Enforcement Runtime
The BeaconGuard Enforcement Runtime is the component responsible for evaluating authorization requests against signed policy snapshots and producing deterministic decisions.
It is intentionally designed to be:
- Stateless
- Deterministic
- Independently deployable
- Auditable by construction
Role in the System
The enforcement runtime sits between:
- Regulated applications
- AI models and inference services
Its sole responsibility is to decide whether an interaction is permitted under the active policy snapshot and to emit an evidence-grade audit record.
It does not:
- Modify prompts
- Inspect model internals
- Perform heuristic safety filtering
- Make probabilistic judgments
Deterministic Evaluation
Given:
- A verified policy snapshot
- Normalized request inputs
- Required reference artifacts (if any)
The enforcement runtime will always produce the same decision output.
This property is required to support:
- Replay-based audits
- Incident investigation
- Regulatory review
- Cross-environment verification
Stateless Execution Model
The runtime does not maintain internal mutable state between requests.
All decision-relevant inputs must be provided explicitly:
- Policy snapshot identifier
- Request context
- Reference artifact identifiers
Any required state must be externalized and versioned.
Failure Semantics
The enforcement runtime operates under fail-closed semantics.
If any of the following occur:
- Policy snapshot cannot be verified
- Required artifacts are missing or invalid
- Input normalization fails
- Internal evaluation error occurs
The runtime must:
- Return DENY
- Emit an audit record describing the failure category
Silent fallback or permissive behavior is prohibited.
Output Contract
Each evaluation produces a structured result including:
- Decision outcome (ALLOW or DENY)
- Deterministic reason codes
- Policy snapshot identifier and version
- Optional obligations (if explicitly defined)
Outputs are designed for machine consumption and audit replay, not narrative explanation.
Audit Integration
The enforcement runtime is tightly coupled to the audit model.
For every evaluation:
- A record is emitted
- The policy identity is recorded
- Inputs and outputs are captured deterministically
This enables full reconstruction of decision context after the fact.