Round-9 swept all ten instruments per fork instead of only the two buttons,
and found selftest-axgate.sh red in all four. Root cause, identical to the
KERNLOG defect fixed the day before: a self-test lifts one phase out of
check.sh and supplies its variables from a HAND-WRITTEN preamble, and the
phase later grew a dependency nobody told the preamble about.
Phase 2b stopped globbing Proofs/*.olean and started reading $PROOFS by
membership. Bash does not error on an unset array under `set -u` — it
expands to nothing — so the gate silently received
expected := [".olean"]
one entry with an empty name, and rejected the baseline via its own
fail-closed absence check. Exit code right, reason wrong.
· lift-guard.sh (new, pinned): derives every variable the lifted payload
reads, subtracts what the driver defines, and fails AT LIFT TIME naming
the remainder. Wired into all five lifting self-tests; selftest-shapes.sh
drops its inline copy. One implementation, not five, since drifting out
of sync is the entire failure mode.
· selftest-axgate.sh: lifts PROOFS verbatim, and its case 2 now poisons a
MANIFESTED leaf module rather than adding a stray file. The stray-file
attack was a no-op against membership semantics — that is the dead-file
gate's job, proven by selftest-harness case 8 — and it is also the
weaker attack, since adding files to Proofs/ must clear a gate that
editing an already-manifested module does not.
· Phase 2c's accounting identity moves behind its own marker with its own
ACCTFAIL verdict, so the phase is liftable by construction rather than
by a self-test knowing where to stop. Truncating the lift range alone
would have dropped Phase 2c's own verdict and left the test unable to fail.
· The other four lifting self-tests assert on the PAYLOAD rather than the
assembled driver, so a marker in the preamble cannot satisfy a check
meant to prove the lift landed.
Certified: 8/8 self-tests green in all four forks (~212 assertions, none
failing); check.sh bytes unchanged and still matching the pin written before
the 3h08m round-9 sweep, whose 36 GREEN button rows therefore stand.
--audit-only re-run against the new HARNESS.sha256 in every fork.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every gate this repository has was executed by scripts that nothing pinned.
Round-5 review of the companion SLH-DSA repository stubbed the compiler
wrapper alone and its button printed ALL GREEN in 3.6 seconds over
deliberately destroyed proofs; flipping two guards in the audit driver
disabled every check with the digest byte-identical. Depth of checking is
worth nothing if the thing doing the checking is unbound — and every gate
added this week made that gap more valuable to an attacker, not less.
Phase 0c requires every harness file to match HARNESS.sha256. Two design
points carry the weight:
- WHICH files must be pinned is POLICY and lives in check.sh, never in the
map being consulted. If the required set were read from the pin file,
deleting an entry would silently un-pin that file. It is instead derived
from the filesystem, so a deleted entry is a set mismatch and a build
failure. That is the exact defect SLH-DSA round-6 found, closed here by
construction.
- Membership self-derives from the executable bit: anything this script can
shell out to must be pinned, so a NEW script fails closed until someone
pins it deliberately. Load-bearing files that are not executable — the
audit driver, the committed manifests, the policy tables — cannot be
discovered that way and are listed explicitly.
lean-guard is inside the set, which finally makes the standing "lean-guard
stays hash-pinned" rule a property of the repository rather than a convention.
selftest-harness.sh replays five cases, each asserting a specific diagnostic:
an edited lean-guard, a new unpinned executable, a deleted pin entry, a
missing pin file, and a positive control. It was itself negative-tested — with
the hash comparison removed it goes red on exactly that case while cheerfully
reporting "10 harness files match their pins".
TRUSTED-BASE.md states the limit at equal length to the claim: pinning a
harness from inside that harness is circular, and an author who edits a script
and refreshes its pin in the same commit passes every phase. What the pin
changes is that the edit can no longer be SILENT — it must appear in the diff
at the commit being reviewed. A green button says "this is the apparatus that
was reviewed", never "this apparatus is trustworthy".
Also fixed, found by this sweep: both self-tests compared the working tree
against its starting state with `diff <(echo "$VAR") <(command)`, which is
asymmetric — for a clean tree the variable is empty and `echo` emits a blank
line the command does not. It reported a difference precisely when nothing was
wrong, and only surfaced once P1-a was committed and Proofs/ became clean.
Both now compare as strings.
Verified green: 20 runs across the four ed25519 repositories (four buttons,
four harness self-tests, four axiom-gate self-tests, four binding self-tests,
four scalar buttons), zero red.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
