DOCS / TRUST BOUNDARY

A change cannot judge itself.

The strongest assurance claim requires separating proposal, evidence production, admission, human approval, and release promotion.

The five identities

  1. Proposer: the human or agent that authors the change.
  2. Untrusted runner: produces fast diagnostic output with no write credentials.
  3. Evidence producer: independently evaluates a read-only, exact source snapshot.
  4. Admission identity: reconciles signed evidence under protected policy.
  5. Release identity: promotes the already attested artifact by digest.

Why repository CI is not enough

A pull request can modify workflows stored on its branch. Even when GitHub executes a base-owned definition, candidate code still runs in an adversarial workspace. Logs and report files are claims until a trusted producer checks their scope, subject, and completeness.

Evidence must bind

  • repository identity, candidate commit, tree digest, and base commit;
  • canonical diff and applicable policy digest;
  • tool, version, runner image, workflow definition, and isolation class;
  • expected and observed files, cases, mutants, findings, and exclusions;
  • artifact digest, signer identity, freshness, and invalidation conditions.

Portable versus maximum assurance

The open repository supplies policy, adapters, schemas, local gates, and hardened workflow templates. Maximum assurance exists only after the external verifier, identities, rulesets, isolation, and release path are deployed and independently verified in your environment.

Inspect the separately versioned reference verifier and the five canonical JSON Schemas. The reference implementation validates the decision contract; it does not create the independent operational boundary on your behalf.