info-tech-canon/infospace/interfaces/security-canon-boundary.md

SecurityCanon extension boundary

Status: accepted for the semantic boundary documented below, reviewed by Claude in the InfoTechCanon repository on 2026-09-20. This is an agent review, not a claim of separate human sign-off or a published peer merge.

Review target: security-canon draft 0.2.0 at b1fa25ebe3204b5da0febf70190533711c19fbce. InfoTechCanon review base and import source: e1f98da015f32545254747c8e9f59b780c423d5b.

SecurityCanon supplies an architecture-layer vocabulary for authority relationships — the Mode of Authority — and references shared InfoTechCanon concepts. InfoTechCanon retains the shared roots, the access-control model, the identity model, and the CARING access governance standard.

Accepted dispositions

• Layer separation. Mode of Authority describes the relationship in which authority is exercised; CARING analyses how an access-control implementation is composed. Both may describe the same system without either subsuming the other. Recorded on the SecurityCanon side as SEC-ADR-001.
• Auth Mode is orthogonal to access operation. read + USE and read + OBSERVE share an operation and differ in authority relationship. AccessOperations remains owned by ITC-ACCESS and is imported, not redefined.
• Auth Mode is orthogonal to CARING Canonical Role and Plane. The three answer different questions. The CARING Operator role and the OPERATE auth mode are not the same concept and neither is renamed; a disambiguation page in SecurityCanon is the required companion.
• Actor/Subject is not reused. ITC-ACCESS owns Subject and binds it as "Subject is the access-control view of an actor", with actor semantics owned by the Organization Model. SecurityCanon renamed its on-behalf-of dimension to AuthorityContext rather than overloading either word. No change is required in InfoTechCanon.
• Scope, AccessOperations, PrincipalType and Purpose are imports. They retain their InfoTechCanon owners. Purpose resolves to the Purpose and Demand extension rather than being defined in SecurityCanon.
• EvidenceBoundary is a new concept, not an alias of the CARING Audit Plane. The Audit Plane names a surface; EvidenceBoundary asks whether the observed actor can alter, suppress or bypass the evidence used to observe it.
• No InfoTechCanon concept is transferred. This boundary creates no removal, relocation or deprecation in InfoTechCanon, so the InfoTechCanon corpus is unchanged by it.

Evidence and limits

Reviewed infospace/vocabulary/mode-of-authority/SecurityCanonModeOfAuthority.md, auth-modes.yaml, dimensions.yaml, imports.json, infospace/mappings/mode-of-authority-to-infotechcanon.md and infospace/interfaces/federation.yaml at the SecurityCanon revision above.

All five manifest SHA-256 values match Git blobs at the declared InfoTechCanon source revision, and those files are unchanged in the review checkout: InfoTechCanonCore, InfoTechCanonAccessControlModel, InfoTechCanonIdentityModel, InfoTechCanonOrganizationModel, and InfoTechCanonPurposeDemandExtension.

None of the seven concepts SecurityCanon declares — AuthMode, AuthorityContext, AuthorityRealm, AuthorityProvenance, Activation, EvidenceBoundary, AccessSituation — appears in any InfoTechCanon owned_concepts declaration, so this boundary introduces no ownership conflict.

Limits of this acceptance:

• Scoped to SecurityCanon draft 0.2.0. No stable promotion is asserted.
• Acceptance covers the semantic boundary and import declarations. It records no consumer adoption, no runtime claim, and no conformance statement.
• A proposal to generalise CARING section 32 beyond non-human subjects was referenced by SecurityCanon and not accepted at the time of this review. It was reviewed separately on 2026-09-20 and accepted as INFO-DEC-2026-001; see history/2026-09-20_235357+0200-caring-32-generalisation.md. CARING moves to canon version 0.4.0-RC2-itc2. The change is additive and affects no SecurityCanon declaration.
• The G7 validator in prj-canon-federation pins card paths for info-tech-canon, commerce-canon and the-custodian. Registering the security-canon card is that project's change; this review does not make it.

Re-verification — 2026-09-20 (INFO-WP-0027-T04)

Re-run against the enlarged InfoTechCanon ownership index (750 entries, up from 164) after INFO-WP-0027-T02 gave every defining artifact an owned_concepts declaration. The original acceptance compared SecurityCanon's concepts against the declarations that existed then; this re-runs it against declarations that now cover the corpus.

No ownership conflict. None of the nine SecurityCanon-owned concepts — AuthMode, AuthorityContext, AuthorityRealm, AuthorityProvenance, Activation, EvidenceBoundary, AccessSituation, Time, and the dimension slot for Environment — collides with an InfoTechCanon declaration. The boundary's central claim holds.

Five of the twelve declared imports do not resolve by name. The original review verified the manifest by file hash, and every hash matched; it never checked that the named concept exists in the named artifact. The enlarged index makes that checkable:

Import	Pinned to	Resolves to	Finding
Artifact	InfoTechCanonCore	model/devsecops	Core owns CanonArtifact, "any identifiable unit of canon content". There is no Core Artifact. The name now resolves to the DevSecOps build artifact, a different concept.
Ownership	InfoTechCanonCore	model/organization	The kernel map assigns Ownership and Stewardship to Organization. The pin names the wrong artifact.
Relationship	InfoTechCanonCore	model/identity	Core owns RelationshipDefinition; the identity model owns Relationship as its actor-linking taxonomy. The pin names the wrong artifact and arguably the wrong concept.
AccessOperations	InfoTechCanonAccessControlModel	unowned	ITC-ACCESS defines Operation, "a system-specific or API-specific action". AccessOperations is SecurityCanon's own compaction of it.
PrincipalType	InfoTechCanonIdentityModel	unowned	The name appears nowhere in the identity or access-control models.

These are SecurityCanon-side manifest corrections, not InfoTechCanon changes. No InfoTechCanon concept is renamed, moved or removed to accommodate them, and the semantic boundary recorded above is unaffected: each case is a citation naming the wrong artifact or a name InfoTechCanon never used, not a contested concept.

Method limit, now closed. Hash verification proves the reviewed file is the file that was pinned. It says nothing about whether the concept named in the manifest exists in it. Both checks are needed, and only the first was run in the original acceptance.

Standing check — 2026-09-20 (INFO-WP-0028)

This partner's import manifest is registered at infospace/interfaces/manifests/security-canon.json as a provenance-preserving copy and is re-resolved on every make check. Hash and name are checked together by info_tech_canon import-review; a name that stops resolving, or resolves to a different owner than the manifest pins, is reported as a federation_import_drift warning naming this partner. It is a warning and not an error because a stale partner pin is not this repository's file to fix.

Current result: 11 of 11 declared imports resolve, all six pinned hashes match, no drift.