whitehat-security/docs/session-cutoff-2026-08-22.md

Session cutoff — 2026-08-22

This is the clean stopping point for the session that prepared WHITEHAT-WP-0001. It separates implemented and calibrated work from target evidence that does not exist yet.

Safety state at cutoff

• No live adversarial request was sent to audit-core, tenant-engine, or any other target.
• No probe pod, fixture, credential, secret, database connection, or load was created.
• WH-ENG-20260821-AUDIT-E2 and WH-ENG-20260821-TENANT-E2 are cancelled. Their identifiers are terminal and must not be reused.
• No pass or finding was delivered to risk-nexus, because offline calibration is not target assurance.

Completed

• Registered the repository, workplan, and tasks consistently in State Hub.
• Established first-class repository intent, scope, ownership, rules of engagement, attacker model, evidence contract, and operator runbook.
• Implemented a Python evidence harness with minimized, body-free reporting.
• Implemented five differential read/list/create/update/delete probes.
• Calibrated every probe against both an enforcing fixture and a deliberately vulnerable fixture; the vulnerable fixture is detected.
• Added engagement authorization, expiry, route, rate, concurrency, credential TTL, production approval, owner acknowledgement, and cancellation gates.
• Added E3 cadence/evaluation, capacity characterization, and pass/finding message formatting.
• Added and reviewed an audit-core E2 adapter and exact attributed pod manifest. Target review found a missing Idempotency-Key; the adapter was corrected and its retry fixtures made deterministic.
• Recorded why tenant-engine does not currently instantiate the stated E2 attacker model instead of forcing a misleading probe.
• The repository check suite passes with 23 tests, and both probe packs validate.

Not completed

• No service has a dated target E2 artifact from this facility.
• audit-core still needs formal target-owner acknowledgement of the final adapter and engagement revision, plus two sanctioned ordinary tenant-scoped may_read/may_write fixture identities with a maximum 900-second lifetime.
• tenant-engine still needs an applicability decision: expose a real tenant-bound identity that models E2, or mark this target not applicable for E2 and test the authorization boundary where it actually exists.
• Target adapters have not yet been calibrated against target-shaped known-bad implementations.
• E3 still needs an authorized database consumer and live SQL runner on the declared 24-hour and pre-promotion cadence.
• P1/P2 still needs a separately approved substrate/load window and ceilings.
• No target pass/finding has been delivered to risk-nexus.

Required redesign before resuming

Build a governed whitehat test plane rather than assembling authority during each run:

1. A dedicated namespace and immutable runner identity, with default-deny networking and explicit target egress.
2. A credential broker that accepts an engagement ID and projects two short-lived, tenant-scoped fixture identities directly into the runner, then expires and revokes them without exposing values to the operator or agent.
3. A target registration contract containing the posture claim, attacker model, fixture lifecycle, exact routes, adapter, known-bad calibration, abort telemetry, and an honest not-applicable state.
4. A pinned runner image, required engagement/admission labels, health and rate watchers, an independently usable kill switch, and automatic cleanup.
5. Standing authorization only for low-rate, fixture-only registered E2 runs; database compromise, recovery, saturation, and destructive techniques keep separate explicit approval classes.
6. Automatic delivery of both passing and finding reports to risk-nexus.

Resume only with new engagement IDs after that plane can issue the correct test identities and enforce the complete envelope. The existing workplan remains the backlog: T01 and T02 are done; T03, T04, T05, T06, and T07 remain in progress.