security-canon/README.md
tegwick a4ec38feb2 Promote Mode of Authority to a canon artifact (T06, T07)
Publishes sec-authority:ModeOfAuthority v0.2.0 with machine-readable
auth-modes.yaml and dimensions.yaml, and moves the v0.1 draft verbatim to
research/ as provenance — it had been sitting in spec/, which the Repository
Layout Standard reserves for implementation guidance.

Terminology separation decided as SECURITY-DEC-2026-002 / SEC-ADR-002. The
v0.1 Subject dimension becomes AuthorityContext, because InfoTechCanon's
access-control model already owns Actor and Subject and binds them as "Subject
is the access-control view of an actor"; reusing the pair for two distinct
parties would have made one word mean two things across the canons. Operator
versus OPERATE, Build Plane versus CONSTRUCT, Policy Plane versus GOVERN, Audit
Plane versus EvidenceBoundary and Condition versus Activation are separated
rather than merged, and Scope, AccessOperations, Purpose and PrincipalType are
declared imports. Namespace sec-authority: reserved; itc-caring: and itc-access:
stay upstream and are not aliased.

Two of the draft's open questions are closed. CONSTRUCT stays distinct from
GOVERN, the test being the object of authority — the artifact versus the
constraint it must satisfy — which keeps "who may edit the policy" separable
from "who decides what it must say". Substrate authority becomes a DOMINATES
relation between Authority Realms carrying dominance_kind, observable and
evidence_boundary, which makes the relative-sovereignty principle checkable
instead of merely asserted.

Orientation surfaces published: the one-page vocabulary card, the ten-question
design heuristic promoted from the draft's appendix to section 3 of the
artifact, the role/plane/mode disambiguation page, and the cross-layer mapping
to InfoTechCanon with its deliberate blanks where one layer has no equivalent.

Generalising CARING section 32 beyond non-human subjects is deliberately not
bundled in; it is InfoTechCanon's to accept as a demand signal.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AUkN13CAqtXWPXuEiEtmJj

Assistant: claude-code
Assistant-Model: opus
Assistant-Process: 36656@bnt-lap001
Assistant-Session: 66d6eece-d245-43ca-85e8-68a1b5970a67
2026-09-20 21:43:11 +02:00

2.6 KiB

security-canon

Orthogonal vocabulary and canonical model for security-related concepts.

SecurityCanon extends InfoTechCanon with a focused security domain model, in the same architectural role that CommerceCanon holds for commercial terminology and InterfaceCanon for interface terminology.

Its subject is architecture, not implementation: the relationships in which authority is exercised, described before and independently of the mechanisms that enforce them. Its first contribution is the Mode of Authority vocabulary — seven auth modes (USE, OBSERVE, OPERATE, ADMINISTER, GOVERN, CONSTRUCT, SOVEREIGN) read relative to a scope. CARING and the access-control and identity models stay in InfoTechCanon, at the implementation layer and as shared roots; see SEC-ADR-001.

Flavor project
Domain infotech
Workplan prefix SECURITY-WP-
Upstream canon InfoTechCanon
Service surface none — reuses InfoTechCanon's

Start with INTENT.md and SCOPE.md. Agent instructions are in AGENTS.md; active work is in workplans/.

Document What it holds
SEC-ADR-001 the boundary decision — what stays upstream, and why
SEC-ADR-002 the terminology separation — why AuthorityContext, not Subject
Mode of Authority assessment review of the v0.1 draft and the proposed canon structure
Actor/Subject implications the one open terminology question, analysed

Status

Draft. The Mode of Authority vocabulary is published as a canon artifact with machine-readable modes and dimensions; the v0.1 research draft is retained in research/ as provenance. Stable promotion needs reviewed mappings and concrete consumer evidence. See SECURITY-WP-0001.

Orientation

Start here For
Vocabulary card the seven modes and the notation, on one page
Mode of Authority the canon artifact
Disambiguation operator or OPERATE? role, plane, or mode?
Mapping to InfoTechCanon how it relates to the access-control model and CARING