# Scope

Derived from `INTENT.md`. Gate House is deliberately narrow: it decides whether
a requested action is authorized, and represents that decision as bounded,
time-limited authority that downstream systems enforce.

## In scope

- deterministic authorization decisions (`GRANT` / `DENY` / `REQUIRE_APPROVAL` / `DEFER`)
- principal / actor / runtime-identity separation
- mandates, delegation, and attenuation
- authority ceilings
- tenant-, environment-, resource-, task-, and time-scoped grants
- approval binding and step-up requirements
- posture intake from King's Guard, restricting only
- change-dynamics limits: quotas, budgets, concurrency, circuit breakers
- credential-binding contract to Secrets Engine / OpenBao
- emergency revocation independent of the actor
- decision evidence, explainability, and protected audit
- policy and decision versioning; fail-closed semantics

## Out of scope

Owned elsewhere in NetKingdom — see the responsibility table in `INTENT.md`:

- human identity lifecycle and memberships — User Engine
- tenant and organizational boundaries — Tenant Engine
- authentication and federation — Key Cape
- credential abstraction and lifecycle orchestration — Secrets Engine
- secret storage, PKI, leases, dynamic secret engines — OpenBao
- operational execution — Ops Warden
- construction, reconciliation, recovery — Ops Mason
- anomaly detection, behavioral risk inference, security memory — King's Guard
- adversarial testing and attack simulation — Whitehat Security

Also out of scope: inventing a new policy language, becoming an IAM suite,
secret scanning, SIEM, autonomous remediation, and supporting every agent
protocol. See "Non-Goals for the First Prototype" in `ArchitectureBlueprint.md` §3.