20 KiB
Gate House — INTENT
Repository: gate-house
Project family: NetKingdom
Status: Initial intent
Date: 2026-08-24
The Mission
Gate House establishes and enforces deterministic authority boundaries for human, workload, and agent actions across NetKingdom.
Gate House is the reference implementation of the Active Secrets Management Plane defined by the Active Secrets Management Canon.
Its purpose is deliberately narrow:
Nothing crosses a protected boundary without deterministically established authority.
Humans and agents may decide what they want to attempt. Adaptive security systems may assess risk and recommend restrictions. Operations systems may know how to execute a change. Secret systems may know how to materialize credentials.
Gate House decides whether the requested authority exists, under which conditions, for which actor, on whose behalf, against which resource, for how long, and within which hard limits.
Why Gate House Exists
Agentic development and operations increase the rate, scope, concurrency, and duration of system change.
Two operating modes are particularly important:
Agent Assistant Coding
A human developer or operator is actively engaged with a coding or operations agent and can observe, redirect, approve, or stop actions with human-scale latency.
The human normally remains the principal and primary accountable operator.
Autonomous Agent Coding
Scheduled, triggered, event-driven, or machine-initiated agents act without continuous human supervision.
They therefore require their own identities, mandates, access profiles, budgets, lifecycle controls, audit trails, and governance boundaries.
Both modes introduce more dynamic system change than human-only operation. Assistant-mode dynamics are partly bounded by human risk appetite and reaction speed. Autonomous-mode dynamics are bounded primarily by policy, organizational governance, runtime constraints, and resource budgets.
Neither mode can safely depend on the behavior of an LLM as the final security boundary.
Gate House exists to provide the deterministic substrate underneath this increasingly dynamic environment.
Foundational Principle
Cognition proposes. Authority disposes. Infrastructure executes.
Gate House belongs to the Authority Plane.
It sits between probabilistic/adaptive systems and protected execution systems.
COGNITIVE PLANE
┌───────────────────────────────┐
│ humans │
│ LLMs │
│ coding agents │
│ operations agents │
│ MCP / A2A tool discovery │
│ King's Guard risk signals │
└──────────────┬────────────────┘
│ requests action
▼
════════════════════════════════════════════════
GATE HOUSE
DETERMINISTIC AUTHORITY PLANE
┌───────────────────────────────┐
│ identity context │
│ principal / actor │
│ tenant / environment │
│ mandate / delegation │
│ resource / action │
│ policy │
│ approval │
│ posture constraints │
│ TTL / quotas / budgets │
│ authority ceiling │
└──────────────┬────────────────┘
│ grant / deny
▼
════════════════════════════════════════════════
EXECUTION PLANE
┌───────────────────────────────┐
│ Git / CI/CD │
│ Kubernetes │
│ cloud APIs │
│ databases │
│ SaaS APIs │
│ production services │
└───────────────────────────────┘
Core Security Invariant
No protected action succeeds merely because an intelligent system believes it should.
For every privileged action, Gate House should be able to evaluate a request equivalent to:
WHO
principal
actor
runtime identity
WHERE
tenant
environment
resource
WHAT
requested operation
WHY
task
mandate
delegation
UNDER WHICH CONDITIONS
policy
approval
security posture
quotas
budgets
UNTIL WHEN
TTL / expiry
→ deterministic GRANT or DENY
For the same authoritative input state, the decision must be reproducible and auditable.
Deterministic does not mean static. Context may change continuously. Risk posture, approvals, resource ownership, incident state, tenancy, time, and quotas may all influence authorization. The rule is that the final privilege boundary is enforced by explicit policy rather than probabilistic model judgment.
Gate House Does
Gate House should:
- receive authenticated identity and context from trusted upstream systems;
- distinguish principal, actor, and runtime identity;
- evaluate deterministic authorization policy;
- enforce authority ceilings;
- model delegation and attenuation;
- issue or represent narrowly scoped, time-bounded authority;
- bind authority to tenant, environment, resource, action, task, and conditions;
- require step-up or parameter-bound approval for sensitive operations;
- expose machine-verifiable grant/deny decisions;
- coordinate credential materialization through the Secrets Engine and secret backends;
- accept bounded security-posture inputs from King's Guard;
- support deterministic circuit breakers and emergency revocation;
- produce authoritative audit evidence;
- preserve policy and decision versioning;
- fail closed for security-critical ambiguity or unavailable authority state;
- provide reusable policy and execution interfaces for NetKingdom tools.
Gate House Does Not
Gate House should deliberately not become a security super-system.
It does not own:
- primary human identity lifecycle;
- tenant lifecycle;
- identity-provider federation;
- password or secret storage;
- PKI implementation;
- secret scanning;
- anomaly detection;
- threat intelligence;
- behavioral risk inference;
- vulnerability scanning;
- penetration testing;
- infrastructure reconciliation;
- deployment execution;
- incident investigation;
- autonomous remediation;
- security learning or adaptive threat modeling.
Those responsibilities belong elsewhere in NetKingdom.
Responsibility Boundaries
| Component | Primary responsibility | Relationship to Gate House |
|---|---|---|
| User Engine | users, subjects, memberships, identity lifecycle | supplies subject context |
| Tenant Engine | tenant and organizational boundaries | supplies tenancy context |
| Key Cape | authentication, federation, identity assertions | establishes authenticated identity |
| Gate House | deterministic authority and delegation | decides what may happen |
| Secrets Engine | credential abstraction, dynamic issuance, rotation/revocation orchestration | materializes granted authority as credentials |
| OpenBao | secure secret storage, leases, PKI, dynamic secret engines | protects and issues credential material |
| Ops Warden | bounded operational execution | executes authorized operations |
| Ops Mason | construction, reconciliation, reconstitution | builds or restores authorized state |
| King's Guard | adaptive observation, risk assessment, containment coordination, security memory | supplies posture and defensive constraints |
| Whitehat Security | adversarial testing and attack simulation | challenges Gate House assumptions and controls |
A useful shorthand is:
User Engine identifies
Tenant Engine contextualizes
Key Cape authenticates
Gate House authorizes
Secrets Engine provisions
OpenBao protects
Ops Warden operates
Ops Mason constructs / restores
King's Guard observes / defends / adapts
Whitehat Security attacks / validates
Relationship to King's Guard
King's Guard is intentionally more ambitious than Gate House.
King's Guard is an adaptive security control system:
declare healthy intent
→ establish and attest identity
→ observe actual behavior
→ compare behavior with policy and intended scope
→ assess risk and confidence
→ respond within bounded authority
→ restore known-good operation
→ validate the outcome
→ retain governed security memory
Gate House is the deterministic boundary through which King's Guard's defensive intent must pass.
A critical asymmetry applies:
Adaptive systems may automatically reduce authority, require stronger authorization, or request containment. They must not probabilistically manufacture additional authority.
For example:
King's Guard posture = DEGRADED
│
▼
Gate House policy:
deny production.write
allow production.read
require step-up for staging.write
King's Guard detects and reasons about risk.
Gate House defines what that risk posture means for authority.
Relationship to Secrets Engine and OpenBao
Gate House should separate authority from credential material.
Example:
Agent:
"I need SELECT on orders-prod for task T"
│
▼
Gate House
│
deterministic decision
│
GRANT:
action = SELECT
resource = orders-prod
ttl = 15m
│
▼
Secrets Engine
│
determine credential mechanism
│
▼
OpenBao
│
create / lease DB credential
│
▼
execution gateway
Gate House decides the authority.
Secrets Engine determines how that authority is materialized.
OpenBao securely protects and issues the credential material.
The credential is an implementation artifact of authority, not the source of authority.
Domain Concepts
Gate House should keep a small, explicit domain model.
- Principal — the human, organization, workload, or system on whose behalf authority originates.
- Actor — the entity directly attempting the action.
- Runtime Identity — the concrete workload instance performing execution.
- Mandate — standing organizational authorization defining what an autonomous actor is intended to do.
- Delegation — a scoped transfer of authority without collapsing principal and actor identity.
- Authority Ceiling — the maximum authority an actor can obtain under deterministic policy.
- Grant — a positive authorization decision scoped by action, resource, context, and time.
- Denial — a negative authorization decision with machine-readable reason and evidence.
- Approval — an independent authorization artifact required for actions exceeding normal policy.
- Posture — a bounded security-state input, normally supplied by King's Guard or another trusted source.
- Credential Binding — the mapping from an authority grant to the technical credential required by the target system.
- Decision Evidence — the record explaining which policy, identities, inputs, and conditions produced the decision.
Preferred Authority Pattern
A privileged action should be reconstructable approximately as:
principal: alice@example
actor: deploy-agent-22
runtime: spiffe://netkingdom/prod/deployer/22
tenant: tenant/acme
task: deploy release 7.2.1
action: production.deploy
resource: cluster/payments
mandate: release-automation
approval: approval-9432
policy_version: authz-2026-08-24
authority_ttl: 20m
credential_type: aws-sts
decision: GRANT
Not every field must live inside a single token. The system must preserve enough linked evidence to reconstruct the authority chain.
Core Rules
- No privilege from cognition.
- Every privileged action crosses a deterministic authority boundary.
- Tool availability is not permission.
- Principal and actor remain distinguishable.
- Assistant and Autonomous operation are different security modes.
- Autonomous agents use independent identities and explicit mandates.
- Authority is least-privileged, task-scoped, tenant-scoped, environment-scoped, and time-bounded wherever possible.
- Delegation attenuates.
- Security posture may reduce authority but must not probabilistically expand it.
- Emergency revocation works without agent cooperation.
- Agents do not casually modify the policies defining their own authority ceiling.
- Credentials are preferably ephemeral implementation artifacts of authorization.
- Audit evidence is protected from the actor being audited.
- Failure of critical policy or authorization dependencies fails closed.
- Production security guarantees must survive incorrect agent behavior.
Agentic Operating Modes
Agent Assistant Profile
human principal
↓
interactive assistant session
↓
agent actor
↓
Gate House
↓
restricted authority
↓
execution
The human's credentials should not simply be dumped into the agent environment. Selective delegation, short-lived sessions, explicit tooling boundaries, and production-side controls remain required.
Human disconnect must not silently transform the session into autonomous privileged operation.
Autonomous Agent Profile
governance mandate
↓
agent identity
↓
task context
↓
Gate House
↓
time-bounded authority
↓
execution
↓
independent audit
Autonomous agents require unique identity, named owner, explicit mandate, authority ceiling, environment and resource bounds, time limits, concurrency limits, token/compute/tool budgets, independent kill switch, lifecycle termination, and audit reconstruction.
Change Dynamics
Gate House should explicitly support a Change Dynamics Envelope.
The envelope defines the maximum rate, scope, duration, and concurrency of system change the organization is prepared to tolerate while preserving required invariants.
Possible constraints include:
- maximum concurrent mutating agents;
- maximum resources per grant;
- maximum destructive actions;
- maximum deployment frequency;
- maximum task duration;
- credential TTL;
- maximum agent-chain depth;
- maximum tool calls;
- token and compute budgets;
- environment restrictions;
- read/write separation;
- reversible versus irreversible action classes.
Economic budgets are useful blast-radius controls but never authorization substitutes.
Circuit Breakers
Gate House should make autonomous degradation simple and deterministic.
NORMAL
↓
risk / anomaly / velocity threshold crossed
↓
AUTONOMOUS WRITE DISABLED
↓
READ / DIAGNOSE REMAINS AVAILABLE
↓
STEP-UP OR HUMAN INTERVENTION REQUIRED
Safe degraded mode should normally remove mutation authority before observability.
MCP and Tooling Doctrine
MCP is a capability interface, not an authority system.
A tool declaration such as:
restart_service()
rotate_database_password()
delete_namespace()
means only that the operation exists.
Invocation still requires Gate House policy evaluation or equivalent resource-side enforcement.
Token passthrough should be avoided. Downstream authority should be separately issued or exchanged and bound to the correct resource.
Technical Direction
Gate House should be designed as a small, composable control plane rather than a monolith.
Likely implementation areas include:
- canonical authorization request schema;
- policy-decision API;
- principal/actor/delegation model;
- policy-engine abstraction;
- grant representation;
- approval binding;
- posture input model;
- authority ceilings;
- quota and time constraints;
- credential-binding interface to Secrets Engine;
- execution-gateway integration;
- audit/event schema;
- decision replay and explainability;
- emergency revocation;
- agentic security test harness.
Potential policy backends may include OPA/Rego, Cedar, native policy evaluators, or multiple pluggable engines. Gate House should not make the conceptual model depend on one policy implementation.
First Reference Use Cases
UC-01 — Human-Assisted Read
A human operates a coding agent that requests read-only Kubernetes diagnostics.
Expected outcome:
- human principal preserved;
- agent actor identifiable;
- time-bounded grant;
- no production mutation capability;
- decision and tool use auditable.
UC-02 — Autonomous CI Deployment
A scheduled release agent deploys an approved artifact.
Expected outcome:
- independent workload identity;
- explicit release mandate;
- workload-federated authentication;
- environment-bound deploy authority;
- short TTL;
- no IAM/policy modification rights;
- full provenance from source to deployment.
UC-03 — Dynamic Database Access
An agent requests temporary database read access.
Expected outcome:
- Gate House grants scoped authority;
- Secrets Engine maps authority to dynamic DB credentials;
- OpenBao issues leased credential;
- credential expires/revokes automatically;
- raw credential is not placed in model context.
UC-04 — King's Guard Containment
King's Guard detects degraded posture for an autonomous actor.
Expected outcome:
- King's Guard publishes bounded posture;
- Gate House deterministically removes write authority;
- Ops Warden performs authorized containment;
- King's Guard validates outcome;
- audit chain remains intact.
UC-05 — Policy Self-Escalation Attempt
An autonomous agent attempts to modify the policy constraining its own access.
Expected outcome:
- request denied or requires a separately governed authority path;
- event becomes high-value audit/security telemetry.
Initial Success Criteria
Gate House is useful when it can demonstrate that:
- human and agent identities remain distinguishable;
- Assistant and Autonomous sessions use different authority profiles;
- a model cannot grant itself additional privilege;
- protected operations are decided by reproducible policy;
- authority can be narrower and shorter-lived than the actor identity;
- secrets can be materialized only after authority exists;
- security posture can deterministically restrict authority;
- autonomous agents can be stopped independently;
- policy self-modification is constrained;
- every privileged action can be reconstructed from audit evidence;
- the system remains secure under deliberately incorrect agent behavior.
Long-Term Direction
Gate House should mature from a reference Active Secrets Management Plane into NetKingdom's reusable deterministic authority substrate.
The mature system should make it natural to express:
Who or what is acting?
On whose behalf?
In which tenant and environment?
Under what mandate?
Against which resource?
For which action?
Under which constraints?
Until when?
According to which policy?
With which evidence?
and return a machine-enforceable answer.
The end state is not a larger secrets manager.
It is a system in which standing secrets and standing authority progressively disappear, while authorization becomes explicit, scoped, ephemeral, explainable, and governable.
Motto
Agents decide what to attempt. Gate House decides what may cross the boundary.