gate-house/decisions/decisions.md

Decision records

GH-DEC-2026-001 — NetKingdom security layer model, the gate-house re-cut, and the access-engine reframing

id: GH-DEC-2026-001
kind: decision
title: NetKingdom security layer model, the gate-house re-cut, and the access-engine
  reframing
status: resolved
owner: Bernd Worsch
repo: gate-house
standard: net-kingdom/canon/standards/security-layer-model_v0.1.md
source_note: history/2026-08-28-security-layer-model-and-gate-house-recut.md
requested_dispositions:
- approved
- revised
- rejected
affects:
- gate-house
- flex-auth
- ops-warden
- ops-mason
- kings-guard
- whitehat-security
- net-kingdom
- zone-engine
created: '2026-08-28T19:15:15.607849Z'
updated: '2026-08-28T19:16:01.456127Z'
rationale: 'Approved in session on 2026-08-28. The three rulings were taken interactively:
  Staff as the layer name, net-kingdom canon as the model''s home, and access-engine
  as the rename target with the lane/rule demarcation accepted as its cost. Approval
  covers the doctrine and documents only; the flex-auth rename remains a separate
  governed migration, and the standard stays proposed pending assent from flex-auth,
  kings-guard, and ops-warden.'
decided_by: Bernd Worsch
decided_at: '2026-08-28T19:16:01.456127Z'
state_hub_decision_id: "2d6509d0-ffd2-4209-89ab-bf68a4945ada"

Context

The security estate acquired overlapping claims to the same responsibility, and the overlap was invisible in each repository's own documents. gate-house was seeded as a deterministic authority plane — a policy decision point with an /authorize API, grant storage, and a revocation service — while flex-auth already described itself as the authorization control plane and was actively delivering FLEX-WP-0017, an approval contract binding approvals to action, actor, target, and validity window. Neither repository's INTENT named the other. zone-engine had already been ruled against on the same question.

Full review and evidence: history/2026-08-28-security-layer-model-and-gate-house-recut.md.

Decision requested

Ratify three linked rulings. They are one decision because the second does not hold without the first, and the third is the first applied to the repository that was already right.

Ruling 1 — Adopt the NetKingdom security layer model

The estate is layered Taxonomy → Tooling → Engines → Staff, distinguished by determinism and by the kind of artifact each layer produces. The top layer is named Staff — the general-staff sense of plans and doctrine without execution — not "Helpers", which undersold a layer holding architecture, controlling, and change.

The model is published as net-kingdom/canon/standards/security-layer-model_v0.1.md, owned by gate-house, status proposed. It belongs in net-kingdom canon rather than info-tech-canon because it is NetKingdom-flavored security architecture, not general semantic contract.

It carries two normative rules:

• Staff never touches Tooling directly. It acts only through Engine APIs.
• access-engine is the only policy decision point, generalizing to the whole estate the ruling first drawn in zone-engine/INTENT.md §5.

Ruling 2 — Re-cut gate-house as the doctrine council

Gate House is Staff: the council where NetKingdom's security and defence doctrine is established, documented, taught, and supervised. It holds no runtime position.

The decisive argument is gate-house's own: a decision point inside gate-house would place the deterministic authority boundary inside the non-deterministic management layer, violating INV-02 — the first invariant the repository exists to defend. The repository would have been the clearest available counterexample to the canon it hosts.

Boundary: the mandate and the operating mode are gate-house's; the decision is access-engine's; the credential is secrets-engine's; the perimeter is ops-mason's and ops-warden's.

gate-house keeps what no other repository owns — the operating modes, the principal/actor/runtime triple, mandates and authority ceilings, the change dynamics envelope, the MCP doctrine, the posture asymmetry, the assurance specifications, and the curriculum. It gives up /authorize, policy evaluation, policy engine selection, grant storage, and revocation.

Ruling 3 — Reframe flex-auth as an Engine and rename it access-engine

flex-auth is Engine-layer and remains the only policy decision point. It is renamed access-engine. auth-engine was rejected: key-cape owns authentication, and auth- preserves the ambiguity the rename exists to remove. permission-engine was rejected as ageing badly against a future role-engine.

The name's one cost is that "access" is already spoken for operationally by ops-warden and ops-mason. It is paid by a demarcation, now normative in §8 of the standard: ops-warden and ops-mason own access lanes — how a worker reaches a host; access-engine owns access rules — whether they may.

Sequence is binding: reframe the INTENT first, rename second, as a governed migration. The rename touches FLEX-WP prefix ownership, State Hub identifiers, ops-warden's routing tables, zone-engine's binding boundary text, and secrets-engine integrations.

The reframing also splits a responsibility flex-auth currently holds whole: authoring and governing policy is Staff work (gate-house); evaluating it deterministically and in-path is access-engine's, exclusively. This is the constructive resolution of the FLEX-WP-0017 overlap — gate-house designs the approval contract, access-engine validates approvals at decision time.

What approval authorizes

• Publication of the layer model as a proposed net-kingdom standard.
• The gate-house INTENT re-cut, already applied at 7f13f72.
• The layering review notes placed at the top of twelve estate INTENT files.
• Starting the flex-auth INTENT reframe.
• Retiring the gate-house artifacts that describe an engine: ADR-003 (policy engine selection), milestones M0, M3, and M4, and GH-WP-0001-T04 (/authorize skeleton). GH-WP-0001 is rewritten against the re-cut before it is promoted to active.

What approval does not authorize

• The flex-auth → access-engine rename itself. That is a separate governed migration with its own record, and it must not begin before the INTENT reframe lands.
• Any change to zone-engine's 2026-08-23 disposition.
• Promoting the standard from proposed to accepted.
• Any change to another repository's workplans. Work structure stays with the repository doing the work.

Assent still required

Two adaptations move vocabulary away from repositories that currently use it, and follow the estate's precedent that a boundary is drawn on review by the other side rather than asserted — as flex-auth did to zone-engine:

1. flex-auth — Engine framing, the rename, and the authoring/evaluation split.
2. kings-guard and ops-warden — releasing "control plane" and the security curriculum respectively to the layers that own them.

Reversal

The rulings are documents; nothing executable depends on them yet, and no code exists in gate-house. Reversal is reverting the INTENT and standard commits. The falsifiers that should trigger reconsideration are in gate-house/INTENT.md § "What Would Make This Repository Wrong" — principally gate-house becoming a paper generator whose conformance loop never turns, or the estate declining to adopt the authority vocabulary.

GH-DEC-2026-002 — Revocation fails closed only when approval-engine's own store is down

id: GH-DEC-2026-002
kind: decision
title: Revocation fails closed only when approval-engine's own store is down
status: resolved
owner: Bernd Worsch
repo: gate-house
standard: net-kingdom/canon/standards/security-layer-model_v0.7.md
source_note: history/2026-08-29-approval-evidence-integrity-contracts.md
requested_dispositions:
- approved
- revised
- rejected
affects:
- gate-house
- approval-engine
- audit-core
- flex-auth
created: '2026-08-29T12:50:04.747439Z'
updated: '2026-08-29T12:50:58.873684Z'
rationale: 'Approved as GH-WP-0002-T03. Local-outbox fail-closed is the only remaining
  closed path: if approval-engine cannot insert the outbox row, the revocation does
  not commit. An audit-core outage must not block a revocation. Synchronous emission
  inside the mutation is forbidden even though it is atomic. Proceed-with-gap is rejected
  for load-bearing approval evidence.'
decided_by: Bernd Worsch
decided_at: '2026-08-29T12:50:58.873684Z'

Context

GH-IN-0001 (from audit-core) required that the revocation failure mode be a recorded decision rather than an implementation accident. Both sides are defensible on their own: fail-closed makes an audit dependency into an availability risk on the revocation path; proceed-with-gap needs a detectable marker so the gap is visible rather than silent.

v0.5's local-outbox rule already narrowed this. With the queue in approval-engine's own store, fail-closed triggers only when that store is down — where the change could not have been recorded anyway — and an audit-core outage does not block a revocation. Satisfying atomicity by emitting synchronously to audit-core inside the mutation is also atomic, and turns an audit outage into an inability to revoke: the operation least tolerable to block during an incident.

The statute states the locality rule at §9.4. This record is the decision the workplan still owed, so an implementer cannot pick the other side by accident.

Wire: docs/contracts/approval-outbox.md.

Decision

If the local outbox insert cannot commit, the revocation does not commit. The same rule applies to issuance, use, and supersession.

An audit-core outage MUST NOT block a revocation. Drain is asynchronous and at-least-once. audit-core dedupes on event_id.

Synchronous emission to audit-core inside the state-change transaction is forbidden, even though it is atomic.

Proceed-with-gap is rejected for load-bearing approval evidence. A revocation that succeeds while its event is lost is the exact case AUDIT-IN-0001 conditioned assent on.

What this authorizes

• approval-engine failing a revoke (and any other mutation) when its own store cannot insert the outbox row.
• Continuing to revoke while audit-core is down, with the row draining later.
• Treating emit-after-commit, a second non-local queue, or a sync audit-core call inside BEGIN…COMMIT as out of contract.

What this does not authorize

• Claiming the outbox closes adversarial omission. Atomicity prevents crash; cadence and reconciliation detect suppression after the fact (§9.6).
• A validity query on audit-core.
• Any change to another repository's workplans.

Reversal

Revert this record and the outbox contract. The falsifier is operational: if failing closed on the local store removes the ability to revoke during the incidents this engine exists for, the trade needs revisiting — but the alternative is a silent evidence gap on the event an attacker most wants missing, which is worse.

GH-DEC-2026-003 — The PEP consumes an approval before the protected side effect

id: GH-DEC-2026-003
kind: decision
title: The PEP consumes an approval before the protected side effect
status: resolved
owner: Bernd Worsch
repo: gate-house
standard: net-kingdom/canon/standards/security-layer-model_v0.7.md
source_note: docs/contracts/approval-consumption.md
requested_dispositions:
- approved
- revised
- rejected
affects:
- gate-house
- approval-engine
- flex-auth
- secrets-engine
- ops-warden
created: '2026-08-29T12:50:06.944092Z'
updated: '2026-08-29T12:51:01.355583Z'
rationale: Approved as GH-WP-0002-T06. The PEP consumes by compare-and-swap before
  the protected side effect; the PDP never mutates; there is no unconsume. Same request
  digest is idempotent success; a different digest against a consumed object is conflict.
  This closes the three named races and unblocks APPROVAL-WP-0001-T05 and FLEX-WP-0017-T05.
decided_by: Bernd Worsch
decided_at: '2026-08-29T12:51:01.355583Z'

Context

Statute §16 left open who marks an approval consumed, and at what point relative to the decision. flex-auth named three failure modes neither engine closes alone: an ALLOW never consumed; a double consumption by racing callers; consumption after a failed action. approval-engine performs the mutation because access-engine never mutates, and refused to wire a public consume by guessing the contract. APPROVAL-WP-0001-T05 and FLEX-WP-0017-T05 are wait on this record.

§9.7.3 forbids inferring consumption from a decision record. That stands. The same paragraph currently reads as if the action must precede the consume call. That reading cannot enforce single use: two racing PEPs can both act, and CAS then prevents only the second record.

Decision

The PEP-shaped consumer consumes, by compare-and-swap, before the protected side effect. The PDP never mutates. Staff never calls consume.

There is no unconsume and no reserve/release. An approval authorizes one attempt, not one success. A consume followed by a failed action spends the object; retry is a new approval.

Same request_digest against an already-consumed object is idempotent success (a retry of one logical request). A different digest is conflict, and the PEP MUST NOT act.

The three failure modes have owners:

1. Allow never consumed — PEP duty to consume; PDP lifetime bounds the window; a stale ALLOW without a matching use is a finding, not a consume.
2. Double consumption — approval-engine CAS; the PEP that receives conflict does not act.
3. Consumed then the action fails — accepted as the cost of closing (2).

Protocol: docs/contracts/approval-consumption.md. Statute v0.8 will replace the §9.7.3 implication that action precedes the consume call; until then this record governs the blocked implementers.

What this authorizes

• approval-engine exposing POST /v1/approvals/{id}/consume against this contract, including the digest column the internal CAS does not yet store.
• FLEX-WP-0017-T05 requiring the PEP (secrets-engine, for that task) to consume before the OpenBao call.
• Canon T-06 consume-side replay (a second, different digest against a consumed object) becoming in-scope once the endpoint exists.

What this does not authorize

• The PDP consuming, or inferring consumption from a decision record.
• Unconsume, reserve, or any path that returns a consumed object to approved.
• A consume that is a decision ("may this actor do X").
• Any change to another repository's workplans. Work structure stays with the repository doing the work.

Reversal

Revert this record and the consumption contract. The falsifier is operational: if spending an approval on a failed attempt makes the estate unable to complete the actions this object exists for, a reserve/commit protocol can be raised then. Unconsume is not the alternative — it reopens replay.

GH-DEC-2026-004 — Layer emission-cadence ownership between Info Tech Canon and Net Kingdom

id: GH-DEC-2026-004
kind: decision
title: Layer emission-cadence ownership between Info Tech Canon and Net Kingdom
status: resolved
owner: Bernd Worsch
repo: gate-house
standard: net-kingdom/canon/standards/security-layer-model_v0.7.md
source_note: kings-guard/specs/EmissionCadenceDeclaration.md
requested_dispositions:
- approved
- revised
- rejected
affects:
- gate-house
- info-tech-canon
- net-kingdom
- kings-guard
- qonto-assistant
created: '2026-09-04T00:55:29Z'
updated: '2026-09-04T00:55:29Z'
rationale: >-
  Approved interactively on 2026-09-04. The layered split gives each artifact
  one owner: ecosystem-wide semantics belong to info-tech-canon; NetKingdom-
  specific MUST/SHOULD rules and the low-volume load-bearing heartbeat-plus-
  reconciliation profile belong to net-kingdom. This avoids both a Staff-local
  consumer schema and competing Taxonomy definitions.
decided_by: Bernd Worsch
decided_at: '2026-09-04T00:55:29Z'
state_hub_decision_id: "89c73f45-d07b-40ea-b428-5a7375ce4b09"

Context

Security-layer-model v0.7 §§9.6 and 17 require evidence sources to declare an expected emission cadence so silence can become a finding. King's Guard is the only current consumer and drafted EmissionCadenceDeclaration.md against the real qonto-assistant source, but correctly declined to keep a Staff-local schema. The standard left ownership between the two Taxonomy repositories: info-tech-canon for ecosystem-wide semantic contracts and net-kingdom for NetKingdom standards of record.

Treating that as joint ownership would leave version authority ambiguous. Giving the entire artifact to either repository would instead conflate a reusable evidence/observability contract with the security obligations of one estate. The split is therefore made by artifact, with one owner for each.

Decision

info-tech-canon owns the versioned, ecosystem-wide EmissionCadenceDeclaration semantic contract. It owns the generic forms, fields, vocabulary, validation semantics, compatibility rules, and evolution of the contract.

net-kingdom imports that contract and owns the NetKingdom security profile. It owns which evidence classes MUST or SHOULD declare cadence, the rule that rate monitoring is forbidden for rare load-bearing classes, and the heartbeat-plus-reconciliation obligations that satisfy security-layer-model §9.6.

The remaining ownership boundaries are unchanged:

• each source repository owns its declaration instance and emission behavior;
• kings-guard owns stream evaluation and silence findings, not the schema;
• Gate House owns doctrine and conformance supervision, not publication or runtime behavior.

The King's Guard draft remains the provenance and handover input. Once the Taxonomy artifacts are published, it becomes historical rather than a second contract.

What this authorizes

• Requesting info-tech-canon to adopt, revise, or contest the generic contract and create its own owning work record.
• Requesting net-kingdom to adopt, revise, or contest the security profile and create its own owning work record.
• Sources such as qonto-assistant, approval-engine, and secrets-engine publishing instances against the eventual canonical contract and profile.
• King's Guard replacing its draft-shaped fixture with the published contract without changing its consumer ownership.

What this does not authorize

• Joint ownership or two independently versioned definitions of the generic schema.
• Gate House or King's Guard retaining the schema as a local contract.
• Gate House creating workplans in either Taxonomy repository.
• Treating ownership as source conformance: qonto-assistant remains incomplete until it publishes and emits the required positive claim.

Assent and completion

The ownership ruling is resolved. Publication is complete only when both Taxonomy owners reply in their own voice and publish or explicitly schedule their respective artifacts. Until then the prior handover residual remains open, now with an unambiguous requested disposition.

Reversal

Supersede this record if the generic contract proves inseparable from the NetKingdom security profile, or if Info Tech Canon cannot provide a stable cross-domain contract boundary. Reversal must still name one owner for every artifact; returning to undifferentiated "Taxonomy ownership" is not an acceptable outcome.

GH-DEC-2026-005 — The approval-claim is the step-1 artifact on the PEP consumption path

id: GH-DEC-2026-005
kind: decision
title: The approval-claim is the step-1 artifact on the PEP consumption path
status: resolved
owner: Bernd Worsch
repo: gate-house
standard: net-kingdom/canon/standards/security-layer-model_v0.7.md
source_note: docs/contracts/approval-consumption.md
origin: GH-IN-0002
requested_dispositions:
- approved
- revised
- rejected
affects:
- gate-house
- approval-engine
- flex-auth
- secrets-engine
- ops-warden
rationale: 'Confirmed, with one addition. GH-DEC-2026-003 already named step 1 by
  endpoint and by field; the approval-claim is what that endpoint serves and valid_now
  is its field. ActionAuthorization is a proposed, unratified shape carrying no doctrine
  standing here. The addition is that the split validation is stated as doctrine rather
  than left implicit: each artifact is checked by the consumer against the layer that
  owns its data, and no PIP republishes a PDP decision. The state-hub authority requirement
  in the secrets-engine validator is struck because State Hub is a read model and
  holds no runtime approval authority.'
decided_by: Bernd Worsch
created: '2026-09-05T23:28:23.931441Z'
updated: '2026-09-05T23:28:23.931441Z'

Context

GH-DEC-2026-003 settled the consumption sequence and named step 1 by endpoint and by field: GET /v1/approvals/{id}/claim → valid_now (a fact, not permission). approval-engine serves the approval-claim at that endpoint (approval-engine/docs/approval-claim.md). secrets-engine's PEP validator (validate_action_authorization, src/secrets_engine/authorization.py) calls the same endpoint but expects a flex-auth ActionAuthorization. Two different objects were being assumed on one path, and the divergence would have surfaced at first live consume rather than at deployment.

ActionAuthorization originates in flex-auth/docs/action-bound-authorization-contract.md as a proposed shape for durable approval storage that the same document assigns to approval-engine. It was never ratified, appears nowhere in this repository's doctrine, and has no valid_now field. GH-DEC-2026-003 was issued after it without reference to it. There is therefore nothing to reconcile: the claim was the step-1 artifact all along, and this record says so where implementers will find it.

approval-engine raised the question rather than guessing, which is the behaviour §12 asks for. The three substantive assertions in the request were checked here independently before confirmation.

Decision

1. The approval-claim is the step-1 artifact on the GH-DEC-2026-003 path. It carries the approval fact: binding digest, validity window, consumption state, observation freshness, and issuer. Holding one with valid_now: true remains not authority to act.

2. ActionAuthorization is not required on that path. approval-engine is not expected to serve it and MUST NOT serve it from the claim endpoint. A step-1 response cannot contain a step-2 decision; any composed post-decision artifact would be a new artifact at a new endpoint. The proposal is shelved on this path, not withdrawn.

3. A PEP validates across the two artifacts it already fetches. The claim is checked for the approval fact; the flex-auth DecisionEnvelope from step 2 is checked for exact CheckRequest match and policy package/version pin. This is doctrine, not merely an implementation convenience: each artifact is validated against the layer that owns its data. A PIP republishing the PDP's decision would put a copy of the authority decision in a repository that did not render it — the same shape of error the re-cut removed from Gate House itself. No safety property is lost, because ActionAuthorization is a bundle of exactly these two checks.

4. The provenance.authority == "state-hub" requirement is struck. State Hub is a read model. It is not the runtime approval authority and never was; flex-auth's own contract says so. A validator that requires it would fail closed against every correctly issued claim. secrets-engine removes the constant with the validator split.

Consequent changes: approval-engine none — the claim schema stands as published; secrets-engine splits its validator and drops the authority constant; flex-auth records that the proposal is shelved on this path. Nothing here gates APPROVAL-WP-0002-T03 — secrets-engine is fail-closed until its own gates land, and this record governs first live consume, not deployment.

Deferred

A ratified post-decision ActionAuthorization — one composed, signed, forwardable object — remains coherent and is recorded here so it is not rediscovered as new. It is not adopted now because it has no named issuer or lifecycle owner and the sequence is already settled without one. Revisit on any of: a third or fourth PEP-shaped consumer; a requirement for a single signed forwardable artifact (offline verification, or an audit that must replay one object rather than a join); resolution of flex-auth's open G3 finding by composition rather than by adding a lifetime to the envelope; or assent of the statute §17 Taxonomy request-claim schema (APPROVAL-IN-0001) — in which case converge there and do not revive this separately.

Also rejected, so they are not re-proposed: serving ActionAuthorization at the claim endpoint (structurally impossible for step 1, and it would assert an authority approval-engine does not hold); and extending the claim with approvals.required_count or entries (publishing approver identities is a deliberate least-disclosure non-goal, and it would still not satisfy the validator).

Reversal

Revert this record and the amendment to docs/contracts/approval-consumption.md. The falsifier is a demonstrated check that two-artifact validation cannot perform and a single composed artifact can — most plausibly offline or forwarded verification with no access to the PDP. That is a trigger for the deferred option above, not for returning ActionAuthorization to the claim endpoint, which stays forbidden on structural grounds regardless.