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gate-house/SCOPE.md
tegwick a5a1bcf537 State two properties once, and repair SCOPE.md's withdrawn framing 
Two things this week's rulings left owed, both the failure mode those
rulings were about.

A-16 and A-17, and Core Rules 16 and 17. Two general properties had
been stated three times each, always against the instance that produced
them and nowhere in general — which is how a property gets found by
accident or not at all. That is the defect gate-house corrected in
three other repositories this month while carrying it here.

A-16, distinguishable routes: where one observable state is reachable
by two routes differing in security meaning, the record must say which.
Four instances, and they only look like one rule once they are next to
each other — an envelope identical whether access-engine issued it or a
responder forged it (GH-DEC-2026-010), unknown versus absent in a
stance map (-011), a tenant claim directory-asserted versus
registration-supplied (-013), erased versus never held on an evidence
path (-014). The rule is not that the routes must diverge; usually they
must behave identically and safely. It is that a later reader can tell
them apart, or a sound check gets read as carrying a property it does
not have.

A-17, fail-closed transitions: a transitional deviation is admissible
only where it fails closed on the case distinguishing it from the
conformant state. Written because two requests for transitional relief
arrived in one week and were answered oppositely, and the answers would
otherwise read as arbitrary rather than as one rule.

Both are marked repository-level and explicitly not estate doctrine.
Graduation waits on a repository that bears a cost under them having
argued them, which is the bar security-layer-model met and these have
not.

SCOPE.md was still the withdrawn authority-plane framing. It opened by
saying gate-house "decides whether a requested action is authorized"
and listed deterministic authorization decisions as in scope — the
design retired by GH-DEC-2026-001, surviving in a derived document a
reader would take as current, with a dead pointer to Blueprint section
3 non-goals that the re-cut removed. Rewritten from current INTENT,
including what is not owned here and what would put the repository out
of scope.

The irony is noted rather than hidden: a derived artifact contradicting
its source, in the repository that generalised that failure into
statute section 12 after finding six instances in one week elsewhere.

rmgr conform clean.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012viPor8WJNCbV64ipwewrm

Assistant: claude-code
Assistant-Model: opus
Assistant-Process: 1754332@bnt-lap001
Assistant-Session: 9c8ac536-ff5e-46a3-8ab1-a548bde25fc0
2026-09-10 07:57:35 +02:00

4.3 KiB
Raw Blame History

Scope

Derived from INTENT.md. Gate House is the council where NetKingdom's security and defence doctrine is established, documented, taught, and supervised. It is a Staff-layer repository: it holds no runtime position and renders no authorization decision.

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.

In scope

  • doctrine — the Active Secrets Management Canon, its invariants, and the argument behind them; doctrine graduates into net-kingdom/canon/standards/ as it stabilizes
  • the authority context schema — what must be sayable about an agentic authority request (principal, actor, runtime identity, tenant, environment, mandate, task, operating mode), consumed by access-engine as input claims
  • principal / actor / runtime-identity separation as a model
  • mandates, delegation, attenuation, and authority ceilings as a model and a governance obligation
  • the agentic operating modes — Assistant and Autonomous as distinct security regimes, and the requirements attaching to each
  • the Change Dynamics Envelope — how much change the organization tolerates, expressed so engines and Staff can bound it
  • the posture contract with King's Guard, including the asymmetry: posture may only restrict
  • the MCP and tooling doctrine — tool availability is not permission
  • the credential-binding contract stating that credentials are implementation artifacts of a grant, materialized by Secrets Engine after authority exists
  • fail-closed semantics and the restrictive-failure rule, as properties the estate must hold
  • conformance review — whether an actor's authority in practice matches its declared mandate and ceiling
  • the assurance specifications T-01…T-10, authored here and executed by whitehat-security
  • the security curriculum — what operators, assistants, and autonomous agents must understand before they are trusted with authority

Decision types GRANT / DENY / REQUIRE_APPROVAL / DEFER are named here and rendered by access-engine.

Out of scope

Gate House holds no runtime position. Not owned here:

  • the authorization decision, policy evaluation, or any /authorize surface — access-engine is NetKingdom's only policy decision point
  • policy engine selection, policy packages, or policy rollout
  • grant storage, credential issuance, leases, or revocation
  • 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
  • approval storage and lifecycle — Approval Engine
  • audit custody and evidence retention — Audit Core
  • operational execution, access lanes, SSH certificates, tunnels, host hardening — Ops Warden
  • construction, reconciliation, recovery — Ops Mason
  • anomaly detection, behavioral risk inference, security memory — King's Guard
  • adversarial testing and attack simulation — Whitehat Security
  • the workplans of other repositories

That last one is load-bearing. Work structure belongs to the repository doing the work. Gate House sets doctrine and reviews conformance; an HQ that starts managing the estate's chores has become a second decision point wearing management clothes.

Also out of scope: inventing a new policy language, becoming an IAM suite, secret scanning, SIEM, autonomous remediation, and supporting every agent protocol.

What would put this repository out of scope

If work here starts producing services, schemas that resolve, or anything evaluated at request time, it belongs to an engine. A decision point inside Gate House would put the deterministic authority boundary inside the non-deterministic management layer, violating INV-02 — the first invariant this repository defends. See decisions/decisions.md GH-DEC-2026-001 and history/2026-08-28-security-layer-model-and-gate-house-recut.md.

The v0.1 milestones M0–M8 and the reference implementation tree (api/, policy/, grants/, deploy/) described the withdrawn authority-plane design and must not be revived.