Operator decision: whitehat is a NetKingdom facility, framed offensively -
offence is how you find out, and a control is believed until someone tries it.
Our own estate is one target among those we choose, not the only one.
I had argued for the-custodian on independence grounds. The counter-argument is
better: offensive security is security work and belongs with the security repo.
The residual tension is real and recorded rather than argued away - NetKingdom
now owns both the Tenancy Posture framework and the facility that tests
conformance to it, which is NetKingdom assessing NetKingdom. The mitigation is
that findings leave for risk-nexus under separate ownership rather than being
resolved in place. Proportionate, not perfect, and worth revisiting if
conformance findings start getting quietly closed.
The reframe changes what this repo must guard against, and that is the
substantial part of this commit. A facility that can be pointed at
infrastructure we do not own is the single thing that could turn this repo from
an asset into a liability, so the targeting rule is structural rather than
cultural.
No target without recorded authorization from whoever is responsible for it.
Own estate in build mode has standing authorization; production needs its own,
because the blast radius differs and so does the decision; anything we do not
own needs written per-engagement authorization recorded here before a packet is
sent.
Three non-authorizations written down because each is a way teams talk
themselves into it: a commercial relationship with the target, the target being
publicly reachable, and believing the owner would obviously be fine with it.
Unauthorized probing is criminal in most jurisdictions regardless of intent,
and a white-hat facility that gets this wrong is an attacker with better
paperwork.
Two consequences. The authorization record is part of the finding - a report
that cannot name what it ran under is not a finding, it is an incident. And
scope creep during an engagement is prohibited: a probe that discovers an
adjacent system stops at the boundary, because following the interesting thing
is how an authorized test becomes an unauthorized one.
Findings routing now forks. Our estate goes to risk-nexus and on to the owning
repo. Any other target goes to that infrastructure's responsible party on the
engagement's agreed terms, with risk-nexus still recording that it happened.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tegwick
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