Research: qualify trusted Contract-B bundle commitment RC4

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Classification

Draft Research only. Do not merge as a maintained runtime change, tag, release, or infer production readiness.

This successor is stacked on RC3 Draft Research PR #79. It changes no maintained src/**, scripts/**, or tests/** bytes.

Question

Can Decision Engine recover exact Contract-B participant authority from an independently selected bundle commitment plus caller-presented raw Contract-B bytes, without requiring a trusted artifact locator?

Disposition

SUPPORTED_TRUSTED_BUNDLE_COMMITMENT_PLUS_PRESENTED_ARTIFACT

Decisive execution:

• executed science head: 32a165f2bd579f559959903e9d02bc9c84a82908
• workflow run: 35237017076
• job: 105255423211
• artifact ID: 10504225119
• artifact ZIP digest: sha256:67ac035438d5ba20ee2e7e87cafa49f97a1e9e597825716ca4321586889274cd
• packaged evidence TGZ: 9fa096a21228b0e4db0191dee692dc343392d74259cc683391affc678b1179f1

Result

Two copies of the same Contract-B artifact at different arbitrary filesystem locations opened the same independently fixed bundle commitment. Exact participant authority was derived only after commitment verification.

A stale participant tamper was rejected. A fully resealed alternate participant world was internally coherent, produced a different whole-bundle hash agreed by the exact EB hashing implementation and a separate reproducer, and was rejected against the original external commitment. The deliberately weak control accepted that malicious world when the external commitment was allowed to move with it.

This supports a smaller boundary than a trusted locator:

trusted run/B commitment + presented raw B bytes
    -> recompute whole-bundle commitment
    -> exact equality
    -> derive participant authority
    -> canonical C2 verification
    -> existing trusted Decision path

The artifact transport/location need not itself be trusted for the tested mechanism. Selection of the expected commitment still must be trusted.

Preserved failure

The first hosted RC4 execution 35236596463 / job 105253975881 is preserved as APPARATUS_VERSION_MISMATCHED_BUNDLE_VALIDATOR. The frozen mechanism control is Contract B 1.0.0 while the current EB validator expects its current Contract B version. The successor first reproduced the exact same sole CONTRACT_VERSION mismatch on the untouched baseline, then neutralized only that known evaluator-version aperture. Any additional validation error remained fatal.

Remaining boundaries

• the private first-genuine Contract-B 1.2 raw artifact was not available in the GitHub-visible aperture and was not tested;
• runtime selection of the correct independently trusted receipt/commitment is still unqualified;
• no independently isolated clean-room consumer reproduction yet;
• no maintained runtime promotion follows.

See research/bundle-commitment-authority-rc4/RESULT.md.

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Cross-pipeline architecture note: the CAL Pipeline provenance-chain blueprint is now captured in Apparatus Contracts Draft PR #101 (docs/architecture/CAL-PIPELINE-PROVENANCE-CHAIN-BLUEPRINT.md, proposal head d16e5e14cab55ed23bdeee4cdeecf48724c542db).

This generalizes the RC4 result rather than replacing it: the trusted B commitment should originate in the producer/run provenance chain, presented B bytes can be transport-untrusted, and Decision Engine should verify the commitment before deriving participant authority. A later DE attestation should bind that verification plus exact C authority, CAL producer authority, Decision policy/target, and produced D.

Local pointer PR: #81. No maintained promotion follows from this note.