact/payload split, why shreddability
is not retrofittable onto a chain committing to cleartext, and why the retained
hash is a confirmation oracle over low-entropy audit records. The framework half
was already resolved as Decision 4.5.3, so what remains is our own position. The
legal basis for retaining audit facts is routed to risk-nexus, open and visible.

T06 closes the review loop with net-kingdom: five findings adopted, declaration
validates clean, and the E line will go stale on an upgrade that Decision 6.1
deliberately does not require anyone to announce.

T07 enumerates the seven dependencies on the accept path and specifies five
recovery scenarios with integrity as a pass condition. It settled one thing: V2
is not reachable from P1 as built, since platform-pg runs instances 1 and
Decision 4.6.1 makes V the minimum across synchronous providers. V1 is the
ceiling here, not the next step. The exercise needs a live window.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-18 15:24:55 +02:00

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# Availability and recovery
**Status:** V1 not yet evidenced. Dependency enumeration complete; exercise
pending a live window on railiance01.
**Framework:** NetKingdom Tenancy Posture v0.1 (draft-8) §4.6, §13 V-row.
**Declared:** `tenancy.yaml``current.V: 0`, `target.V: 1`.
## Why V0 today
`V0` is "no availability or recovery position; recovery is untested or depends
on improvisation". That is accurate. Nothing in this repo exercises recovery of
the complete audit path and records a measured recovery time.
What exists is an *observation*, not an exercise: after the railiance01 node
reboot on 2026-08-16, `/readyz` failed for roughly 40 seconds before the pod
went Ready, recorded in `docs/operator-runbook.md`. That is useful and it is not
V1 evidence — it enumerated nothing, measured nothing deliberately, and happened
to us rather than being performed.
Decision 4.6.1 is explicit that a replica count or a status page is not
evidence of a level. audit-core runs one replica; that fact argues for neither
V0 nor V1. Only the exercise settles it.
## Critical dependency enumeration (Decision 4.6.1)
V is **end-to-end**: the minimum across the components and synchronous providers
required to serve the operation. An application that restarts in five seconds
over a database that takes ninety is not V1 at five seconds.
The operation being declared is **accept an audit event** (`POST /v1/events`).
Read surfaces are operator-facing and are not the availability claim.
| # | Dependency | Role in the accept path | Failure shows as |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | `audit-core` Deployment (1 replica, namespace `audit-core`) | Serves the receiver | Connection refused; Service has no endpoint |
| 2 | `platform-pg` (CNPG, `instances: 1`) | Custody. Synchronous — an accept is not accepted until committed | `/readyz` 503, request 503 `unavailable` |
| 3 | Secret `audit-core-database` at `/etc/audit-core/db` | Runtime lease, re-read per connection | 503 `unavailable` on lease expiry or revocation |
| 4 | ESO + OpenBao (`database/creds/audit-core-runtime`) | Refreshes 3 every 15 min | Delayed: works until the current lease expires |
| 5 | Secret `audit-core-senders` + scope ConfigMap | Sender authentication; read at process start | 401 for every sender after a restart with a bad Secret |
| 6 | CoreDNS | Resolves `platform-pg` | 503 `unavailable`, indistinguishable from 2 without logs |
| 7 | NetworkPolicy (default-deny + sender ingress) | Admits `user-engine` | Sender timeouts; receiver sees nothing at all |
**The binding constraint is 2.** `platform-pg` runs `instances: 1` — no HA, single
node. §17 of the framework already records that no P1 tenant has HA. audit-core
cannot exceed `platform-pg`'s availability level regardless of what it does to
its own Deployment, so **V2 is not reachable from P1 as built** and is not a
target. V1 is.
Dependency 4 is worth separating: OpenBao being down does not stop accepts. It
stops *renewal*, so the failure is deferred to lease expiry. An exercise that
takes OpenBao down and declares success after two minutes has proved nothing —
this is the invisible-failure shape §12 warns about.
## The V1 exercise
§13's V1 row asks for three things, all mechanical: dependencies enumerated
(above), restart/recreate recovery exercised, interruption and measured recovery
time recorded.
**Rules for the run.** Measure from the last successful accept to the next
successful accept, not from pod restart to Ready — Ready is our own opinion of
ourselves. Drive a real `POST /v1/events` on a fixed interval throughout and
count what the sender sees, because the sender's experience is the availability
being claimed. Record wall-clock times, not durations someone computed later.
| # | Scenario | Action | Record |
|---|---|---|---|
| E1 | Receiver restart | `kubectl -n audit-core rollout restart deploy/audit-core` | Accepts lost; time to first successful accept |
| E2 | Receiver recreate | Delete the pod | As E1, plus whether any accepted event is missing after recovery |
| E3 | Custody restart | Restart the `platform-pg` primary | Time to first successful accept; 503 count; chain intact after |
| E4 | Lease expiry under load | Revoke the runtime lease, wait for ESO refresh | Time to recovery **without** a pod restart — the property `credentials.py` exists to provide |
| E5 | Node reboot | Reboot railiance01 | End-to-end recovery; compare against the 2026-08-16 observation of ~40s |
**Integrity is part of the pass condition, not a separate check.** After every
scenario, `python -m audit_core verify-chain` must report intact, and every
event the driver believes was accepted must be present. A recovery that loses an
accepted event, or forks the chain, is a custody defect and fails the exercise
regardless of how fast it was.
**RPO.** An accept is committed before the sender is told, so the expected RPO
for accepted events is zero. The exercise tests that claim rather than assuming
it; E2 and E3 are where it would break.
## Results
*Not yet run.* Needs a live window on railiance01 and coordination with
`user-engine`, since E4 and E5 are visible to the sender.
On completion, record the measured recovery time per scenario here with dates,
raise `tenancy.yaml` `current.V` to 1, note the exercise as the evidence, and
set a review date — a recovery exercise from a year ago describes a system that
no longer exists.