tegwick
cbf6828061
flex-auth enforced its ops-warden pin (FLEX-WP-0016 T03) and the gate verified clean against it: readiness exits 0, decision:f3f7c88f9585582a, anonymous /v1/check now 401. Everything needed to set policy.enabled: true was in place. It stays false, by decision. policy.enabled is a single repo-wide boolean, and with fail_closed: true it makes flex-auth a hard dependency of every warden sign — including the certs the ops-bridge tunnels depend on, one of which carries the policy call itself. Uniform enforcement across an estate being actively rebuilt hardens the access needed to perform the rebuild. The repo already refuses one-dimensional posture: WP-0015 shipped environment and maturity axes, WP-0029 added organization_posture. A global flag ignores all three. ADR-0006 records that enforcement belongs to a zone, and binds future work — a zone-blind enforcement flag is out of order, not merely unwise. WARDEN-WP-0032 drafts the zone model, leading with the ownership question: whether this is ops-warden's to own or NetKingdom canon to consume (ADR-0005). WP-0031 is finished with T05 cancelled and resuming as WP-0032-T05. Also replaces the hand-run kubectl port-forward with a managed ops-bridge tunnel, flex-auth-ops-warden-railiance01 (-L 19090:10.43.1.165:8080). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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| id | type | title | domain | repo | status | version | revision | owner | binds | created | updated | last_reviewed | review_interval | enforced_by | supersedes | successor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ops-warden-adr-0006 | adr | ADR-0006 — Enforcement is zone-scoped, never a global flag | infotech | ops-warden | accepted | 1.0 | 1 | ops-warden | ops-warden | 2026-08-19 | 2026-08-19 | 2026-08-19 | 6m | warden.yaml policy.enabled; scripts/check_policy_caller_identity.py; WARDEN-WP-0032 |
ADR-0006 — Enforcement is zone-scoped, never a global flag
Status
Accepted 2026-08-19, at the moment policy.enabled: true was ready to be set
and deliberately was not.
Context
WARDEN-WP-0031 finished the calling side of the flex-auth pre-sign gate. The
flex-auth pin flex-auth-ops-warden runs callerAuth.mode: enforce; ops-warden
presents a bound ServiceAccount token; the readiness gate exits 0 against the
enforcing pin and an anonymous /v1/check is 401. Everything needed to set
policy.enabled: true was in place.
policy.enabled is a single boolean over the whole repo. Combined with
fail_closed: true it makes flex-auth a hard dependency of every warden sign — including the certificates the ops-bridge tunnels depend on, one of
which is the tunnel carrying the policy call itself. A dead tunnel or a
recreated Service does not degrade signing; it stops it.
That cost might be acceptable for a settled production lane. It is not acceptable uniformly, because ops-warden signs across an estate that is being actively rebuilt. During deep refactors — CoulombCore's decommission, the issue-core move, cluster rebuilds — the same flag would harden exactly the access needed to perform the refactor. Security that stops the work stops being security and starts being an outage with good intentions.
The repo already refuses to treat posture as one-dimensional. WP-0015 shipped
environment posture (dev / test / prod) and workload maturity (M0–M3);
WP-0029 added organization_posture: build as a third axis precisely because
the organization's state changes what is reasonable to demand. A global
policy.enabled contradicts all of that: it is a fourth control that ignores
the three axes already declared.
Decision
Enforcement posture is a property of a zone, not of the repo. ops-warden
does not enable a fail-closed authorization gate globally. Before
policy.enabled: true is set anywhere, the zones must exist: named bands of
differing rigidity, each declaring what is enforced, what is advisory, and what
is exempt — and the gate must be scoped to them.
Concretely, until WARDEN-WP-0032 defines the zone model:
policy.enabledstaysfalse. Its readiness is evidence, not a mandate.- A gate that is ready is recorded as ready. Readiness is not a reason to enable; deferral with a stated reason is a legitimate terminal state for a task, not an unfinished one.
- Any future enforcement control ships zone-aware or does not ship. A second global boolean is the defect this record exists to prevent.
Consequences
We accept that the pre-sign gate remains unexercised in production longer,
and that the WP-0031 evidence ages. Re-running
scripts/check_policy_caller_identity.py re-establishes it cheaply, and the
readiness gate exists precisely so this is a re-check rather than a re-do.
We accept that flex-auth's flex-auth-ops-warden pin sits enforcing with no
enforcing consumer. That is not waste: it makes the anonymous path 401 rather
than a decision, which was the ADHOC-2026-08-17-T01 condition regardless of
whether ops-warden calls it.
We reject the framing that a ready control should be turned on because it is ready. The question is not "does it work" but "which zone is this, and does this zone want this failure mode."
This binds future work. A zone-blind enforcement flag proposed in any ops-warden workplan is out of order under this ADR, and should be sent back to the zone model rather than merged with a caveat in its description.
Related
WARDEN-WP-0031— the calling side that made the flip possible (T05 deferred under this ADR)WARDEN-WP-0032— the zone model this record defers towiki/WorkloadSecurityPosture.md— the two axes already shipped (WP-0015)wiki/PolicyGatedSigning.md— the gate itselfhistory/2026-08-19-flex-auth-caller-identity-evidence.md— readiness evidence- flex-auth
FLEX-WP-0016— the enforcing pin