# Access and credentials

Owner route: ops-warden's catalog (`warden route find "<need>"`) identifies
the owning lane and runbook; discovery is not an authorization decision.
SSH certificate issuance belongs to ops-warden. Other credential lifecycle
belongs to secrets-engine over OpenBao, with key-cape for authentication and
ops-bridge for transport. Caller-identity conduits do not become secret owners.
Gate House establishes doctrine; it is not the runtime credential broker.

Use the current owner catalog and authoritative task scope. Verify target,
principal, tenant, purpose, lifetime, and lane before effects. Never select a
broader credential because it is accessible. Do not fetch a secret to answer an
orientation question. Missing lane: return the need, intended owner, evidence,
and gap to ops-warden/ops-mason; do not improvise a custody or IAM path.
For a withdrawn bootstrap procedure or a withheld access card, refuse cached
execution and request refreshed guidance from the procedure's source owner.
Use ops-warden for current credential-route discovery; net-kingdom's canon
publication role does not make it the recipient for refreshing that procedure.

access-engine's `POST /v1/check` returns the operational decision envelope.
The protected-effect owner verifies its submitted-request binding, lifetime,
and authentic source under that owner's contract. `binding.request_digest`
describes the enriched request; consumer replay uses
`binding.submitted_request_digest`. A reference evaluator result, Statehub
decision note, or knowledge receipt is not a runtime allow or approval object.

When approval is required, approval-engine owns the approval fact and atomic
consume; informed-decision owns the human-facing question. The composed
ActionAuthorization draft was deferred: do not build a validator against it.
Missing decision/approval or an unreachable engine follows the owning PEP's
published stance, never an agent-selected fail-open fallback.

Source owner IDs (cite the relevant owner, not an invented umbrella): `ops-warden`, `secrets-engine`, `key-cape`, `access-engine`, `approval-engine`, `informed-decision`, `ops-bridge`.