SIMULATION NOTICE: This document (audit, evaluation, response) is part of an AI-driven role-playing simulation conducted for project quality and governance testing. It does not constitute a formal legal or professional audit by any real-world entity.

This response acknowledges the Red Team report on the Web/A Folio transport concept. Our priority is to absorb the findings as a protective barrier while the team is mid-implementation. We will not advance production scope until explicit security invariants are defined and verified.

Positioning and Scope Control

  • Transport remains optional and transport-agnostic, but a minimum security baseline is required for any compliant implementation.
  • Transport must stay a carrier only. It cannot terminate encryption or re-encrypt payloads, and it must not expand key trust.
  • Multi-hop routing is deferred for production until authenticated bindings and replay protections are specified and validated.

Specification Changes We Will Propose

Authenticated transport envelope

  • Define a transport envelope with authenticated headers.
  • Bind sender DID, recipient DID or scoped address, policy version, and anti-replay nonce or sequence.
  • Cryptographically bind the envelope to the payload signature or a derived MAC from the sender's DID key.

Anti-replay and sequencing

  • Require monotonic counters or epoch-bound nonces with explicit replay windows.
  • Enforce hard-reject behavior on replay, with defined cache retention requirements.

Verified-only acceptance policy

  • Verification must include issuer binding checks, not only signature validity.
  • Enforce schema or profile conformity before storage acceptance.
  • Reject invalid inputs with minimal metadata capture for abuse tracking.

Metadata minimization and retention

  • Prohibit stable routing identifiers by default. Require scoped, short-lived addresses.
  • Establish explicit retention windows for transport logs and inbox metadata.
  • Require redaction rules for observability pipelines.

Operator trust model

  • Treat transport operators as adversarial by default.
  • Any trust elevation must be justified by governance and audit controls.

Immediate Implementation Directives

  • Freeze any feature that implies multi-hop routing or delivery receipts.
  • Restrict current work to internal development environments only.
  • Require a formal security design review before any transport API is declared stable.

Action Plan

  • Week 1: Draft transport envelope and anti-replay policy; review with security.
  • Week 2: Define acceptance policy and metadata retention baseline; update compliance criteria.
  • Week 3: Run a red-team tabletop focused on replay, policy downgrade, and metadata correlation.
  • Week 4: Approve a minimal prototype only if the envelope and replay controls are finalized and testable.

Risk Acceptance (Conditional)

If schedule pressure requires a pilot, we will accept only a limited, single-hop, verified-only transport under these constraints:

  • Authenticated headers and anti-replay are mandatory.
  • Logs are minimized with fixed retention and redaction.
  • No production data without explicit security sign-off.

Closing

We accept the core findings and will treat transport as a controlled security boundary. Implementation continues only within the narrowed scope and with new specification controls that preserve end-to-end integrity and privacy.