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>
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secrets-engine probed the Service DNS name handed over in FLEX-WP-0021-T05
and found it resolves, from the workstation, to an unrelated public host.
Reproduced here: search ad.binect.de answers wildcard, so
flex-auth-secrets-engine.flex-auth.svc.cluster.local and
this-service-does-not-exist.flex-auth.svc.cluster.local both resolve to
80.158.43.29, while the trailing-dot FQDN correctly fails. A bare Service
name in a handover is not merely unreachable from there, it is a live
misdirection, and the handover was ours.
Had a deployment pointed at it, the CheckRequest body would have gone to
that host: subject, tenant, lane and resource ids, stage, field names,
purpose, plus the caller's bearer token.
Trailing-dot FQDN and "in-cluster only" now replace the bare name in the
example README, SCOPE.md, and the T05 note.
Their real question was how the response channel is authenticated, and
they declined to answer it locally because choosing a transport control
for our service is not a consumer's call. Right boundary, so the answer
is recorded here as FLEX-DEC-2026-010: it is not authenticated. Pins
serve plain HTTP, the envelope carries no signature, and a responder that
knows the package id and version can return a well-formed allow that
passes every check a consumer performs.
The part worth stating in the contract is that the digests do not help
and look like they do. Every input to request_digest,
policy_package_digest and registry_snapshot_digest is either sent by the
caller or published in this repo, so a forger reproduces all three
exactly. They establish integrity of the binding, never authenticity of
the source — and publishing more digests makes a forged envelope look
more authenticated, not less.
For secrets-engine specifically: fail-closed protects against a PDP that
is absent, not against one that lies. An unreachable PDP denies; a lying
PDP allows.
Third instance of one seam in three decisions. 008: a tenant carried
into the digest and never compared — visible, not enforced. 009: a caller
authenticated and never recorded — enforced, not visible. 010: a record
verifiable and unauthentic — checkable, but not evidence.
One nuance that changes the operator recommendation: kubectl port-forward
does authenticate the responder, transitively — no DNS name, one named
pod, API-server TLS. That is the exact reverse of the caller direction,
where it bypasses the NetworkPolicy. Independent properties pointing
opposite ways, so neither can be summarised as "the network protects it".
FLEX-WP-0024 carries signing; key custody routes through warden/OpenBao
rather than minting a key here.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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secrets-engine.catalog-lane.lifecycle v1 contained no reference to
input.tenant — not in well_formed, not in the denial ladder, not in a
test. A rotate on lane:glas-primary under tenant:coulomb returned allow
against the deployed package (decision:066e629bbf0c0924).
Found while answering glas-harness's tenant-alignment request, which had
asked for wrong-tenant denial evidence. There was none to return.
Three covers failed the same way: every one of the 29 fixtures carried
tenant:platform, so the suite could not report on the field; T02's own
gate named "wrong-tenant deny" and was recorded done unmet; and the
engine hashes tenant into request_digest but never compares it. Four
other published packages carry the branch — this one was the outlier.
v2 adds wrong_tenant above wrong_system, three Rego tests and three
fixtures (28/28, 32/32). The absent-tenant test caught a second defect
in the first draft: a bare input.tenant != comparison is undefined on a
missing key, so the branch dropped and the ladder reported the wrong
rung. request_tenant := object.get(input, "tenant", "") fixes it.
v2 supersedes rather than amends v1 because the defect failed open: a
consumer pinned to _VERSION=v1 would keep receiving allows with no
signal the rule beneath the version string had changed. The earlier
dual-control correction stayed at v1 because it denied everything.
Replay envelopes regenerated at v2; both request_digest values are
byte-identical, so secrets-engine's digest join needs no re-pinning.
The sweep this prompted found tenant-engine unscoped on tenant as well —
deployed, and verified allowing tenant:coulomb. Not the same fix: its
request tenant names the target rather than the caller, so a constant
would break it. Recorded and carried by FLEX-WP-0022 rather than patched
unilaterally.
FLEX-WP-0021 closes at T05; the pin still serves v1 until a redeploy.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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TWO FINDINGS, BOTH FROM READING OTHER REPOSITORIES RATHER THAN OURS.
The §13.1 stance register has a second row. secrets-engine published
pep-stance.yaml -- total over catalog stage plus unknown, runtime-read
and pinned to SHIPPED_STANCE by test. SCOPE.md claimed ops-warden's was
the estate's only published map and that the register's single row was
itself the finding; that is no longer true and is corrected.
docs/stance-register-review.md is the first exercise of the
aggregate-divergence capability flex-auth claimed on 2026-08-29 and then
recorded as unexercised because one row cannot diverge from anything.
Three findings:
The two maps take opposite stances on unknown -- ops-warden fail_open by
versioned build profile under ADR-0009, secrets-engine fail_closed. Both
conformant, neither a defect, and they disagree about the one case nobody
planned for. Reported as an observation for gate-house's register, not as
a request that either repository change: a PDP does not set a consumer's
stance, and §9.3's two-owner split is our own finding.
The rows are not comparable. ops-warden scopes by security-zone,
secrets-engine by catalog-stage. §6.4 permits both, but the register
cannot then answer what the estate's stance is for a z2 workload. Worth
recording before a third row arrives.
secrets-engine's map defines fail_closed in terms of a durable
ActionAuthorization record, which GH-DEC-2026-005 shelved. The stance is
unaffected -- only the artifact name is stale -- but the file is read at
runtime and pinned by test, so the stale name outlives a comment.
SEPARATELY, T04 IS BLOCKED AND THE REASON IS STRUCTURAL. The task assumed
the ops-warden/tenant-engine/user-engine pattern, where the pin's
default-deny NetworkPolicy admits one approved consumer workload.
secrets-engine has no Kubernetes deployment at all -- it is a CLI. There
is no pod selector to write, and inventing one would repeat the error
corrected in T02. Three possible shapes recorded in the workplan and
raised with them; callerAuth, not the NetworkPolicy, becomes the real
boundary if an operator CLI is the caller, so the FLEX-WP-0016 precedent
does not transfer unexamined.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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The standard was accepted at v0.7 on 2026-08-29. Four of flex-auth's review
findings are in the accepted text: 9.3's two-owner split, 6.4.2 scoped to the
decision's own binding with our canonical request digest as its mechanical test,
9.7.2 split by role, and 17 moving the decision-record schema to access-engine.
INTENT.md
- Machine-readable layer declaration in frontmatter (layer: Engine, role: PDP),
which section 11 requires and we did not have. audit-core noted our
declaration was legible only by following the decision trail.
- PDP failure semantics stated: our outage is consumer residue, not input
degradation; fail-open is not expressible by a PDP at all.
- Four owned obligations added: the decision-record schema as our contract, the
request digest as the published replay test, a lifetime on every allow, and
visibility deadlines per input class.
- A Layer Conformance section stating the state honestly: conforming with one
declared gap, no Tooling client, not PEP-shaped.
- Vocabulary correction: earlier text dropped "control plane" as Staff
vocabulary. Section 8 binds it to the Engine layer, which is why kings-guard
was asked to release it. The term is ours; we prefer "decision engine" for
precision, not boundary.
SCOPE.md
- Layer and role in the one-liner; the four obligations In Scope; five
boundaries established in review but never written down Out of Scope.
- Three capability blocks marked planned for workplans completed in May are now
current; two blocks added.
- Superseded ADR-0006 citation corrected to ADR-0009, which retires the global
flag outright rather than deferring it.
history/2026-08-29-layer-model-v0.7-alignment-review.md checks each obligation
against the code and finds six gaps. FLEX-WP-0019 closes them, with T02 before
T04 because a visibility deadline for registry-borne facts is unfalsifiable
until provenance can identify the snapshot a decision read.
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FLEX-WP-0016 was titled 'so policy.enabled can flip' and the flip is not
coming. ops-warden's ADR-0006 defers it permanently in favour of
zone-scoped enforcement, so this closes rather than stalls: every task
it owned is delivered and enforce is independently verified by both
sides. The pin stays enforce and is not reverted to warn.
SCOPE's account of policy.enabled was stale - it read as a
build-stage timing choice. Replaced with the actual reason and with
flex-auth's boundary as the reviewing PDP: membership compiles to the
registry, stance stays in the policy package, fail-open is not
expressible by a PDP.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Correct a stale Current State paragraph: FLEX-WP-0002 (standalone core),
0003 (Markitect integration), and 0004 (delegated PDP/directory adapters)
were completed in May 2026, not "planned". Record FLEX-WP-0007 closure:
ops-warden ran the joint OpenBao smoke (2026-06-29, decision
032b096c433ad80c allow; ttl_out_of_bounds deny), with production
policy.enabled deliberately left off while the ecosystem is build-stage.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
ops-warden's SSH signing policy gate (FLEX-WP-0006 finished, FLEX-WP-0007
deploying) makes it flex-auth's first shipped protected-system consumer.
Update the intent baseline to match the implemented reality:
- SCOPE Current State: standalone Go core + /v1/check is implemented;
FLEX-WP-0001/0005/0006 complete, 0007 blocked only on T4 VAULT_TOKEN.
- SCOPE Related/Overlapping + Disjoint From: ops-warden is now a consumer,
not merely disjoint; the once-hypothetical "agt as flex-auth subject"
flow is realized through the signing gate. Disjointness narrowed to the
identity surface (warden issues certs, flex-auth never does).
- INTENT Consumer Patterns: lead with the shipped action-gate shape
(ops-warden), keep Markitect as the planned knowledge-pipeline consumer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Pre-implementation assessment and boundary review
(docs/pre-implementation-assessment.md) lead to three ADRs:
- ADR-001 Go + repo skeleton
- ADR-002 Rego-in-Markdown policy package format
- ADR-003 Topaz-aligned MVP (Topaz spike moves into foundations)
New workplan FLEX-WP-0005 (Foundations and Topaz Alignment) is inserted
between WP-0001 (done) and WP-0002 (core). WP-0002 pins Rego-in-Markdown
for P2.3; WP-0004 P4.1 refocused from Topaz evaluation to Topaz adapter.
Go skeleton at repo root: cmd/flex-auth + internal/{registry,policy,
decision,audit,adapters} + pkg/api + Makefile + .golangci.yml + GitHub
Actions CI. make ci green locally; bin/flex-auth --version works.
INTENT/SCOPE cite the NetKingdom IAM Profile and add the ops-warden /
ops-bridge disjoint-surface clarifications.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
