Seed INTENT and WP-0001: adversarial evidence facility

Answers the Tenancy Posture question that has been unowned since the framework
was drafted - who verifies a consumer's tenant boundary. Two repos were asked
and both correctly declined as fleet-scope work. The work needed a home.

Independence is the load-bearing property, not a nicety. rapp-postgres wrote
fifteen probes against its own isolation model and found four real defects,
which is good work and still the author checking their own homework. The probes
worth having are the ones the author would not think to write, because the
assumption that produced the defect produces the blind spot.

That argues against NetKingdom owning this even though it owns the security
canon: a facility verifying conformance to a framework must not report to the
repo that owns the framework, or self-grading just moves up a level. Proposed
owner is the-custodian, consistent with policy and risk. Needs confirmation.

Two things stated because overclaiming is the failure this estate keeps
catching in itself. "Automated" has a ceiling - the highest-impact cross-tenant
findings need someone who understands what the data means, since a response can
be well-formed, 200, fast, and contain another tenant's rows; so automate the
reproducible and flag the irreducible for dated review. And a passing suite
proves the attacks we thought of did not work, not that the boundary holds. The
gap between those sentences is where breaches live.

WP-0001 gates everything behind rules of engagement, because an automated
facility probing systems without written scope is indistinguishable from the
threat it models. No standing privilege, no BYPASSRLS, no superuser - an
attacker would not have them and a probe holding them proves nothing. No
exfiltration of real tenant data even as proof; a count and a schema shape are
proof enough. And no saturation probing outside a declared window, because with
a six-consumer connection ceiling that is an outage for every co-resident.

T04 exists because a probe that has only ever passed is not evidence. Every
probe must be shown failing against a known-bad fixture before it is trusted
passing - the same discipline rapp-postgres used when it verified its drift
check by deliberately re-pinning to a bad digest.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

workplans/WHITEHAT-WP-0001-cross-tenant-evidence.md

@@ -0,0 +1,189 @@
+---
+id: WHITEHAT-WP-0001
+type: workplan
+title: "Produce the adversarial evidence the Tenancy Posture ladders require"
+domain: infotech
+repo: whitehat-security
+status: proposed
+owner: the-custodian
+topic_slug: whitehat-security
+created: "2026-08-17"
+updated: "2026-08-17"
+---
+
+# WHITEHAT-WP-0001 — cross-tenant evidence
+
+## Goal
+
+Produce, on a schedule, the adversarial evidence artifacts that NetKingdom's
+*Tenancy Posture* standard requires and no repo can honestly produce about
+itself — starting with the one the framework calls its highest-severity gap.
+
+Done means: a service claiming `E2` has been attacked as an adversary holding
+its runtime credential, the attempt is recorded with a date and an attacker
+model, and a failure routes to `risk-nexus` rather than to a log nobody reads.
+
+## The forcing case
+
+*Tenancy Posture* open question 3 has been unowned since the framework was
+drafted. What it calls a tenant-boundary failure the security industry calls
+**Broken Object Level Authorization** — OWASP API1, top of the API Security Top
+10 since that list launched, and the most commonly exploited API vulnerability
+in published assessments.
+
+The estate has no coverage for it. `rapp-postgres` runs fifteen adversarial
+probes and every one targets the *consumer* boundary — service versus service.
+None targets the tenant boundary *inside* a consumer, which is where the
+framework says the residual risk actually lives.
+
+## Rules of engagement — T01, and nothing else starts first
+
+An automated facility that probes systems without written scope is
+indistinguishable from the threat it models. This is the gating task and it is
+not paperwork.
+
+- **Scope.** Which systems, which namespaces, which credentials. Explicitly:
+  build-mode environments now; production requires a separate, recorded
+  authorization.
+- **Prohibited actions**, stated as hard rules rather than intentions:
+  no destructive operations against data the estate did not create for the
+  test; no exfiltration of real tenant data even as proof of a finding —
+  a count and a schema shape are proof enough; no denial-of-service against a
+  shared substrate outside a declared window, because the connection ceiling
+  means a saturation probe is an outage for every co-resident.
+- **Credentials.** The facility holds leased credentials like any workload,
+  through the sanctioned OpenBao lane. It gets no standing privilege, and
+  notably **no `BYPASSRLS` and no superuser** — an attacker would not have them
+  and a probe holding them proves nothing.
+- **Attribution.** Every probe connection is identifiable as a probe in
+  `pg_stat_activity` and in logs, so an operator investigating an anomaly can
+  tell us from a real adversary in seconds.
+- **Abort.** How a run is stopped, by whom, and what state it leaves behind.
+
+**Output:** `docs/rules-of-engagement.md`, reviewed by the operator personally.
+This is exactly the class of thing `risk-nexus`'s escalation duty exists for.
+
+## Tasks
+
+### T01 — Rules of engagement
+As above. Gates everything.
+
+### T02 — The attacker model per axis
+
+What the adversary is assumed to hold, so a probe is judged against a threat
+rather than against taste. Drawn from *Tenancy Posture* §4.3, which already
+distinguishes them:
+
+| Axis | Adversary holds | Probe answers |
+|---|---|---|
+| E1/E2 | A legitimate runtime credential and the ability to make ordinary requests as tenant A | Can it reach tenant B's rows? |
+| E3 | The above, plus SQL execution on the connection | Can it re-`SET` the tenant GUC and read across? |
+| E4 | A leaked per-tenant credential | Can it address another tenant's substrate at all? |
+| P1/P2 | A co-resident consumer behaving badly within its own allowance | What degradation do neighbours experience? |
+| R | A copy of a backup taken before an erasure | Is the erased data still readable? |
+
+**Output:** `docs/attacker-model.md`. Note that the E3 row exists because the
+framework corrected itself: E3 stops accident, not compromise, and a probe that
+only tested accident would report a strength E3 does not have.
+
+### T03 — Differential cross-tenant harness (the E2 artifact)
+
+The core technique: run the same request as two tenants and compare.
+
+- Provision two disposable tenants against a target service.
+- Exercise its surface as tenant A; attempt every object identifier observed
+  from tenant B's context.
+- Assert: B receives a denial or an empty result. **A well-formed 200
+  containing A's data is the finding**, and the harness must be built to notice
+  that rather than to notice errors — both of this estate's real regressions
+  produced ordinary-looking responses, a 403 and a 404, and nothing alerted.
+- Capture evidence as a count and a schema shape, never as tenant data (T01).
+
+**Acceptance:** run against `tenant-engine` and `audit-core`, both of which
+currently claim `E2`. The artifact is the run record, not a green tick.
+
+### T04 — Prove the probes fail
+
+A probe that has only ever passed is not evidence.
+
+Build known-bad fixtures — a service with a deliberately missing tenant
+predicate — and confirm each probe fails against them. `rapp-postgres` verified
+its drift check this way, by re-pinning to a bad digest and confirming exit 1;
+the same discipline applies here and is not optional.
+
+**Acceptance:** every probe in T03 demonstrated failing before any of them is
+trusted passing.
+
+### T05 — RLS conformance under attack (the E3 artifact)
+
+`rapp-postgres` ADR-0003 supplies an `rls_conformance` view and a template, and
+states plainly that the platform's guarantee is **detection, not prevention** —
+a table created by a later migration ships without a policy until something
+notices. This repo is that something.
+
+- Query the conformance view on a cadence; any row is a finding.
+- Attack what the view cannot see: a session that sets no GUC must read
+  nothing; a session with another tenant's value must see nothing; an insert
+  attributed to another tenant must be refused.
+- Attempt the documented bypasses: a `SECURITY DEFINER` function owned by the
+  table owner, and a role holding `BYPASSRLS`.
+
+**Cadence is the deliverable here, not a detail.** For a detection-based
+control the interval between runs *is* the exposure window, and ADR-0003 leaves
+the number to this repo. Set it, and state the resulting window in the record.
+
+### T06 — Noisy-neighbour characterisation (the P1/P2 artifact)
+
+The framework had to reword this artifact once already: its first draft
+required proof that a saturating consumer "does not breach" another's
+allowance, which shared infrastructure cannot provide.
+
+What is achievable and therefore what this produces: a recorded baseline of
+per-consumer resource usage; a run in which one consumer saturates its declared
+allowance; evidence that the governance controls **bind**; and the degradation
+co-residents experience, **measured and written down** rather than asserted
+acceptable.
+
+Runs inside a declared window per T01 — on a single-node rail with a six-
+consumer connection ceiling, a saturation probe is an outage if run carelessly.
+
+### T07 — Reporting into risk-nexus
+
+Findings leave this repo in one direction. A run produces: what was attempted,
+under which attacker model, when, against which posture claim, and the outcome.
+It carries no severity — that is `risk-nexus`'s.
+
+A **passing** run is also reported. "The attacks we thought of did not work" is
+the honest claim, and recording it dated is what lets anyone see how stale the
+assurance has become.
+
+## Sequencing
+
+T01 gates all. T02 shapes T03/T05/T06. T04 gates trusting any of them. T07 can
+follow T03.
+
+## Risks
+
+**The facility becomes the threat.** Mitigated by T01, and by holding no
+standing privilege.
+
+**Probes weaken silently.** A probe that starts passing after a change to
+itself rather than to the system is a finding, not a fix. Probe changes are
+reviewed as security changes.
+
+**Green is mistaken for safe.** Every report states that a pass means the
+attacks attempted did not work, not that the boundary holds.
+
+**It drifts into fixing things.** The boundary in INTENT is load-bearing:
+findings route out, work does not come in.
+
+## Open questions
+
+1. **Owner confirmation.** Proposed `the-custodian`, deliberately not
+   NetKingdom, whose framework this verifies. Needs the operator's yes.
+2. **Where probes run from.** In-cluster gives realistic network position;
+   outside gives independence from the substrate under test. Probably both,
+   eventually; pick one to start.
+3. **Does a service get told it is being probed?** Announced runs are easier to
+   operate; unannounced ones test the alerting too. Build mode probably
+   announced, production probably not — which is itself a T01 decision.