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.

Answered by net-kingdom 2026-08-19 (canon owner of tenancy-posture_v0.1, answering ZONE-WP-0001-T01): do not fold it in, and do not put it in a per-repo declaration under any key. organization_posture is a fleet-wide, time-varying scalar describing the estate, not a property of a declaring service; a per-repo copy of a global goes stale in as many places as there are repos. It stays what WP-0029 made it — an input to stance selection that the zone model reads. Hand it over as an input, not as a candidate axis. Environment posture and M0–M3 are per-workload and remain genuinely composable; those two are still open for ZONE-WP-0001-T02.

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 the format ZONE-WP-0001-T05 settles, alongside the existing posture descriptors.

Amended by net-kingdom 2026-08-19 — the carrier file is already settled, only its contents are open. Canon Decision 5.6 (tenancy-posture_v0.1 draft-9) rules that zone membership is declared in tenancy.yaml under a reserved top-level zones: key, sibling to tenancy: and provider: and never inside tenancy.current. §5.4 makes that file the repo's single posture declaration surface, and a second root file would be the second-source-of-truth failure ADR-0001 exists to prevent — in ops-warden's own idiom. The key is reserved and deliberately unconstrained in net-kingdom/canon/schemas/tenancy-posture_v0.1.schema.json, so a combined declaration validates today.

Note the consequence for this repo: ops-warden does not currently have a tenancy.yaml. Declaring zones means writing one, which means declaring the six-axis posture vector too. That is a real and probably overdue cost, not an accident of this amendment — canon would rather ops-warden declare both accurately than declare a zone with no posture beside it.

Note also why stance is not something this declaration may set: canon Decision 5.6 rules that a declarer must not be the party that sets the stance, or an accurately declared exempt becomes conformant and exempt. ops-warden declares which zone a lane or actor is in. The stance of the pre-sign gate in that zone is flex-auth's policy package; the failure mode is ops-warden's own setting, per flex-auth's T03 amendment. 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.

id: WARDEN-WP-0032-T05
status: done
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "4d5d2756-c880-4e90-8fb7-1f03674a4cd9"

Grade the five exposed lanes now — do not wait for the model. RISK-F-0003: is_high_risk is risk == "high" and risk is optional, so the 14 ungraded lanes never reach the agent read-boundary. Five are exec_capable and can therefore stream a value to an agent session: openbao-api-key, whynot-design-npm-publish, key-cape-oidc-login, issue-core-ingestion-api-key, reuse-surface-hub-write-token.

The durable answer is a maturity-derived default (ZONE-WP-0001-T03), and it is the right answer. It is also months away, and this is a live control gap in a shipped ADR. Grade these five explicitly, then the remaining nine.

Grading is judgement, not backfill — each lane's grade should be justified in the entry, and the operator should sanction the high/standard calls rather than having them inferred. Verify separately whether OpenBao's agent-high-risk-boundary policy covers these paths; RISK-F-0003 deliberately does not assume it does, because those paths were graded by the same omission.

Done 2026-08-19, operator-sanctioned. All 14 ungraded lanes graded on merit, each with its justification in the entry: 17 high, 10 standard, 0 ungraded. warden access <lane> --fetch with WARDEN_AGENT_ID set now exits 7 on lanes that were silently outside the control an hour earlier.

Graded on merit, not defensively. A first pass marked issue-core-ingestion-api-key and reuse-surface-hub-write-token high; the existing test test_high_risk_lanes_classified asserted the opposite and was right — ordinary internal workload secrets are standard. Both were regraded down. high means disclosure into a logged context is damaging beyond what rotation recovers: provider keys with spend, admin PATs, tenant commercial data, supply-chain publish rights. inter-hub-bootstrap-ssh is high conservatively — ops-warden could not establish that no key material moves in the envelope, and that is recorded in the entry so it is regraded with evidence rather than assumed down.

The rule is now ADR-0007: build-stage permissiveness stops at credential disclosure. Not yet verified: whether OpenBao's agent-high-risk-boundary policy covers these paths (T06).

id: WARDEN-WP-0032-T06
status: progress
priority: medium
state_hub_task_id: "8c082416-0ff9-45dc-8cbd-e9ca7913a6ef"

Make absence impossible, once the model says what absence means. Waits on ZONE-WP-0001-T03. Either invert the default (absent risk resolves through the lane owner's maturity, per the operator direction) or require risk at catalog load and in CI. Whichever lands, the failure mode to kill is the current one: adding a lane without a grade silently places it outside a control, with nothing at load or in CI noticing.

Feed back to ZONE-WP-0001-T03 whether ops-warden can supply the join it needs — today no lane references a workload or an environment, so the M0–M3 ladder has nothing to attach to from this side.

Enforcement half done 2026-08-20. It did not need the zone model: ADR-0007 already decided absence is a defect, which is enough to make the code fail safe and to gate CI.

The real mechanism turned out to be sharper than RISK-F-0003 described. is_high_risk was risk == "high", but risk was not absent at the model layer — RouteEntry.risk carried a dataclass default of "standard". So an omitted grade was not unhandled; it was actively resolved to the permissive value. Fail-open by construction, which is why nothing warned.

Now: the default is "ungraded", and is_high_risk returns true for anything not in an explicit low-risk vocabulary (standard / low / accepted). An omitted grade and a grade from a newer catalog both resolve to high, so the boundary fails safe in both directions. is_graded exposes the distinction, and test_every_repo_catalog_lane_is_explicitly_graded is the CI gate that stops an ungraded lane being committed. Four regression tests cover it.

accepted is in the low-risk vocabulary deliberately, ready for the maturity-derived default: an experimental-context lane may be explicitly accepted, which is a graded decision rather than an omission.

Still open on this task: whether the maturity-derived default replaces the ungraded sentinel entirely (waits on ZONE-WP-0001-T03), and verifying OpenBao's agent-high-risk-boundary policy covers these paths.

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
• net-kingdom tenancy-posture_v0.1 draft-9 Decisions 5.6, 8.4.1, 8.4.2 — canon's answer to ZONE-WP-0001-T01; enforcement stance is a sibling standard, not a seventh axis, and the declaration surface is tenancy.yaml