Compliance and Audit

BeaconGuard Assurance is designed to support regulatory compliance, auditability, and evidence preservation for AI-enabled systems operating in regulated environments.

The system is built around deterministic evaluation, immutable artifacts, and explicit provenance.

Compliance Support Objectives

BeaconGuard is designed to support common review and audit requirements:

• Deterministic authorization outcomes
• Allow, deny, or needs-review decisions before model execution
• Signed request metadata, workflow identity, user role, source-system trust, approved-pathway status, context tags, freshness windows, and replay controls
• Explicit, versioned policy intent
• Tamper-evident audit records
• Replayable decision evidence
• Separation of policy, enforcement, and models

These properties enable post-hoc verification without relying on probabilistic explanations.

Audit Record Model

Every authorization evaluation produces a structured audit record containing:

• Timestamp
• Policy snapshot identifier and version
• Normalized request inputs, including signed metadata and workflow identity
• Decision outcome and reason codes
• Evaluation provenance

Audit records are append-only and designed for long-term retention.

Evidence Preservation

BeaconGuard treats audit output as evidence, not telemetry.

Key properties:

• Records are immutable once written
• No in-place modification or deletion
• Policy snapshots referenced by cryptographic identity
• Inputs captured in normalized, replayable form
• Existing systems remain the systems of record

This enables auditors to reconstruct decisions exactly as they occurred.

Deterministic Replay

Deterministic replay allows an auditor or investigator to:

• Re-run a historical request
• Using the original policy snapshot
• With the original normalized inputs
• And obtain the same decision outcome

Replay is fundamental to:

• Incident investigation
• Regulatory response
• Third-party verification

Failure Visibility

Failure conditions are explicitly recorded.

If an evaluation fails due to missing artifacts, verification errors, or internal faults:

• The decision fails closed
• The failure category is recorded
• No permissive fallback is allowed

This helps make compliance gaps visible rather than hidden.

Scope Boundaries

BeaconGuard control assertions apply to:

• Authorization decisions
• Policy evaluation
• Audit record generation

They do not extend to:

• Model training data
• Model internal reasoning
• Downstream application behavior beyond authorization
• EHR, AML, fraud, SIEM, IAM, GRC, case-management, or workflow system replacement

These boundaries are explicit to avoid over-claiming compliance coverage. BeaconGuard does not make legal compliance guarantees and does not replace internal compliance programs.

Intended Reviewers

This documentation is intended for:

• Compliance and risk teams
• Internal and external auditors
• Security reviewers
• Regulatory stakeholders

Related Sections

• Policy Model
• Enforcement Runtime
• System Architecture