ops-warden/workplans/WARDEN-WP-0032-security-zones.md

id	type	title	domain	repo	status	owner	topic_slug	planning_priority	depends_on_workplans	created	updated	state_hub_workstream_id
WARDEN-WP-0032	workplan	Adopt security zones as a consumer — retire the global policy.enabled	infotech	ops-warden	proposed	ops-warden	netkingdom	P1	WARDEN-WP-0031	2026-08-19	2026-08-19	f1b6cdcb-5e16-48ab-a72b-339e909e92f0

WARDEN-WP-0032 — Adopt security zones as a consumer

ADR-0006 defers policy.enabled: true until enforcement can be scoped to a zone. The zone model itself is no longer ops-warden's work. It moved to zone-engine as ZONE-WP-0001 on 2026-08-19, where it belongs under ADR-0005 — ops-warden implements one lane narrowly and routes the rest, and an estate-wide enforcement model is not a lane it should absorb.

What stays here is the consumer side: ops-warden was the repo whose deferred flip exposed the gap, it holds the controls the model must be able to express, and it is the first consumer the model has to satisfy.

What ops-warden owes zone-engine

Inputs, not designs. ZONE-WP-0001-T02 derives the model from the real estate, and most of that estate is ops-warden's:

• 27 routing catalog lanes (registry/routing/catalog.yaml) with risk, status, and delegation already on each — the likeliest membership inputs.
• The actor inventory (adm / agt / atm) and its TTL policy.
• The three posture axes already shipped — environment and maturity (WP-0015), organization_posture (WP-0029) — including the honest answer to whether organization_posture should be folded into zones rather than run beside them.
• Three controls the model must be able to express: the flex-auth pre-sign gate (policy.enabled + fail_closed), the agent read-boundary on risk: high lanes (ADR-0004), and the warden plan escalation verdicts.
• The compiled-registry path (scripts/build_flex_auth_registry.py) — how membership can reach flex-auth without a lookup in a latency-critical decision path.

Tasks

id: WARDEN-WP-0032-T01
status: todo
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "b6dac514-4b05-47b8-8745-6a1c67b6100e"

Hand the estate inputs to ZONE-WP-0001-T02. Not a design proposal — the lanes, actors, axes, and controls above, with the exceptions ops-warden already knows do not fit cleanly (the interim delegation lanes from WP-0030 are the obvious candidates: a lane covered on someone else's behalf may not sit in the same zone as one ops-warden owns outright).

Include the organization_posture fold-in question honestly, including the case against keeping it.

id: WARDEN-WP-0032-T02
status: wait
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "08735f17-fe7e-4a6a-9b71-f350f98c30b1"

Replace policy.enabled with a zone-aware control. Waits on ZONE-WP-0001-T03 and T05. Reads the zone of the actor being signed for and that zone's failure mode. Ship deprecation and migration in the same change — leaving both is the second-source-of-truth failure ADR-0001 exists to prevent.

Re-run scripts/check_policy_caller_identity.py before enabling anything: the WP-0031 evidence (decision:f3f7c88f9585582a, 2026-08-19) will be stale, and re-establishing it is cheap precisely so this is a re-check rather than a re-do.

This closes WARDEN-WP-0031-T05.

Amended by flex-auth 2026-08-19, reviewing ZONE-WP-0001 as the PDP. Two constraints that change what this task can build, both argued in full at ZONE-WP-0001-T03 and T04:

1. The zone-aware control splits across the boundary, it does not move. flex-auth will read compiled zone membership from the registry and apply the per-zone stance from its policy package, returning an effect plus an advisory annotation. What stays on the ops-warden side is the axis flex-auth structurally cannot carry: fail_closed is not expressible by a PDP. Fail-open describes what warden sign does when flex-auth is unreachable — no decision is rendered, so no compiled data and no policy rule can reach it. So the replacement for policy.enabled is not one zone-derived boolean either; it is (a) stance, which arrives in the decision, and (b) failure mode, which stays a local ops-warden setting declared per zone. Plan for two, or T02 will be built expecting flex-auth to answer something it cannot.

2. The membership compiler is ops-warden's to change, and it has a name collision to resolve first. scripts/build_flex_auth_registry.py:77 already emits "trust_zone": "platform" as a hardcoded constant on every ssh-certificate resource. It is a first-class field on flex-auth's Resource, it is surfaced into rego input, and no policy package reads it. Before compiling zone membership, either retire that constant or deliberately repurpose it — do not add security_zone beside a dormant trust_zone and leave the next reader to guess which is real. That is the ADR-0001 second-source-of-truth failure in miniature, inside a generated artifact.

Good news for T03's cost: no flex-auth registry schema change is required. metadata, labels and attributes already flatten into the rego input, so the compiler can emit membership today.

id: WARDEN-WP-0032-T03
status: wait
priority: medium
state_hub_task_id: "fd642377-8d64-473c-b684-f8f1a842c223"

Declare ops-warden's zones in whatever format ZONE-WP-0001-T05 settles, alongside the existing posture descriptors. Per flex-auth's T05 amendment, this declaration must also say whether a zone rides the actor (a flex-auth subject) or the lane (a flex-auth per-actor resource) — in the compiled registry an actor is both, and the compiler needs to be told which record carries membership. Carry the conformance rule: accuracy, not altitude. Declaring a stricter zone than can be evidenced is the failure mode that looks like progress.

id: WARDEN-WP-0032-T04
status: wait
priority: medium
state_hub_task_id: "1af3d26e-ce21-46ca-a56c-486d52b76dcb"

Amend ADR-0006. Once zones exist and enforcement scoping is owned by zone-engine, ADR-0006 must say that ops-warden follows the model rather than owning it — a superseding record, never an in-place edit. Update SCOPE.md, wiki/WorkloadSecurityPosture.md, and wiki/PolicyGatedSigning.md with it.

Related

• zone-engine ZONE-WP-0001 — the model, and where this work is led from
• ADR-0006 — enforcement is zone-scoped, never a global flag
• WARDEN-WP-0031 — the deferred flip and its readiness evidence