fix(decision): registry facts win over caller-supplied attributes
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secrets-engine's first live request rejected our allow: binding.
request_digest is computed over material they never sent, because we
enrich subject and resource from the registry before hashing. Answering
that meant reading the enrichment path, which had a worse defect in it.

Enrichment was additive-if-absent — addAttribute wrote a registry value
only where the request had no value for that key. So where a caller
supplied a key, the caller's value won and the registry's never applied.
Every registry ceiling and allowlist was advisory. Verified against the
shipped ops-warden package, each one added key on an otherwise-denied
request:

  max_ttl_hours: 99      registry says 8    -> allowed a 12h certificate
  allowed_principals     registry allowlist -> disallowed_principal bypassed
  allowed_subjects       registry allowlist -> unknown_subject bypassed

The third is the one to read twice: a subject the registry does not know
authorized itself by naming itself in the allowlist it was being checked
against.

Not remotely reachable today — the PEP builds the CheckRequest,
ops-warden sends no resource.attributes, and enforce admits one identity.
It is a defence-in-depth failure: any path that lets attacker-influenced
data into a CheckRequest field became a full policy bypass rather than a
bounded input problem. Callers sending resource.attributes is not
hypothetical; secrets-engine does it on every request.

Registry facts now win, and diagnostics.registry_overrode names every
displaced key, because a registry that silently discards a contradicting
claim hides that a caller asserted authority it did not have.

subject.type is carved out, and the reason is a finding of its own.
Making the registry win there denied every secrets-engine allow: the
registry's type is CARING vocabulary (Human, Agent, Automation, Service)
and the request's is the protected system's actor vocabulary (service,
adm, agt, atm). Two fields sharing a name; substituting one for the other
is translation rather than identity, which GH-DEC-2026-008 ruled against.
Note what surfaced it — the registry's type had been dead data since the
field existed, because the caller's value always won.

Also publishes binding.submitted_request_digest, over the request exactly
as sent. request_digest was published as the consumer replay test and
cannot be one. Nothing is lost hashing the pre-enrichment form:
enrichment is a function of the request and the snapshot, and
registry_snapshot_digest already pins the snapshot.

Existing pins do not move. All three replay fixtures' request_digest and
approval_binding_digest values are byte-identical — those requests
contradict no registry fact. A field to add, not a value to correct.

Regression tests verified failing against the old behaviour before being
kept. FLEX-DEC-2026-012; FLEX-WP-0025 carries the residual, that a policy
still cannot tell a fact from an assertion.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014aQMM1dPXaPiXVn6DwwtLd

Assistant: claude-code
Assistant-Model: opus
Assistant-Process: 715613@bnt-lap001
Assistant-Session: fabd95c1-4c9e-4080-8849-8707ae025f80
This commit is contained in:
tegwick 2026-09-07 13:43:33 +02:00
parent c861d75703
commit 0bc624ba62
14 changed files with 822 additions and 34 deletions

View file

@ -142,3 +142,20 @@ against a request carrying none. That is why this is an additional field rather
than a redefinition of the existing one, and why `pkg/api/approval_binding_test.go`
asserts the two functions **disagree** on a claim-bearing request. A test that a
distinction is real is how a distinction that looks like duplication is defended.
## Correction, 2026-09-07: which digest a consumer computes
This document describes the canonical form. It does **not** follow that
`binding.request_digest` is the value a consumer reproduces.
`request_digest` is computed over the **enriched** request — after the evaluator
overlays registry facts onto subject and resource — so a consumer recomputing it
over what it sent gets a different value on every request whose subject or
resource the registry knows. `secrets-engine` found this on its first live
request.
**The consumer's §6.4.2 replay test is `binding.submitted_request_digest`**: this
same canonical form applied to the request exactly as received. Everything below
about canonicalisation is unchanged and applies to both; what changed is which
*material* a consumer hashes. See
[`request-enrichment.md`](request-enrichment.md) and `FLEX-DEC-2026-012`.