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

@ -69,19 +69,21 @@
"stage": "prod"
}
},
"request_digest": "sha256:de67324f54187055307a833235f83ced9fcd3a20952a27b3d19493ed39734345"
"request_digest": "sha256:de67324f54187055307a833235f83ced9fcd3a20952a27b3d19493ed39734345",
"submitted_request_digest": "sha256:41c8fc084e58c46554ccb6afe9943a99906e5986668c923811721f66d9b30a6a"
},
"lifetime": {
"kind": "ttl",
"ttl": "15m",
"not_before": "2026-09-06T18:35:18Z",
"expires_at": "2026-09-06T18:50:18Z"
"not_before": "2026-09-07T07:10:23Z",
"expires_at": "2026-09-07T07:25:23Z"
},
"diagnostics": {
"action": "rotate",
"matched_relationship": "",
"policy_package": "secrets-engine.catalog-lane.lifecycle",
"policy_status": "ready",
"registry_overrode": [],
"registry_resource": false,
"registry_subject": true
},
@ -92,7 +94,7 @@
"policy_version": "v2",
"policy_package_digest": "sha256:bd11c5fe77ce6439c65fea225ad6b71d2110efc5e7b5bc9b499c59cd0a53b8b4",
"registry_snapshot_digest": "sha256:f5a309bc0b36721fd6d9ad7f53eb21222162bc2eac62a0ab0802a9a1d51340bb",
"decision_time": "2026-09-06T18:35:18Z"
"decision_time": "2026-09-07T07:10:23Z"
},
"caring": {
"profile": "caring-0.4.0-rc2",