Two cross-repo questions arrived in the flex-auth inbox and both are
answered as decision records rather than as prose in a message.
FLEX-DEC-2026-004 answers ops-warden WARDEN-WP-0034-T05. A decision
lifetime shorter than the SSH certificate TTL is meaningful, but only as
authority to issue, never as authority to use an already-issued
certificate. The pre-sign gate is the only consumer of the shorter
lifetime: no replay past expires_at, fresh Check per sign. The lever that
shortens effective access is the requested TTL as a policy input, which
is already deployed as the ttl_out_of_bounds deny. ops-warden's section
9.7.2 window through certificate TTL is correct as written and correctly
owned by the PEP; flex-auth does not want that residue moved to the PDP.
docs/decision-input-freshness.md gains the same boundary as published
contract text, so the ruling is not only in the decision log.
FLEX-DEC-2026-005 answers secrets-engine. A real policy package is
expected and flex-auth authors it here as it does for every consumer; the
reserved coordinate is secrets-engine.catalog-lane.lifecycle v1 and it
does not exist yet. Their choice not to default the pin was correct and
is endorsed explicitly. POST /v1/check is deployed but has no
estate-wide address by design -- per-consumer cluster-local pins with
default-deny ingress -- so their 2026-09-06 probe found the design
working, not an outage.
FLEX-WP-0021 carries that work: obtain the real action vocabulary from
secrets-engine, publish the package with fixtures, confirm the digest
join against a real decision record, then stand up a
flex-auth-secrets-engine pin in warn without moving the other two pins.
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.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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FLEX-IN-0002 asked for review of v0.3; v0.4 supersedes it, so the assessment is
against v0.4 plus the in-place section 11 amendment.
Assent, with one rule contested:
- Section 9.3 conflates two failure cases. Input degradation inside a reachable
engine is flex-auth's fallback and is accepted. Engine unreachability is not:
there is no evaluator in the path to express anything, which is why flex-auth
has held that fail-open is not expressible by a PDP at all. As written 9.3
also collides with ops-warden ADR-0009 (accepted, superseding ADR-0006),
which retires the global flag for a total per-zone map in the consumer PEP —
the correct design, since the alternative makes flex-auth a hard dependency
of the SSH certificate the tunnel carrying the policy call depends on.
- Section 13 names access-engine as intended owner of two capabilities never
reviewed here. Containment is plausible and recorded as proposed owner only.
Authentication/assurance evidence is declined as stated: flex-auth consumes
assurance claims and never re-defines them.
- Three consistency defects: frontmatter status proposed vs section 14
"accepted"; "seven of fifteen"/"remaining eight" against sixteen
estate-authored catalog rows and nine listed; "all three repositories" above
a table of four.
FLEX-IN-0002's two questions answered: the approval boundary unblocks T03
design, but T05 needs the approval claim bound to the same request digest
NewDecisionBinding computes, and a named owner and ordering for single
consumption. The maturity claim route works as a request claim, not as registry
content, until the self-declared provenance digest gap closes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012sgN4GH5ZYT8pJVkCR6dcP
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flex-auth answers gate-house's assent request on the three items ratified in
GH-DEC-2026-001, following the estate precedent that a boundary is drawn on
review by the other side.
Assent to all three, with one conformance debt flex-auth accepts as its own and
two conditions on the rename:
- Engine framing and sole decision point: assent. flex-auth cannot hold this
boundary against zone-engine and decline it as a general rule. But standard
section 6 also binds flex-auth: DecisionProvenance carries no registry
snapshot digest, so a decision that turned on registry content cannot be
replayed from its own provenance. Recorded as a known non-conformance rather
than claimed as conformance.
- access-engine rename: assent to the name, not to execution. Repository
identity and runtime identity must rename in separate revertible steps —
since FLEX-WP-0016 the enforcing ops-warden pin binds tokens to the
protected-system name, so a single-step rename 401s every warden sign,
including the certificate the ops-bridge tunnels depend on. FLEX-WP prefix
ownership stays with the repository.
- Authoring/evaluation split: assent, with the section 6 test applied
symmetrically — a gate-house authority ceiling that determines an outcome
reaches the decision as an input claim or as a rule in the versioned policy
package, so its application stays reconstructable from the decision record.
FLEX-WP-0017-T03 stays wait: the design half re-routes to gate-house, the
durable storage half remains unowned and is raised as an engine gap under
section 5.
Decision id follows the canon scheme {PREFIX}-DEC-YYYY-NNN.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012sgN4GH5ZYT8pJVkCR6dcP
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