gate-house/docs/contracts/posture-findings-return.md

# Posture and findings return-path contract

**Doctrine owner:** gate-house
**Posture publisher:** kings-guard
**Decision point:** access-engine
**Assurance executor:** whitehat-security
**Finding triage:** risk-nexus
**Status:** normative for GH-WP-0001-T06
**Version:** posture-findings-return.v1
**Date:** 2026-09-01
**Agreement basis:** kings-guard `KG-DEC-2026-001` and `KG-WP-0003`

## 1. Agreed boundary

The existing agreement is:

```text
kings-guard publishes non-deterministic posture
Gate House defines posture's authority meaning and restrictive asymmetry
access-engine deterministically renders a decision
the responsible Engine or ops-warden performs an authorized response
```

Posture may reduce authority, require stronger authorization, or request
containment. It never creates or widens authority. A containment proposal is
not an authorization and kings-guard never bypasses an Engine to act on
Tooling.

## 2. Posture envelope

A posture input offered for authority use must make these facts expressible:

```yaml
posture_id: <stable id>
subject:
  kind: actor | runtime | resource | tenant | environment
  id: <canonical id>
assessment: HEALTHY | DEGRADED | SUSPICIOUS | CONTAIN | BLOCKED
source: kings-guard
observed_at: <RFC 3339 UTC>
expires_at: <RFC 3339 UTC>
evidence_refs: []
stream_completeness:
  status: complete | degraded | unknown
  reason: <value-safe explanation>
rationale: <value-safe explanation>
```

This is a logical contract, not a kings-guard wire schema. Confidence or record
richness may accompany it, but cannot override unknown or degraded stream
completeness and cannot grant authority.

Access-engine records the posture identifier, freshness, and policy version
that interpreted it. Unknown, missing, expired, or incomplete posture follows a
declared restrictive stance; it does not fall back to extra authority.

## 3. Observation and proposal linkage

A kings-guard finding or containment proposal carries:

- originating observation identifier;
- emitted signal/posture identifier;
- affected subject and target;
- evidence-stream completeness state;
- requested restrictive direction;
- no credential, secret value, or direct actuation instruction.

The eventual access-engine decision and authorized response retain those
origin references. This makes a containment decision reconstructable without
turning the proposal into authority.

## 4. Findings return

King's Guard returns these classes to Gate House:

- an invariant does not match observed behavior;
- an implementation supplies posture in a form that cannot be interpreted
  without widening or ambiguity;
- a load-bearing evidence stream is silent, divergent, stale, or incomplete;
- a required live observation lane does not exist;
- a doctrine claim is recomputable and therefore misclassified as posture;
- a conformance result exposes a missing or untestable doctrine rule.

The durable transport is a State Hub inbox message:

```text
Subject: [GH-POSTURE] <finding-class> <subject>@<revision-or-time>
Body: posture/signal/observation ids, safe evidence references, completeness,
      affected invariant, current restriction, and requested doctrine action
```

## 5. Gate House disposition

Gate House classifies the returned item without regrading security severity:

| Finding shape | Gate House action |
| --- | --- |
| Doctrine correct; implementation failed | Cross-reference risk-nexus/owner record; no foreign task is created here. |
| Doctrine ambiguous or contradictory | Create or promote a Gate House intake, decision, contract revision, or workplan. |
| Posture lane or observation mechanism missing | Return to kings-guard as its owning gap; mark affected conformance claim pending. |
| Deterministic/recomputable property called posture | Move the criterion toward its owning Engine; do not create a second grader. |
| Assurance specification incomplete | Revise the Gate House target and return the new version to whitehat-security. |

Every disposition replies with the resulting Gate House record identifiers or
`no_change` plus rationale. Silence is not a disposition.

## 6. Loop closure

The loop is considered staffed, not necessarily green, when:

1. whitehat-security has an executable target and reports every outcome;
2. kings-guard can observe at least one live lane and reports stream
   completeness separately from record richness;
3. access-engine can bind posture to the decision it influenced;
4. Gate House records doctrine disposition and returns identifiers;
5. implementation remediation remains with the owning repository via
   risk-nexus.

`KG-WP-0003-T06` and T07 are the kings-guard work that makes origin linkage and
live observation real. Until those tasks report completion, the corresponding
lanes are declared gaps rather than assumed capabilities.