# Research — Secret Redaction Hardening & Snapshot Data Integrity (Spec 120)

This document records the design choices for the reduced Spec 120 scope after removing the pre-go-live legacy-data remediation workflow.

## Decisions

### 1) Central classification authority
- Decision: Introduce one shared secret-classification service that evaluates protected fields by exact field name plus canonical path, and reuse it across snapshot protection, audit sanitization, verification sanitization, and ops failure sanitization.
- Rationale: The current codebase had multiple substring-based sanitizers. Spec 120 requires one authority so safe configuration fields like `passwordMinimumLength` remain visible while true secrets stay protected.

### 2) Canonical protected-path format
- Decision: Represent protected locations as source-bucketed RFC 6901 JSON Pointers, stored under `secret_fingerprints` buckets: `snapshot`, `assignments`, and `scope_tags`.
- Rationale: JSON Pointer is deterministic, array-safe, and avoids ambiguity between object keys and numeric list indexes.

### 3) Single ownership of persisted snapshot protection
- Decision: Make `VersionService::captureVersion()` the sole write-time owner of protected snapshot generation.
- Rationale: `VersionService` is the final `PolicyVersion` persistence boundary. Removing duplicate masking from `PolicyCaptureOrchestrator` eliminates double-redaction and ensures dedupe/version creation decisions use the same protected result.

### 4) Protected snapshot persistence contract
- Decision: Persist protected values as `[REDACTED]`, store the ruleset marker in `policy_versions.redaction_version`, and store path-keyed HMAC digests in `policy_versions.secret_fingerprints`.
- Rationale: The placeholder preserves JSON shape for downstream consumers, while dedicated columns keep the change signal and contract version out of generic metadata.

### 5) Fingerprint derivation strategy
- Decision: Use HMAC-SHA256 with a signing key derived from the app key and the stable `workspace_id`, then hash the tuple `(source_bucket, json_pointer, normalized_secret_value)`.
- Rationale: This satisfies the workspace-isolation requirement while keeping fingerprints deterministic inside one workspace and non-correlatable across workspaces.

### 6) Fingerprinting scope and version identity
- Decision: Apply the protected contract consistently to all persisted protected payload buckets: `snapshot`, `assignments`, and `scope_tags`. Version identity must incorporate both the visible protected payload and the fingerprint map so secret-only changes create a new `PolicyVersion`.
- Rationale: If dedupe ignores `secret_fingerprints`, secret-only changes still collapse into one version and FR-120-007 fails.

### 7) Output readability and integrity messaging
- Decision: Protected-value messaging remains text-first on existing viewers and export surfaces. The product explains that protected values were intentionally hidden, but it does not ship a dedicated historical-data remediation workflow.
- Rationale: Production starts with fresh compliant data, so the feature only needs to explain current protected behavior, not historical repair.

### 8) Regression strategy
- Decision: Replace substring-match regression expectations with a corpus-based test matrix covering safe fields, true secrets, secret-only version changes, audit/verification readability, and notification/export behavior.
- Rationale: The existing suite proved the old broken behavior. Phase 1 needs tests that lock in exact/path-based classification and block new broad substring redactors.

## Repo Facts Used

- `PolicySnapshotRedactor` previously used broad regex patterns and was invoked both in `PolicyCaptureOrchestrator` and `VersionService`.
- `AuditContextSanitizer`, `VerificationReportSanitizer`, and `RunFailureSanitizer` all contained substring-based protection logic.
- `policy_versions` already stores immutable snapshot evidence consumed by drift, compare, and restore flows.
- Pre-go-live data is disposable for this product rollout, so no supported legacy-data remediation workflow is required in this feature.
