net-kingdom/workplans/NK-WP-0054-service-identity-policy.md

---
id: NK-WP-0054
type: workplan
title: "Service identity and privilege policy, conformance check and bind-account split"
domain: infotech
repo: net-kingdom
status: active
flavor: implementation
owner: claude
topic_slug: netkingdom
created: "2026-10-24"
updated: "2026-10-24"
related:
  - NK-WP-0049
  - NK-WP-0053
  - NK-WP-0031
state_hub_workstream_id: "36f61e43-f1f3-53fc-ad77-d1d797b3d5b1"
---

# NK-WP-0054 — Service identity and privilege policy

Intake from the founder's direction on 2026-10-24, during NK-WP-0049 backup validation.
Three identities exist today: `platform-root` (all-mighty build-mode access, not for
production use), `tegwick` (developer) and `admin` (platform administrator, intended
for operations and for backup validation and crisis recovery). Findings that led here:

- The T19 MFA proof ran as `platform-root`, the identity meant to leave production use.
- The human `admin` is LLDAP `uid=admin`, which is also the directory bind account for
  Authelia and the privacyIDEA resolver. One account has one password, so the human
  password is the service secret held in Kubernetes Secrets and in every backup bundle.
  An OTP on `admin` protects KeyCape logins but not the bind path.
- `pi-admin` already exists for privacyIDEA and is separate; its credentials are in the
  founder's personal password safe.
- No concrete crisis custody list existed. A first draft is `docs/crisis-custody-list.md`.

Direction: dedicated `svc-<service>` bind accounts, a dedicated admin account per
service (`ld-admin`, `pi-admin`, …), a NetKingdom standard that governs which identities
and privileges may exist for the services that are part of NetKingdom, and a health check
that validates conformance. This plan prepares and proposes; it grants nothing and changes
no live service. IAM Profile v0.3 already distinguishes human, service and agent
principals in tokens; this standard governs the accounts behind them and must extend,
not contradict, that profile and Credential Management Standard v0.2.

## Inventory current service identities and privileges

```task
id: NK-WP-0054-T01
status: done
priority: high
assignee: claude-code
state_hub_task_id: "422918a5-c695-5fe3-ba3c-2b370b2ef4dc"
```

Read-only inventory from repository manifests, ConfigMaps and owner-provided metadata.
No Secret is read. For each NetKingdom service (LLDAP, Authelia, KeyCape, privacyIDEA,
OpenBao, user-engine, tenant-engine, flex-auth and the platform consumers) list every
identity: name, class (human, break-glass, service bind, service admin, workload),
privileges, the credential's custody location, its consumers and its owner.

**Done when:** `docs/service-identity-inventory.md` lists every identity with its source,
and states plainly which entries are unknown and who must confirm them.

Completed 2026-10-24. `docs/service-identity-inventory.md` covers people, LLDAP, Authelia, KeyCape,
privacyIDEA, the identity-provisioner and engines, and OpenBao (railiance-platform files read
read-only). No Secret or live service was read. It ends with a table of what is unknown and who
confirms it. Main finding: the `admin` credential has **five** consumers (the human, Authelia,
KeyCape, the privacyIDEA resolver and the identity-provisioner), so T05 needs four service
accounts, not two. Also recorded: the provisioner needs more than read access, `trigger-admin`
is an uninventoried legacy admin, and OpenBao `platform-admin` binds on a group claim alone
(a question for T02, not a defect).

## Draft the Service Identity and Privilege standard

```task
id: NK-WP-0054-T02
status: done
priority: high
assignee: claude-code
depends_on: [NK-WP-0054-T01]
state_hub_task_id: "5830e2eb-334a-52fa-9c55-a8c00d89c09f"
```

Write `canon/standards/service-identity-privilege_v0.1.md` as a proposed standard:
identity classes; naming (`svc-<service>` for binds, `<service>-admin` for admins);
the rules the founder's findings imply (one identity, one purpose; a bind account is
read-only and never a login; no human uses a service credential; humans and admins
require MFA; every identity has an owner, a custody class and a rotation path; the
break-glass identity is not routine); the exception record; and its relation to IAM
Profile v0.3, Credential Management v0.2 and the Security Zones standard.

**Done when:** the draft is reviewed by the founder and the service owners it names.

Founder review of draft-3 completed 2026-10-24: profile approach accepted, `platform-root` and `admin` definitions
confirmed, approved in principle. What remains for **done** is the owners' side: railiance-platform and
security-canon replies (the other four hub messages, to state-hub, key-cape, glas-harness and emergent-security, are
recommendations and do not gate ratification). On their replies, set the standard's status to accepted and close T02.

Owner replies received 2026-10-24: security-canon confirmed all five mode readings and corrected the SEC-DSM
citations; railiance-platform prepared F-1 and the aal2 binding in source (RPF-WP-0065, nothing applied); key-cape,
glas-harness and state-hub assessed the agent and attribution gaps (KEY-WP-0043, GLAS-WP-0018, STATE-WP-0100).
Draft-4 of the standard applies all of it without changing a founder decision. What remains for T02 is ratification:
set the status to accepted when the founder decides.

Completed 2026-10-25: the founder ratified the standard as v0.1 (status accepted). Ratification applies no exception's
elimination path and changes no live service; owners adopt on their own schedule and the declarations stay
unconfirmed until they do.

Draft-3 (2026-10-24): realigned as an estate profile of SecurityCanon after a review against the canon
(`history/2026-10-24-security-identity-and-agent-review.md`): imported vocabulary, SEC-DSM references per rule,
estate identities in canon terms, new SI-15 (accountable automation). Validator migration is T08.
Draft-2 (2026-10-24, after the founder's review): decisions applied are OpenBao `platform-admin` binds
`aal2`; the human administrator keeps directory admin rights through an admin group; declarations start here
and move to the services; agents get their own class and rule SI-14. Rehearsals still to do (not decisions):
introducing `ld-admin` (LLDAP only) as the configured super-admin and demoting `admin`, the provisioner's narrowest scope, and whether a bind account can be kept
from signing in interactively. Finding F-1: the coding-agent role in OpenBao presents as a service against
IAM Profile v0.3. Draft-1 was delivered earlier the same day: `canon/standards/service-identity-privilege_v0.1.md` (proposed). Thirteen
rules (SI-1 to SI-13), naming, a target shape for today's services, the declaration fields, the
conformance result states, five initial exceptions (SI-X1 to SI-X5) and six open questions. It
extends IAM Profile v0.3 and Credential Management v0.2 without changing either. Review is the
founder's, then the service owners named in the inventory.

## Schema and offline conformance validator

```task
id: NK-WP-0054-T03
status: done
priority: medium
assignee: claude-code
depends_on: [NK-WP-0054-T02]
state_hub_task_id: "a5c51d69-28ff-5458-83eb-10a35c8c5492"
```

A declaration schema in `canon/schemas/` and an offline validator in
`tools/service-identity/`, in the style of `tools/tenancy-posture` and
`tools/custody-record`: each service declares its identities, the validator checks the
declaration against the standard, refuses secret-shaped values and reports counts only.

**Done when:** valid and invalid fixtures pass and fail as expected, and the declarations
for the current services are checked in.

Completed 2026-10-24, **provisionally**: built against draft-1 before the founder's review, so a rule
change in the standard changes the tool. `canon/schemas/service-identity_v0.1.schema.json`;
`tools/service-identity/validate.py` (30 tests); `make service-identity-test` and
`make service-identity-check`; eight declarations in `tools/service-identity/declarations/`, authored from
the inventory and all marked `owner_confirmed: false`. First run as of 2026-10-24: 0 non-conformant, 12
unknown, 2 excepted, 5 planned, 6 conformant. Unknown outnumbers conformant because the repository
cannot establish privileges for the KeyCape clients and others; that is the honest result, not a pass.
Building it changed the draft in three ways: custody became a list (the `admin` password lives in a
Secret and a person's safe), the SI-X1 exception grew to include SI-9 and NAMING, and the reserved-name
rule was scoped to credential-holding identities (standard section 10, question 7). SI-4, SI-5, SI-7,
SI-10 and SI-13 are not decidable from a declaration.

## Migrate declarations and validator to canon grants (draft-3)

```task
id: NK-WP-0054-T08
status: done
priority: medium
assignee: claude-code
depends_on: [NK-WP-0054-T03]
state_hub_task_id: "d45efcad-fb96-51b2-ab3d-4b183d3f586e"
```

Draft-3 of the standard is an estate profile of SecurityCanon: accounts carry an imported `principal_type`
and authority grants written `MODE @ SCOPE` with activation and environment, and break-glass is an
activation. The schema, validator and declarations still use draft-2's classes. Migrate them, keeping the
rule ids, the exception ids and the current results comparable (the first run under grants should report the
same non-conformant, excepted and unknown accounts unless a difference is explained).

**Done when:** the schema expresses principal type and grants, the declarations follow §3 of the standard,
the tests pass, and a before/after comparison is recorded.

Completed 2026-10-24. Schema, validator, fixtures, declarations and tests (40 pass) follow draft-3: imported
`principal_type`, grants `MODE @ SCOPE` with activation and environments, estate conventions `bind` and
`service-admin`, `unknown` placeholders, and an `elimination_path` on every exception. SI-4 and SI-7 became
decidable. Before/after, as of 2026-10-24 over the same eight declarations:

| Result | Draft-2 fields | Draft-3 grants |
| --- | --- | --- |
| non-conformant | 1 | 1 (`openbao/coding-agent`, SI-14) |
| unknown | 11 | 10 |
| excepted | 2 | 2 (`lldap/admin` SI-X1, `openbao/netkingdom-platform-admin` SI-X4) |
| planned | 5 | 5 |
| conformant | 6 | 7 |

The only account that moved is KeyCape's `secrets-engine-openbao` client, unknown to conformant: its scope
(`openbao:login` only) is established, so it can be stated as a grant instead of an unknown privilege level.
`lldap/admin` is now also excepted under SI-4, which grants made decidable; SI-X1 lists it.

## Live conformance health check

```task
id: NK-WP-0054-T04
status: wait
priority: medium
assignee: claude-code
depends_on: [NK-WP-0054-T03]
blocking_reason: "Validator delivered (T03, provisional). Await the T02 review and owner agreement on what read-only metadata each service can provide."
state_hub_task_id: "c8db4607-9306-572b-a3cb-c35ca5989ec7"
```

Compare declared against observed: for example, which DN each consumer's configuration
binds as, which group the bind accounts belong to, and which policies the admin roles
carry. Observed state comes from owner-provided read-only metadata and repository
manifests, never from reading Secrets. Findings feed the existing proposal-only posture
feedback (`tools/posture-feedback`) with an evidence-freshness bound. It changes nothing.

**Done when:** a dated run reports conformant, non-conformant and unknown per identity,
with each owner named for every finding.

**2026-10-28 (KeyCape):** key-cape `a1ab8ff` (KEY-WP-0045) adds `keycape identity-facts`, a value-safe
JSON export of the client registry, directory bind, factor service and admin surfaces. Four of
the five KeyCape unknowns are now declared from source (scopes limited to registered scopes,
`token.go:355-363`); `rapp-qonto` stays `unknown` until the live view (reference config names it
`rapp-qonto-client`, `qonto:read`). Findings handed on: KeyCape's LLDAP bind is the directory
admin (scope of T05, KEY-WP-0045-T03); `approval-engine-operator` is withdrawn but registered
(SI-11, KEY-WP-0013-T02). The founder's live view streams the deployed config through the
exporter without writing it to disk; the exact command is in key-cape KEY-WP-0045-T02.

**2026-10-28 (OpenBao, PostgreSQL):** railiance-platform `bd8ca57` (RPF-WP-0067-T02) adds a
value-safe metadata exporter (`scripts/service_identity_metadata_export.py`, 10 tests) for
OpenBao auth roles/policies with effective rules and PostgreSQL role flags and memberships.
Declared from source: `fluid-telegram-operators` OPERATE on four exact KV entries;
`coding-agent` OBSERVE only (its boundary policy denies the KV path its second policy grants,
which is therefore inert). `coding-agent` `agent.mode` stays unknown (KeyCape KEY-WP-0043).
The founder's live export commands are in RPF-WP-0067-T03.

## Split the directory bind from the human admin

```task
id: NK-WP-0054-T05
status: progress
priority: high
assignee: claude-code
needs_human: true
decision_id: "9f0f7a87-7adb-44f6-8360-db6a80e3ceca"
depends_on: [NK-WP-0054-T01]
state_hub_task_id: "c43d339a-fc8a-5526-885a-64693c930005"
```

Create `svc-authelia`, `svc-keycape` and `svc-privacyidea` as read-only directory binds and a
narrowly scoped provisioner account that can create users and groups without being the
directory super-admin (the inventory found these four consumers beside the human; the
narrowest working privilege for the provisioner must be tested against the pinned LLDAP image
first). Per the founder's decisions the human `admin` keeps its name and its administrative rights through an admin
group on its own password and OTP, and `ld-admin` is LLDAP's configured super-admin only. The migration
therefore introduces `ld-admin` by configuration on the existing directory and demotes `admin`; this is
rehearsed in isolation before any change. Switch the Authelia, KeyCape and privacyIDEA resolver configurations and the
provisioner to them, make `admin`'s password
human-only and rotate it, and remove the shared secret from the service Secrets. Update
the backup profile, the restore adapters (`isolated-lldap.py`, `isolated-authelia.py`,
`isolated-privacyidea-mfa.py`, which read the directory password from `lldap-secrets` and
rewrite the resolver address) and the restore packet. Prepare guarded helpers and
filled-in commands; the founder runs the live steps.

**Done when:** both services bind with their own read-only accounts, the human `admin`
password is not present in any service Secret, a fresh backup restores and passes the T17
and T19 drills under the new accounts, and the old shared credential is retired.

**2026-10-28 founder decision `9f0f7a87`: go, including the live run this week.** Order: guarded
helpers and filled-in commands; an isolated rehearsal on a restored copy of the directory covering
the `ld-admin` introduction, demotion of `admin` to an admin group, the narrowest provisioner
privilege on the pinned LLDAP image, and SI-3 (can a `svc-*` bind be kept from interactive login);
then the founder runs the live steps as soon as the rehearsal passes. KeyCape's bind is confirmed
as the directory admin from source (key-cape `a1ab8ff`, KEY-WP-0045-T03). The rotation lane is
`lldap-directory-bind` / `lldap-service-binds` in `tools/rotation-lanes/lanes.yaml`.

## Disposition of per-service admin accounts

```task
id: NK-WP-0054-T06
status: done
priority: medium
assignee: claude-code
needs_human: true
decision_id: "9f0f7a87-7adb-44f6-8360-db6a80e3ceca"
depends_on: [NK-WP-0054-T02]
state_hub_task_id: "8072b5cf-4161-58b9-8dfc-62fa102ccd16"
```

For each service decide whether a dedicated admin account exists and what it is called:
LLDAP (`ld-admin`), privacyIDEA (`pi-admin`, existing), Authelia, KeyCape (client
registry), OpenBao (the `platform-admin` role) and others. Record the result in the
inventory and the standard. `ld-admin` is for LLDAP only; `admin` stays the human's name on every service. Introducing `ld-admin` as the
configured super-admin on an existing directory is untested here, so it needs a rehearsal first. Also rehearse
whether a read-only bind account can be kept from signing in interactively (SI-3).

**Done when:** every service has a recorded disposition and a custody location.

**Done 2026-10-28, founder decision `9f0f7a87`:** dispositions accepted as proposed and recorded in
the standard (section "Per-service admin disposition"): LLDAP `ld-admin`; privacyIDEA `pi-admin`;
Authelia and KeyCape none (configuration-only, no local admin plane); OpenBao federated
`platform-admin` with root only via `generate-root`; PostgreSQL the CNPG `postgres` superuser through
railiance-platform. The `ld-admin` introduction and the SI-3 check are rehearsed under T05.

## Maintain the crisis custody list

```task
id: NK-WP-0054-T07
status: progress
priority: high
assignee: claude-code
needs_human: true
decision_id: "9f0f7a87-7adb-44f6-8360-db6a80e3ceca"
blocking_reason: "No TO CONFIRM row remains (2026-10-28). Open: the machine-readable freshness check and the first admin-operated drill (NK-WP-0053) verifying the list."
state_hub_task_id: "ae8524ff-12d8-59c2-b46b-88f3bfd44dd8"
```

Keep `docs/crisis-custody-list.md` current, and propose a non-secret machine-readable
record with a freshness check, modelled on `tools/custody-record`, so a drill can verify
that each row has a holder, a location and a last-proven date.

**Done when:** no row is marked `TO CONFIRM`, the freshness check exists and the first
`admin`-operated drill (NK-WP-0053) has verified the list.