---
id: KEY-WP-0032
type: workplan
title: "Pin the single route by which a principal becomes human"
domain: infotech
repo: key-cape
status: finished
owner: claude
topic_slug: principal-type-provenance-guard
created: "2026-09-10"
updated: "2026-09-10"
state_hub_workstream_id: "150b892c-f112-5fb9-b0f0-8072a52b85d5"
---

GH-DEC-2026-016 §5 applies A-16 to what makes a principal *human*: if `human` is
reachable by two routes — asserted by the identity layer about the person, or
supplied by a registration about the client they came through — the record must
say which, and a human-in-the-loop control must not be discharged on the
registration-supplied one. Refusing a service principal while accepting an
unverified assertion of humanity moves the defect rather than closing it.

gate-house said explicitly this was not a request. It is built because the
property it protects is true *today* and is the kind a plausible change erases
quietly.

## Pin the property, not the behaviour

```task
id: KEY-WP-0032-T01
status: done
priority: medium
state_hub_task_id: "2f42a72e-6292-5c02-9223-835db17b0a63"
```

`principal_type` has exactly one route to `human`: a string literal on the
authorization-code path, reached only after an upstream login resolved to a
directory user. No configuration field can assert it — verified against source
rather than assumed, and it is why the tenant provenance work has no counterpart
here and why A-16 does not yet bite.

Asserting the *behaviour* would not have protected that. A test checking "a human
token says human" passes just as happily when the value starts coming from a
registration. So the guard parses the package and requires every assignment to
`principal_type` to be a string literal, with the literal set exactly
`{human, service}` — one route each. `claims["principal_type"] =
client.PrincipalType` would look like a feature in review and fails the build
instead, with a message saying that if it is deliberate the claim must carry its
provenance the way `tenant_source` does.

Both assignment shapes are covered. The browser path assigns into a map; the
service path uses a key-value pair inside a map literal. Checking only
assignments found one of two routes and passed — a guard proving less than it
claimed, caught because the expected literal set was pinned rather than merely
counted.

Verified by mutation: replacing the literal with a function of the client
registration fails it at the exact line, and restoring it passes.

## What this deliberately does not do

```task
id: KEY-WP-0032-T02
status: done
priority: medium
state_hub_task_id: "13199970-75d1-5c38-aa8c-27d6e38dcf65"
```

No `principal_type_source` claim was added. There is one route, so a provenance
marker would encode a distinction that does not exist and invite consumers to
branch on it — the opposite of the tenant case, where two routes existed and the
claim could not say which had been taken.

The guard is the honest response to "not a request today": it makes the absence
of a second route a checked fact rather than a remembered one, and hands the
decision to whoever creates the second route, at the moment they create it.