Research: pressure C2 authority boundary at Decision ingress

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Classification

Draft Research / authority-boundary hardening. Keep Draft. Do not merge as production.

No maintained src/**, scripts/**, or tests/** mutation occurred. No Contract C2/D mutation, CAL change, Decision policy expansion, Authorization, execution, tag, release, or production-default change is authorized.

Terminal status

Research disposition: SUPPORTED_WITH_BOUNDARY.

Terminal record: research/c2-authority-boundary-hardening-rc0/RESULT.md

Decisive frozen science head: bee53b481dbeac6c225899a5e1c0c188504a0d67

Decisive hosted evidence:

• workflow run 35185025913 — SUCCESS;
• job 105085123610 — SUCCESS;
• artifact ID 10481498841;
• artifact digest sha256:801b0d61a788817b2e8231dd7f130549727c679985133f843aa63df80d829018.

Exact stacked subject

This research is stacked on the C2 integration specimen because the completed CAL Pipeline run used that path:

• parent PR: Integration: bounded C2 ingress/conformance for CAL Pipeline smoke #75;
• exact Decision C2 subject: b1bcc33e2b5ef0707b8cbf7dd8e821b2d34d1b55;
• released V1 ancestor: 7be709b2141c767c5da89b8b94cf90233c4238fe;
• exact Apparatus C2 authority: b42c827acb0a9fe65353354d709add0e27bab307;
• C2 compatibility candidate: 2.0.0;
• wire profile: contract-c-successor-candidate-a-rc2-research.

The branch changes research apparatus/records only. Exact-head workflow scope checks verified maintained Decision bytes unchanged before the decisive run.

Observed result

The preregistered baseline passed both current Decision ingress and exact canonical C2 verify_candidate(...).

Four validator-valid, freshly resealed substitutions were then tested:

1. evidence source ID;
2. evidence passage ID;
3. producer policy-resolver commit;
4. producer semantic-implementation SHA.

For all four:

• current C2 Decision ingress reached the maintained supported-claim policy;
• the maintained policy returned CLEAR;
• exact canonical C2 strict verification rejected the object when the relevant Contract-B evidence-world and policy-resolver authority inputs were held fixed.

The rejection reasons were the intended authority discriminators: missing exact Contract-B evidence reference, wrong resolver authority, or unknown/ambiguous implementation-policy binding.

Collusion control

The same canonical verifier accepted mutated objects when its external evidence-index / resolver authority inputs were deliberately changed to collude with the mutation.

Therefore the result does not justify simply adding more caller-supplied verifier arguments to Decision ingress. The external authority inputs must themselves be independently bound or derived from authoritative artifacts.

Bounded inference

The current C2 Decision policy kernel was not falsified. The hardening gap is immediately before it.

Current C2 ingress establishes exact C2 bytes/authority and top-level Contract-B identity, but does not independently establish the full Contract-B participant-reference authority or immutable producer-policy resolver binding that canonical C2 is capable of checking.

This does not show that the completed pipeline's observed HOLD was wrong, that CAL semantics are wrong, or that any current source claim is false. It identifies a downstream authority aperture that becomes material if Decision Engine is expected to independently establish those references before issuing a Decision.

Next discriminator

Do not modify maintained C2 ingress from this result alone.

The next bounded experiment is to derive the strict verifier inputs from independent authority rather than caller declarations:

• verify an exact Contract-B 1.2 artifact/tree and deterministically derive its evidence index;
• derive the permitted CAL implementation/policy mapping from the exact immutable resolver artifact;
• rerun the same baseline and four substitutions;
• require unchanged legitimate Decision behavior and pre-policy rejection of every substitution;
• include a weak caller-trusting control that must fail the promotion gate.

If an independently reconstructable authority source does not exist, that is a cross-component authority requirement rather than permission for Decision Engine to invent one.

Full preregistration and exact observations are preserved in the research directory. No promotion is authorized by this PR.