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
state_hub_decision_id: "b606e8ce-f1fa-4b39-bfe9-c11e88a3cde6"
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 — struck, see the amendment below; 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).

Amendment, 2026-09-06 — the G3 trigger is struck

Recorded the day after this decision, on corrections volunteered independently by approval-engine and access-engine, and verified here against flex-auth/schemas/decision_envelope.schema.json.

FLEX-WP-0019 closed G3 on 2026-09-02 by adding the field: the schema requires lifetime whenever effect is allow, sourced from the policy package's allow_ttl with a 15-minute engine default, and allow_ttl: none renders a DENY with reason allow_lifetime_unstated rather than a standing grant.

The trigger was therefore already spent when this decision was written, and it resolved on the branch that removes the argument rather than the one that supports it. This is not bookkeeping. Carrying its own end was the one structural thing the composed bundle did that the split does not, so the strongest available case for ratifying option D is not merely unspent — it is answered, and the answer is no. A DecisionEnvelope now states its own lifetime without borrowing an ActionAuthorizationValidity.

Three revisit triggers remain: a third or fourth PEP-shaped consumer; a requirement for a single signed forwardable artifact; and assent of the §17 request-claim schema, where the instruction is to converge rather than revive.

The error came from sourcing the trigger from a 2026-08-29 alignment record rather than from current state — the same class of mistake as reading a change log for what the body says, which the v0.6 findings audit hit on the same day (docs/conformance/2026-09-06-v06-findings-audit.md). Both repositories reported it against their own interest, which is why it was caught within a day.

Stated consequence, 2026-09-06 — what the PEP stopped checking

Raised by secrets-engine on implementing the split, against its own position, and recorded here rather than left in a commit message.

The distinct-approver threshold is no longer verified independently at the PEP. The claim exposes no approver entries — publishing approver identities is the deliberate least-disclosure non-goal this decision upheld — so approval-engine folds the threshold into valid_now. That is the correct layer under this doctrine and it is also a genuine reduction in what the PEP checks on its own, and the second thing does not stop being true because the first one is.

The estate should hold this consciously. valid_now is a summary predicate, and a consumer of a summary trusts the issuer's evaluation of everything folded into it. The compensating property is not a second check at the PEP — that is the duplication the split removes — but reconstructability at the issuer: approval-engine's state transitions and its use outbox row must make the threshold evaluation recoverable after the fact under §9.6. Detection, not prevention, and it should be named as such in the same register as §9.6's other residual.

A second consequence, also from secrets-engine and also correct: two digests now cover the same proposed action and are never compared — approval-engine's binding digest over {action, actor, principal, purpose, target} and the flex-auth CheckRequest digest, with claim.binding.pdp_digest preferred where the issuer recorded one. They answer different questions at different layers and collapsing them would be a layer violation wearing the costume of a refactor. secrets-engine holds a test asserting the two functions disagree, which is the right way to defend a distinction that looks like duplication.

Narrowed, 2026-09-06, by approval-engine on implementing the §9.6 obligation. The framing above was too broad. entries is UNIQUE on (approval_id, subject_id), so a repeat approver is refused at insert: distinctness is a storage invariant in that engine, not something a consumer or an auditor recomputes. What the PEP stopped checking is therefore that this engine applied its own invariant correctly — not whether dual control could be forged by a repeated signature, which the schema forecloses. The reduction is real and it is narrower than "the threshold is now unverified". approval-engine found this by writing a test that expected duplicate entries to collapse to one distinct approver, watching it fail, and reporting the result against its own earlier framing; it also dropped an entry_count field rather than ship a number that by construction can never differ from the distinct count.

The compensating property is now implemented rather than asserted: approval.issuance and approval.use both carry a threshold object — required_count, distinct_approver_count, threshold_met, and approver subject_id, approved_at and evidence reference — with tests asserting reconstruction from the use row alone, performing the recomputation an auditor would. The disclosure boundary is pinned by test: identities are on the outbox, never on the claim. The evidence path carries them because that is what audit is for; the consumer-facing artifact discloses the least it can. The split did not push identities to consumers by another route.

Hub row provenance. approval-engine's fix-consistency C-32 check registered the drafted record block in its own request document as a hub decision (b606e8ce-f1fa-4b39-bfe9-c11e88a3cde6), which it then resolved rather than leave an open row for a settled question. Gate House adopts that row as canonical and records its id above, rather than registering a second one — the row's content is correct and a duplicate would be worse than an imperfectly-provenanced single row. A drafted decision block inside a requesting repository's document is machine-readable to that repository's own consistency checks, which is a trap in this workflow; the disposition is recorded here so the next request does not rediscover it.

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.

GH-DEC-2026-006 — The §13 registers become pointers only once maturity-engine publishes a readable export

id: GH-DEC-2026-006
kind: decision
title: The §13 registers become pointers only once maturity-engine publishes a readable
  export
status: resolved
owner: Bernd Worsch
repo: gate-house
standard: net-kingdom/canon/standards/security-layer-model_v0.7.md
source_note: workplans/GH-WP-0003-statute-v08-amendment-set.md (T03)
requested_dispositions:
- approved
- revised
- rejected
affects:
- gate-house
- net-kingdom
- maturity-engine
- ops-warden
- ops-mason
- user-engine
- tenant-engine
- access-engine
rationale: 'A statute of record should not carry state, and §13 and §13.1 are state:
  they change without the doctrine changing, and a hand-maintained table inside a
  standard is a register that drifts. maturity-engine is the right holder. But a pointer
  is only an improvement once there is something readable to point at — a standard
  that can only be understood by querying a live engine has traded one defect for
  a worse one, and it would make the statute unreadable to exactly the auditor it
  exists for. The migration is therefore conditioned on a committed, versioned export
  rather than declared outright. Until that export exists the tables stay and rows
  are transcribed, so no repository is left without an answer while the condition
  is outstanding.'
decided_by: Bernd Worsch
created: '2026-09-05T23:38:49.777532Z'
updated: '2026-09-05T23:38:49.777532Z'

Context

security-layer-model v0.7 §13 holds the open-gap register and §13.1 the PEP stance-map register. Both were created because the obligations above them named a register that did not exist — §9.1's own logic, that a requirement whose register is missing is a capability catalogued without a surface. They did their job.

maturity-engine (MAT-WP-0001) now holds both as queryable data: the §13 snapshot with state and owner-status intact, the §13.1 inventory, ASM-0…ASM-6 registered as data owned by gate-house, pep-stance-publication owned by ops-warden, and blocked-clean scored equal to conforming by test. It proposes that the statute table become a pointer.

Four repositories are waiting behind the answer. user-engine and tenant-engine have published stance maps and asked for §13.1 rows; ops-warden is published and ops-mason is not. §6.4 obliges every PEP-shaped consumer to publish and obliges those maps to be inventoried. Each week the question stays open, the register either accumulates transcription or accumulates silence.

Decision

§13 and §13.1 become pointers to maturity-engine, and not before it publishes a committed, versioned export of both registers that is readable without a live query.

Two things are true at once and the ruling holds both.

A statute should not carry state. §13 and §13.1 change without the doctrine changing. A table maintained by hand inside a standard of record drifts, and every row transcribed into it is the manual step maturity-engine exists to remove. This is the same rule as GH-DEC-2026-005: the artifact is held by the layer that owns its data, and a repository that neither computes nor owns a fact should not be its register of record.

A standard must be readable on its own. A pointer to a live engine is not a register an auditor can read; it is an instruction to run software. Whatever else the statute is, it must be legible in git, at a version, to a reader with no cluster access — including a reader auditing the estate precisely because they do not trust its running systems. Replacing a drifting table with an unreadable reference trades a known defect for a worse one.

The condition reconciles them. maturity-engine computes and remembers; it also publishes the result as a committed artifact at a stated path and version, and the statute cites that path. The rows are then computed rather than transcribed, and still readable without a query. Publication is the migration's precondition, not its follow-up.

What happens meanwhile

The tables stay, and rows continue to be transcribed into §13.1 at each version cut. No repository waits on the export to get an answer. user-engine, tenant-engine, ops-warden and ops-mason are inventoried in v0.8 whether or not the export has landed by then.

This is deliberately the slower path. The alternative — strike the tables now and point at the engine — would close four open requests immediately and leave the statute stating an obligation whose register no reader can open, which is the exact defect §13.1 was created to fix. Repeating a defect in the other direction is not progress.

What is asked of maturity-engine

Not a new capability, a published form of one it has. The export must be a file in the repository, versioned, generated rather than hand-edited, carrying the same fields the statute tables carry today (§13: capability, kind, declarer, owner, state, owner-status; §13.1: consumer, stance map path, shape), and regenerable so drift between the export and the engine's own state is detectable. layer.yaml and pep-stance.yaml are the shape to follow: published, machine-readable, and asserted equal to shipped behaviour by a test. §6.4 obligation 3 already requires that equality of every PEP; a register of those maps should not hold itself to less.

When it exists, the §13 and §13.1 tables are replaced by a citation of it, and maturity-engine becomes the register of record.

Reversal

Revert to tables if the export proves to drift from the engine's computed state faster than a hand-maintained table drifted from reality — that is, if generation and publication decouple. The falsifier is mechanical: a regeneration that changes the committed export without any underlying evidence having changed, or an underlying change that does not reach the export.

GH-DEC-2026-007 — The posture/maturity boundary is recomputability, bounded by a criteria-grounding rule

id: GH-DEC-2026-007
kind: decision
title: The posture/maturity boundary is recomputability, bounded by a criteria-grounding
  rule
status: resolved
owner: Bernd Worsch
repo: gate-house
standard: net-kingdom/canon/standards/security-layer-model_v0.7.md
source_note: kings-guard/docs/PostureMaturityBoundary.md (KG-DEC-2026-002, KG-COM-0001)
requested_dispositions:
- approved
- revised
- rejected
affects:
- gate-house
- net-kingdom
- kings-guard
- maturity-engine
- access-engine
rationale: 'Adopted with one addition. kings-guard is right that volatility describes
  the two categories without partitioning them, and right that the discriminator is
  already in §9.5''s determinism clause rather than being a new rule. The addition
  closes the loophole the test leaves open: recomputability is assessed over the stated
  criteria, so any judgment can be made to look recomputable by writing a criterion
  that dereferences it. Criteria must bottom out in evidence about the subject, not
  in another party''s opinion recorded as evidence. Without that clause the test is
  satisfiable in form by exactly the inference it exists to exclude.'
decided_by: Bernd Worsch
created: '2026-09-06T06:07:34.017316Z'
updated: '2026-09-06T06:07:34.017316Z'

Context

GH-WP-0003-T04. v0.7 §9.5 states the maturity half of the boundary — "Given the same criteria and the same evidence it MUST return the same level; that determinism is what makes it an Engine rather than an opinion", and "A criterion that cannot be evaluated by rule is not yet a criterion." It does not state the posture half.

Gate House had proposed drawing the line on volatility: posture is fast-moving, maturity is slow. kings-guard answered KG-IN-0003 with a proposed revision (KG-DEC-2026-002, argued in kings-guard/docs/PostureMaturityBoundary.md) rejecting that line and offering recomputability instead. The commentary was also sent to maturity-engine.

The concern behind the original question stands and is why the line has to be exact: a second grading authority would be the same shape of mistake as a second decision point, and §6 says it would arrive the same way — gradually, each time for a good local reason.

Decision

The boundary is recomputability, not volatility.

Given the same criteria and the same evidence, recompute. If you MUST get the same answer, it is maturity and it belongs in an engine. If you CANNOT promise the same answer, it is posture and it belongs in Staff.

The volatility line is withdrawn. kings-guard's argument against it is accepted in full: volatility is an observation about how a value has behaved, not a definition of what it is. It fails at both edges — a maturity criterion moves fast when evidence lands in a burst, and a posture sits unchanged for months on a healthy subject — and, more seriously, it describes the two categories without partitioning them. Every case it does not obviously cover becomes an argument, and arguments at a boundary are the mechanism §6 exists to prevent.

Recomputability is not a new rule. It is §9.5's own determinism clause pointed at the one boundary where it had not been pointed, which is why it can be adopted without enlarging the standard. §9.5 already states the maturity half; the posture half is its mirror, and the pair partitions: a criterion that cannot be evaluated by rule is not yet a criterion; a judgment that can be evaluated by rule is not posture — it is a criterion sitting in the wrong repository.

The addition — criteria must be grounded

Adopted with one clause kings-guard did not propose, and the reason is the loophole their own framing opens.

Recomputability is assessed over the stated criteria. That makes it mechanical, which is its virtue, and it also makes it satisfiable in form by the thing it exists to exclude. Any judgment can be made to look recomputable by writing a criterion that dereferences it: "level 2 iff the reviewer marked the control adequate" is perfectly deterministic — recompute it and you get the same answer every time — and it has smuggled an opinion into an engine wearing a rule's clothes. The engine would then be grading, deterministically, on someone's judgment, which is precisely the second grading authority the boundary is drawn to prevent.

Therefore:

A criterion MUST bottom out in evidence about the subject, not in another party's conclusion about the subject. A recorded judgment may be evidence that the judgment was made — a fact with an issuer and a timestamp. It MUST NOT be evidence that the thing judged is so.

This is the same distinction §9.6 draws between what an archive proves and what it is read as proving, and the same one this repository applies to valid_now in GH-DEC-2026-005: a summary predicate is a fact about the issuer's evaluation, not a substitute for the evaluation. Without the clause the test is mechanical and circumventable; with it, the test is mechanical and the circumvention is itself checkable.

Consequences carried

The three kings-guard names are adopted as stated.

1. The migration direction is permanent. Anything called posture that turns out to be recomputable moves to maturity-engine as a criterion; anything in maturity-engine that needs judgment is not yet a criterion and moves back to Staff. The boundary maintains itself under change because the test applies to each item rather than to the category.
2. Two authorities cannot grade the same subject property, because a property is either recomputable or it is not, and that fact does not depend on which repository claims it. The failure becomes structurally prevented rather than conventionally avoided.
3. Capability readiness MUST NOT be an input to posture. Readiness is deterministic; posture is not; feeding one into the other would make posture partly recomputable and blur the boundary from the kings-guard side. Volunteered by kings-guard as a constraint on itself and accepted as normative.

Consequence 3 also answers the second half of KG-IN-0003: tracking kings-guard's own gaps in maturity-engine creates no incident-time dependency, because posture evaluation never consults readiness. The dependency would exist only if the mistake consequence 3 forbids had already been made.

The limit is recorded, not resolved

kings-guard flagged, against its own proposal, that "the same evidence" is not well defined anywhere in the estate, so until §17's request-claim and gap-record schemas exist, recomputability is a thought experiment rather than a check. That is recorded in the statute alongside the test rather than left in the commentary. A boundary that is correct but not yet mechanically checkable does beat one that is checkable and wrong — but a reader is entitled to know which of the two they are holding. It makes §17 load-bearing for this rule.

The caution is also recorded: "posture" has the drift profile "control plane" had — it sounds specific and quietly absorbs whatever sits next to it. §8 exists because the estate has been bitten by exactly that, and this repository described itself as a control plane before the re-cut. The recomputability test is a defence against that drift because it can be applied to a candidate before the word is stretched to cover it. kings-guard asked to be held to it rather than trusted about it, and that is the standing it gets.

No change to §8's three-way split and no §4 catalog change. Posture stays non-deterministic and stays Staff; the test explains why, which is what was missing.

Reversal

Revert if the grounding clause proves to exclude criteria the estate needs — that is, if a legitimate maturity criterion cannot be expressed without dereferencing a judgment. The falsifier is a concrete criterion, not an argument that one might exist. The likely candidates are human-attested controls (a policy was reviewed, a drill was run); the expected resolution is that the attestation event is the evidence and the criterion grades on its existence, freshness, and issuer rather than on its verdict. If that resolution does not hold for some real criterion, this clause is wrong.

GH-DEC-2026-008 — The PDP digest is the binding correspondence; no cross-engine vocabulary mapping is published

id: GH-DEC-2026-008
kind: decision
title: The PDP digest is the binding correspondence; no cross-engine vocabulary mapping
  is published
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; approval-engine/docs/approval-claim.md
requested_dispositions:
- approved
- revised
- rejected
affects:
- gate-house
- approval-engine
- access-engine
- secrets-engine
- ops-warden
rationale: 'Raised by access-engine. approval-claim verification item 4 is a disjunction:
  the consumer recomputes approval-engine''s native binding from the proposed action,
  OR compares binding.pdp_digest to the decision''s request digest. The first limb
  needs a cross-engine vocabulary mapping nobody owns and nobody has published; the
  second is optional in the schema. Together that leaves ''approved for THIS request''
  unestablished whenever the PDP digest is absent, while the claim still reads valid_now
  true. The mapping is rejected because a translation between two engines'' vocabularies
  can be silently wrong and would be owned by neither, and because recomputing another
  layer''s binding is the re-derivation GH-DEC-2026-005 forbids. The digest is identity
  rather than translation, so it is made required on the PDP path and consumers fail
  closed without it.'
decided_by: Bernd Worsch
created: '2026-09-06T07:30:42.213794Z'
updated: '2026-09-06T07:30:42.213794Z'

Context

Raised by access-engine while implementing GH-DEC-2026-005, and declined by it rather than solved locally — the right call, and the reason it reached a decision record instead of a commit.

approval-engine/docs/approval-claim.md verification item 4 is a disjunction:

binding.digest equals the digest of the binding the consumer computed from the proposed action, or binding.pdp_digest equals the NewDecisionBinding digest of that request.

Both limbs are load-bearing for one property — approved for this request, as distinct from approved. Neither limb currently delivers it on the PDP path.

Limb one requires a mapping nobody owns. The claim's binding.action and binding.target are in approval-engine's vocabulary, over {action, actor, principal, purpose, target}. access-engine's policy package and CheckRequest are in its own. To compute limb one, a consumer must translate between them. No mapping is published. access-engine declined to invent one on the correct ground that a wrong mapping fails open in the worst way available: it silently accepts a claim approved for something else.

Limb two is optional. binding.pdp_digest is present only "when recorded at issue".

So on the path this estate actually runs, correspondence rests entirely on an optional field, and where that field is absent a consumer can hold a claim with valid_now: true, receive an ALLOW, consume, and act — with nothing having established that the approval and the decision concern the same action and target. The claim would not be lying; valid_now answers a different question.

Decision

binding.pdp_digest is the binding correspondence on the GH-DEC-2026-003 path, and it is required there. No cross-engine vocabulary mapping is published.

1. A consumer on the PDP path MUST verify claim.binding.pdp_digest equals the decision's NewDecisionBinding.request_digest. It is no longer a preferred comparison; it is the comparison.
2. A claim carrying no pdp_digest MUST NOT be used on that path. The consumer fails closed. It is not an error to be worked around, and specifically it is not a licence to fall back to limb one.
3. Limb one survives only where the consumer is natively in approval-engine's vocabulary — that engine's own tests, and the T-06 assurance case, which uses the native binding precisely because no PDP digest exists there. It is not a fallback for a PDP-path consumer.
4. approval-engine MUST record the PDP digest at issue for any approval intended for use on the PDP path, and the claim schema states which approvals those are rather than leaving it to the requester's memory.

Why not publish the mapping

access-engine offered to co-author one. Declining is the substantive half of this record.

A mapping is a translation; a digest is an identity. A translation can be wrong in a way that still produces a confident answer — the failure mode access-engine named, and it fails open. A digest comparison has no wrong-but-plausible result: it matches or it does not.

A published mapping would be owned by neither engine. It would sit between two vocabularies, each of which is its own repository's to evolve under §2, and it would have to be revised whenever either side changed. That artifact is a third authority on what a request is — the shape §6 exists to prevent, arriving as plumbing rather than as a decision point.

And computing limb one is the re-derivation GH-DEC-2026-005 forbids. A consumer recomputing approval-engine's native binding from its own vocabulary is a consumer deriving another layer's data instead of validating against the layer that owns it. The rule this estate just adopted answers this question on its own terms.

The cost, stated

An approval requested without a known CheckRequest cannot be used on the PDP path, because there was no PDP digest to record. That is a real constraint and it is correct behaviour, not a defect: an approval granted against an unspecified action does not become an approval for a specific one because a consumer later found a use for it. Any workflow needing detached approval must either bind the request at issue or accept that its approvals are not usable here.

This narrows what approval-engine may issue for this path. It does not narrow what it may issue.

Reversal

Revert if a legitimate workflow genuinely cannot bind the CheckRequest at approval time — a standing human authorization for an action whose exact parameters are not knowable until execution is the plausible candidate. The falsifier is a concrete workflow, not the possibility of one. The expected resolution is that such a case needs a class binding with its own contract, not a relaxation of this one to an optional field, because an optional correspondence is indistinguishable at the consumer from no correspondence at all.

GH-DEC-2026-009 — Unknown is not a zone and fails closed; stance maps declare their scoping axis

id: GH-DEC-2026-009
kind: decision
title: Unknown is not a zone and fails closed; stance maps declare their scoping axis
status: resolved
owner: Bernd Worsch
repo: gate-house
standard: net-kingdom/canon/standards/security-layer-model_v0.7.md
source_note: flex-auth/docs/stance-register-review.md
requested_dispositions:
- approved
- revised
- rejected
affects:
- gate-house
- net-kingdom
- ops-warden
- secrets-engine
- user-engine
- tenant-engine
- ops-mason
- access-engine
- zone-engine
rationale: 'Raised by access-engine on the first occasion the §13.1 register held
  enough rows to diverge. Two rulings. First: an unreachable engine and an unclassifiable
  subject are different failure cases, and §9.3''s per-zone availability trade is
  only available for the first. Trading openness for a zone requires knowing the zone;
  where the scope is unknown the trade cannot have been made for it, and fail_open
  on unknown hands the most permissive stance to exactly the request an attacker can
  most easily make unclassifiable. unknown is therefore not a zone and MUST fail closed.
  Second: the register cannot aggregate across incommensurable scoping axes, so each
  map declares its axis and its relationship to zone, and the register states what
  it cannot answer rather than implying it can.'
decided_by: Bernd Worsch
created: '2026-09-06T12:17:19.104531Z'
updated: '2026-09-06T12:17:19.104531Z'

Context

On 2026-08-29 access-engine told this repository it was the party positioned to notice when the aggregate of consumer stances diverged from what the policy packages say — and then recorded that the claim was sound but the data was not there, because §13.1 held one row and one row cannot diverge from anything. secrets-engine's publication made it two, and the divergence appeared immediately.

That is worth noting on its own: the register earned its existence the first time it had two entries.

ops-warden declares unknown → fail_open. Explicit, versioned, under ADR-0009. secrets-engine declares unknown → fail_closed. Both maps are total, published, test-pinned, and §6.4-conformant. Neither is a defect under v0.7. They disagree about the one case that by construction is the one nobody planned for.

They are also not comparable: ops-warden scopes by security zone, secrets-engine by catalog stage — explicitly as the "equivalent scope" §6.4 permits, until zone membership arrives as a claim. So the register cannot answer "what is the estate's stance for a z2-protected workload", which is the question an inventory exists to answer.

access-engine reported both as observations and explicitly not as a request that either repository change its stance, on the ground that a PDP does not set a consumer's stance — §9.3's two-owner split, which was its own finding, cutting against its own convenience. That restraint is correct and it is why the question arrives here: setting a consumer's stance is not the PDP's to do, but doctrine is Gate House's.

Decision

1. unknown is not a zone, and it fails closed

A stance map MUST resolve unknown to fail_closed. It is not a scope over which the §9.3 availability trade may be made.

The reasoning is a distinction v0.7 does not draw, and the two maps are the proof it is needed. §9.3 sanctions trading availability for openness per zone — knowingly, for a named scope, at a declared cost. ops-warden's fail_open for z0–z2 is exactly that and remains sanctioned: it is a known request in a degraded system. The consumer knows what it is being asked and cannot reach the engine to ask.

unknown is a different failure. It is not a degraded system; it is an unclassified subject. The consumer does not know what it is being asked.

A per-zone trade requires knowing the zone. Where the scope is unknown, the trade cannot have been made for it — there was no zone in hand when the profile was written, so no one weighed this request's cost. Resolving unknown to the permissive answer therefore does not extend a considered decision; it invents one, and it invents the most permissive one available.

The adversarial reading settles it. unknown is the cheapest state for an attacker to induce: an unregistered workload, a malformed label, a resource created before classification, a race against registry propagation. fail_open on unknown makes "be unclassifiable" a privilege escalation, and it is the one escalation that requires no credential. This is the §8 asymmetry — nothing may manufacture privilege — applied where the estate had left a gap open by symmetry with a rule that does not reach it.

ops-warden's map is conformant today and this makes one cell of it non-conformant at v0.8. That is a doctrine change with a cost to a repository that did everything asked of it — published early, built the reference form, and offered it estate-wide — and it should be argued in the assent round rather than imposed quietly. Their z0–z2 zone stances are untouched.

2. A stance map declares its scoping axis and its relation to zone

Each published map MUST name the axis it scopes over, and state its relationship to security zone: a mapping, or an explicit declaration that none exists yet and why.

The register is not repaired by forcing everyone onto zones. secrets-engine chose catalog stage because zone membership is not yet available to it as a claim; making it assert zones now would produce a fiction, and a fiction in a runtime-read, test-pinned file is worse than an honest incommensurability.

The register instead states what it cannot answer. §13.1 carries the axis per row and records that cross-axis aggregation is not available. An inventory that silently cannot answer its own question is the §9.1 defect again — a surface catalogued without the capability behind it.

access-engine notes the convergence path and it is the right one: zone membership compiles into the registry snapshot it already consumes, while per-zone stance belongs to the consumer. If membership reaches the decision as a claim, secrets-engine's axis converges onto zones with neither side inventing a mapping. Until then the axes are recorded, not reconciled.

The cost of two incommensurable axes is small; the cost of five is not. This lands before the third row rather than after the fifth.

What is not decided here

Neither repository is asked to change its zone stances. secrets-engine's stale reference to a durable ActionAuthorization record in its map — the artifact GH-DEC-2026-005 shelved — is theirs to correct and access-engine has already told them; it is a naming error in a runtime-read file, where a stale name outlives a stale comment, and it does not change the stance.

Reversal

Reverse ruling 1 if a consumer demonstrates a scope that is genuinely unknown and genuinely low-consequence, where failing closed on it costs availability with no security gain — the plausible candidate is a read-only diagnostic path under §5.1. The expected resolution is that such a path is not a protected side effect and therefore has no PEP obligation at all, rather than that it needs a permissive unknown. If that resolution fails on a real path, this ruling is too broad.

Reverse ruling 2 if declaring the axis proves to be all the register needed, in which case the "states what it cannot answer" half is redundant rather than wrong.

---

Amendment to GH-DEC-2026-008, 2026-09-06 — the comparison as written could never pass

Found by secrets-engine re-verifying a replay fixture within hours of the ruling, and reported independently by access-engine and approval-engine. Verified here against flex-auth/schemas/decision_envelope.schema.json and pkg/api/canonical.go before amending.

The defect. The ruling required claim.binding.pdp_digest to equal the decision's NewDecisionBinding.request_digest. access-engine hashes context into the request digest, and the dual-control pattern carries the claim in context.approval. Embedding the claim therefore changes the digest of the request that carries it, so a digest recorded at issue can never equal the final one.

This is a hash cycle, and approval-engine put the resolution correctly: it is forced rather than chosen. A claim cannot carry the digest of a document containing that claim — the value would have to be known before it could be computed. The recorded digest is necessarily of the underlying action before any claim was embedded.

The consequence had it shipped. A consumer obeying the rule and failing closed would have denied destroy permanently — failing closed forever on a check that cannot pass. The ruling's own fail-closed requirement is what would have made it harmful rather than merely wrong.

The fix, and whose it was. access-engine publishes binding.approval_binding_digest — the same canonical material with context.approval removed, emitted only where a claim was carried (FLEX-DEC-2026-007). An approval issued against a claim-free Check records that Check's digest, and the claim-bearing request reproduces it. The comparison becomes implementable without changing what it requires: correspondence by identity, no translation, nobody asserting an equivalence between vocabularies. The A5 property holds exactly as drafted.

approval-engine was right that what was missing was a published statement of which fields the PDP excludes, and right not to make that statement on access-engine's behalf. A consumer MUST NOT guess the exclusion rule: a digest computed under an assumed rule produces a confident wrong answer, and comparing two digests derived under different rules fails open toward accepting a claim bound to a different request — the same failure direction as the vocabulary mapping this decision rejected, reached by another road. Until a PDP publishes its exclusion rule, the path is correctly fail-closed rather than complete: a gap in a dependency, not in the ruling.

What this changes in the record. The ruling stands. Its four numbered obligations stand. Obligation 1's comparison target is corrected from the request digest to the PDP's published exclusion-scoped digest. v0.8 §9.7.3 carries the corrected form.

And a general property, flagged by access-engine as a near miss it does not ask for. The obvious fix is to drop context.approval from the request digest entirely. That is unsafe, and the reason generalises: an evidence-bearing input may be excluded from a correspondence digest but never from the replay identity. Two requests differing only in which approval was presented decide differently — one allows, one denies dual_control_required — so collapsing them would let an allow obtained with a valid claim be replayed against a request carrying none. A fail-open hole reached by a refactor that looks like simplification. It is in v0.8 §6.4 obligation 5 because the shape recurs wherever evidence travels inside a hashed request, and because a property discovered by nearly getting it wrong is worth more written down than remembered.

Implementation status. access-engine: FLEX-DEC-2026-007, dd3ce4c. approval-engine: schema v3 adds a declared pdp_path; create() refuses pdp_path: true without a pdp_digest, so an approval that would be unusable on the path fails at issue rather than at the protected side effect. Intent is declared, never inferred — a digest that happens to be present is not a declaration anybody made, legacy rows migrate to false rather than being back-filled, and a successor inherits its predecessor's declaration. Back-filling would have manufactured a statement no requester made, which is this decision's own objection to translation in another form.

What this says about the ruling process. The ruling was right and its mechanism was missing, and that combination is only survivable because the repositories implementing it read it against their own fixtures rather than accepting it. The defect was found in hours by the repository that would have been broken by it, and reported by two others who had no obligation to look.

GH-DEC-2026-010 — A PEP must be able to attribute a decision to access-engine; the digest test does not do it

id: GH-DEC-2026-010
kind: decision
title: A PEP must be able to attribute a decision to access-engine; the digest test
  does not do it
status: resolved
owner: Bernd Worsch
repo: gate-house
standard: net-kingdom/canon/standards/security-layer-model_v0.8.md
source_note: flex-auth FLEX-DEC-2026-010; approval-engine docs/reviews/2026-09-07-security-layer-model-v08.md
requested_dispositions:
- approved
- revised
- rejected
affects:
- gate-house
- net-kingdom
- access-engine
- approval-engine
- secrets-engine
- ops-warden
- ops-mason
- user-engine
- tenant-engine
- audit-core
decided_by: Bernd Worsch
rationale: 'Raised by access-engine against its own artifact during the v0.8 assent
  round, having recorded it as its own defect (FLEX-DEC-2026-010) before reviewing
  this text. Section 6.4 obligation 1 required a PEP to hold a decision from access-engine,
  and obligation 2 supplied a test emphatic that it was mechanical rather than a matter
  of implementer judgement. That test establishes which request a decision was rendered
  for and nothing about who rendered it, and it cannot: every input to it is either
  sent by the caller or published, so a responder knowing a published package id and
  version reproduces all of it and returns a well-formed allow. Fail-closed protects
  against a decision point that is absent, not against one that lies. The asymmetry
  with obligation 5 is the sharp form, since section 9.4 requires the approval object
  to have authenticated entries and nothing required it of the decision, leaving an
  obligation written over a pair of artifacts satisfiable for only one half. The obligation
  now requires attribution and states that the digest comparison does not discharge
  it; the mechanism is the owner s under section 17 and the gap is declared in section
  13 rather than papered by a rule the standard does not get to choose.'
created: '2026-09-09T18:11:20.071372Z'
updated: '2026-09-09T18:11:20.071372Z'

Context

access-engine returned its v0.8 review on 2026-09-07 and ranked this finding blocking for calling §6.4's PEP obligations complete — explicitly not blocking anyone's adoption, since the condition already exists under v0.7 and v0.8 does not create it. It had already recorded the defect against its own artifact as FLEX-DEC-2026-010, with FLEX-WP-0024 carrying the fix, before it read this text.

The finding is that the standard is not merely silent. Obligation 1 says a PEP must hold "a decision from access-engine identifying the request it was rendered for", and obligation 2 supplies a test and is emphatic that it is not a judgement call: replay is permitted iff the canonical request digest matches and the lifetime holds, "mechanical, not a matter of implementer judgement". A careful implementer reads the mechanical test as discharging the obligation above it. It does not.

Every input to that comparison is either sent by the caller or published by the PDP. The request material is what the PEP transmitted; policy_package_digest and registry_snapshot_digest are computable from files in a public repository. A responder that knows the package id and version — both published — reproduces all three and returns a well-formed allow. Publishing more digests makes a forged envelope look more authenticated, not less.

secrets-engine put the consequence better than either of us: its posture "silently assumes the PDP is the PDP". approval-engine carried it into the correspondence chain — an approval whose pdp_digest matches a forged decision matches perfectly. Identity comparison proves two artifacts describe one request. It proves nothing about whether the decision is authentic.

The gap was visible from inside and was recorded against the wrong artifact. §16 already carried "publication integrity of the Taxonomy layer itself… while its own publication path has no digest, freeze, or rollback discipline". That is this observation one layer up. Applied to the artifact the standard regulates rather than to the standard, it is this decision.

Decision

1. Attribution is required, and is a separate property from identity

A PEP MUST hold a decision that is attributable to access-engine, not merely present and well-formed. Obligation 2's digest test establishes which request a decision was rendered for. It establishes nothing about who rendered it.

Obligation 1 is not discharged by a digest comparison, and an implementer MUST NOT read obligation 2's mechanical test as discharging it. This is the whole of the change: the obligation stops reading as satisfied by a check that does not satisfy it.

2. Fail-closed does not reach this

§9.3's apparatus — two failure cases, two owners, published stance maps — addresses absence. An unreachable PDP denies. A responder impersonating one allows. Nothing in the standard addressed a responder, and no stance value can: the stance is consulted when the engine is unreachable, and a lying responder is reachable by construction.

3. Obligation 5 was written over a pair it could only half satisfy

§9.4 requires the approval object to have "durable, authenticated entries". §6.4 obligation 5 then requires that where a PEP's decision rests on more than one artifact, each MUST be validated against the layer that owns its data — and names the approval-claim / DecisionEnvelope pair as the live instance.

So the standard required authenticity of the PIP's artifact and not of the PDP's, and wrote an obligation across both. That asymmetry was argued nowhere. It is oversight, not position, and it is corrected here rather than defended.

4. The mechanism is not the standard's to choose

access-engine did not ask for a signature scheme in the statute, and it does not get one. The shape is the owner's under §17. What the standard names is the property.

Until a mechanism ships, the condition is a declared §13 gap with access-engine as owner (FLEX-DEC-2026-010, FLEX-WP-0024; FLEX-DEC-2026-009 puts the authenticated caller in provenance, so a record eventually attests both ends of the channel rather than neither). A declared gap is honest. An unstated assumption inside a test called mechanical is not.

What this does not do

It does not close the gap. access-engine's note that Glas completed operator caller-auth mid-review is correctly self-limited: an authenticated API-server port-forward authenticates the responder for one operator path and produces no signed portable artifact.

It also does not create an adoption blocker. The condition predates v0.8 and every PEP-shaped consumer is in it today. What changes is that they can now see they are.

Reversal condition

If a PEP can verify the decision's origin by a mechanism that does not itself rest on material the caller supplies or the PDP publishes openly, the §13 gap closes and this record's second half becomes historical. The first half — that identity is not attribution — does not revert; it is a property of hashing, not of the current channel.

Provenance

Raised by access-engine (FLEX-DEC-2026-011, v0.8 assent, F1), against its own artifact and having recorded the defect on its own side first. Independently framed by secrets-engine. Carried into the correspondence chain by approval-engine, which noted its own docs/approval-claim.md said what pdp_digest cannot cover without saying it cannot detect a forged decision. Applied to security-layer-model_v0.8.md §6.4 obligation 1 and §13 at net-kingdom@64394e9.

GH-DEC-2026-011 — Classification coverage is published beside the stance; a transitional fail_open is declined

id: GH-DEC-2026-011
kind: decision
title: Classification coverage is published beside the stance; a transitional fail_open
  is declined
status: resolved
owner: Bernd Worsch
repo: gate-house
standard: net-kingdom/canon/standards/security-layer-model_v0.8.md
source_note: ops-warden history/2026-09-09-layer-model-v08-review.md @ 8e1b621; flex-auth
  FLEX-DEC-2026-011 F2
requested_dispositions:
- approved
- revised
- rejected
affects:
- gate-house
- net-kingdom
- ops-warden
- ops-mason
- secrets-engine
- user-engine
- tenant-engine
- access-engine
- zone-engine
decided_by: Bernd Worsch
rationale: 'ops-warden assented to GH-DEC-2026-009 on its own terms and then reported
  what adopting it costs: zero of three signing targets and three of twenty-one routing
  lanes resolve to a zone, so unknown fail_closed adopted today would fail closed
  on essentially every certificate it issues whenever access-engine is unreachable,
  including the continuity path an operator needs to repair that unreachability. It
  asked for a dated transitional unknown fail_open converting on coverage rather than
  calendar. Declined: a sanctioned transitional fail_open is indistinguishable at
  runtime from the stance the rule forbids and would make the rule optional at the
  only moment it costs anything, while section 11 s declared-gap mark already expresses
  a correct rule whose adoption is not yet affordable. Its second preference is adopted
  instead. Section 13.1 records a dated classification-coverage figure beside each
  stance, because unknown fail_closed over an entirely unclassified population is
  conformant and materially misleading. access-engine reached the same place from
  the other side: totality satisfied by a catch-all is satisfied vacuously, so a map
  must enumerate its axis and an absent scope must be distinguishable in the record
  from an unknown one and surface as a conformance failure.'
created: '2026-09-09T18:12:02.553370Z'
updated: '2026-09-09T18:12:02.553370Z'

Context

GH-DEC-2026-009 made unknown → fail_closed normative and made one cell of ops-warden's published stance map non-conformant. That ruling was circulated with v0.8 rather than imposed, precisely because the repository bearing its cost had not reviewed it. ops-warden returned the review on 2026-09-09 (history/2026-09-09-layer-model-v08-review.md, 8e1b621).

It assented to the rule, on the falsifier's own terms. The reversal clause anticipated that such a path would be a §5.1 read-only diagnostic carrying no PEP obligation. ops-warden went looking for that escape hatch on its own side and reported that it does not have one: the stance map governs exactly one protected action, warden sign, which is a credential-issuing side effect that §5.1 does not reach. The predicted defence is absent and the argument stands unrebutted.

Then it priced the adoption. Measured 2026-09-09:

signing targets (actor resources in snapshot):   0 resolved, 3 unknown, 1 n/a
routing catalog lanes:                           3 resolved, 18 unknown, 12 n/a

Zero of its signing targets resolve to a zone. So unknown → fail_closed adopted today does not fail closed on an edge case; it fails closed on essentially every certificate ops-warden issues, whenever access-engine is unreachable. That is the configuration ADR-0006 rejected, reached by another route: one value making the decision engine a uniform dependency of every signing path, including the continuity path needed to repair that dependency. Engine down → operator needs an SSH certificate to reach the host and restore it → the repair target is unknown because nobody classified it → denied.

Eighteen of its eighteen unknown lanes are unknown because another repository has not published a workload-identity declaration, and ADR-0009 rule 3 forbids closing that by inference.

access-engine arrived at the same register from the opposite side (FLEX-DEC-2026-011, F2): a map carrying unknown → fail_closed satisfies obligation 3's totality requirement vacuously. Every scope the author never enumerated lands in unknown, fails closed, and nobody ever learns which those were. It recognised the shape because it published it — FLEX-DEC-2026-008, a policy package shipped with no tenant rule at all while 29 fixtures passed, because every fixture carried the same tenant.

Decision

1. A dated transitional unknown: fail_open is declined

ops-warden's first preference was that obligation 3 name a transition: a consumer may declare unknown: fail_open as a dated, published transitional state with a coverage figure attached, converting on coverage rather than on calendar.

Declined. A sanctioned transitional fail_open is indistinguishable at runtime from the stance the rule forbids. It makes the rule optional at the moment of adoption — the only moment it costs anything — and unknown is the cheapest state for an attacker to induce whether or not the consumer has dated its intention to stop being permissive.

The mechanism asked for already exists and does not have that defect: §11's declared-gap mark says "correct rule, adoption not yet affordable" without inverting the rule's effect. ops-warden proposed exactly that as its own second preference and named WARDEN-WP-0040 as the route.

The deadlock is real and the answer is classification, not a permissive axis: continuity paths are classified into a scope whose stance is open, and the deadlock does not arise. ops-warden accepted that answer and correctly observed that it is work not yet done. Work not yet done is a gap. It is not a reason to hold the axis open.

And a stricter stance is not a licence to manufacture the membership that makes it survivable. ADR-0009 rule 3 is right and must hold under pressure from this ruling. A consumer MUST NOT infer a scope another repository has not declared.

2. Classification coverage is published beside the stance

§13.1 records a dated classification-coverage figure for each consumer. A row reading unknown → fail_closed while 100% of that consumer's targets are unknown is conformant and materially misleading: a reader cannot distinguish a strict consumer from an unclassified one. It is §11's published-map-equals-shipped-behaviour rule one level up — the map becomes accurate about itself and inaccurate about its effect.

Coverage is disclosure, not a licence. It does not soften the stance, gate it, or create a state in which a non-conformant cell becomes conformant. It reports.

Coverage is reported by the consumer and never computed here. A blank means "not reported", never "complete".

3. A map must enumerate its axis; absent is not unknown

Totality MUST NOT be satisfied by a catch-all. A published map enumerates the axis it scopes over. Otherwise obligation 3's totality requirement is unfalsifiable and its drift test passes by exercising the default rather than the axis.

unknown and absent are one runtime behaviour and two meanings. Both fail closed — absent for the stronger reason, since it is the branch reached by discovering that the author's model of their own axis was wrong, and §8's asymmetry forbids being more permissive on surprise. But an unknown hit is normal operation under a considered stance, while an absent hit is evidence this obligation is violated. An absent hit MUST be distinguishable in the record and MUST surface as a conformance failure rather than be absorbed by the catch-all.

This closes the question §16 opened at the v0.8 cut.

4. ops-mason is marked

An unpublished stance map is a plainer violation of obligation 3 than a wrongly-valued cell in a published one, and §13.1 stated it as bare fact while bolding the other. A reader scanning for marks found one row and concluded the other four were fine. That is Gate House's own §11 marking obligation applied to Gate House's own register, returned unchanged by access-engine after receiving the same argument about a stale row of its own. ops-mason's row is now marked, with no route recorded.

Reversal condition

If a consumer demonstrates a scope that is genuinely unclassifiable, genuinely low-consequence, and whose permissive resolution cannot be induced by an unprivileged party, §1 is open to revision — that falsifier is GH-DEC-2026-009's and survives here. ops-warden went looking for it and reported its absence, which is evidence and not proof.

§2 reverses if coverage figures start being read as a stance qualifier rather than as disclosure. If a row is ever argued to be conformant because its coverage is low, the column is doing harm and comes out.

Provenance

Raised by ops-warden (v0.8 assent, two findings and one agreement), which bears the entire cost of the ruling it assented to and asked for the transition it did not get. Its measured figures are the first entries in the coverage column. §3 raised by access-engine (FLEX-DEC-2026-011, F2); §4 by access-engine (F4). Applied to security-layer-model_v0.8.md §6.4 obligation 3 and §13.1 at net-kingdom@64394e9.

access-engine added, unprompted, that its concurrence with GH-DEC-2026-009 cost it nothing — it is not PEP-shaped and publishes no stance map — and that a PDP's assent to a ruling falling entirely on other repositories is weak evidence for it. That is recorded because it is right: the strength here is the asymmetry argument and ops-warden's assent against its own interest, not the count of repositories agreeing.