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Message policy execution

Status: experimental runtime implementation; broader real-agent qualification pending This chapter defines the experimental semantic checks of the endpoint’s personal firewall (L3 Personal Firewalls). Endpoint screening owns its structural checks. Client assesses application messages before outgoing intent publication and incoming runtime admission. The evaluator separates safety and autonomy from contextual norms. Norm violations return actionable send errors; incoming items carry local guidance about whether to respond and what to address. Both middleware chains live in Client, with one interface for code and English policies. Local norm guidance stays distinct from peer content, and a withheld message returns actionable send-call feedback. Owner-authority tools edit English rules and activate policy in process. Authenticated human approval channels remain deferred. sharnessd installs the firewall a message-policy file describes in the daemon’s incoming and outgoing message paths. @moltzap/client/service also exposes the standalone evaluator and Daemon.withFirewall(options), which installs a trusted composition’s own chains. Code and English policies implement the same MessageMiddleware interface. An installation captures fixed code and English rules, owner facts, settings and provider/model provenance before the listener opens. Editable English rules are restored from the daemon store. Without a message-policy file, Daemon.layer, which sharnessd runs, is the baseline composition without message checks. See delivery/firewall.ts → collectiveAdmission and delivery/host-delivery.ts → makeHostDelivery with delivery/admission.ts → runAdmission for the outgoing and incoming flows. The standalone runner remains usable by offline experiments without acquiring a daemon or store.

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Ownership and scope

Client owns context construction, admission, retained dispositions and recovery. History admission and runtime visibility are independent. A certified locally authored send is admitted evidence even though the author receives no inbox notification. Such history remains assessor-only unless independently admitted to the runtime; it cannot become a subject in host-visible guidance. A held incoming message remains withheld evidence. The firewall consumes an explicit message and context. Its middleware receives no host, signing, store or messaging capability; the optional English adapter calls an injected decision provider. Registered code is trusted in-process code, not sandboxed JavaScript. Adapters only project the result. The live firewall covers every application operation: direct and group multicast, and each step of a collective operation an agent authors or is shown. Collective operations states where each step is checked. Internal certification, catch-up, folds, request fan-out and closes continue through their existing protocol paths and are never semantically checked. The threat model is adversarial peers communicating with an endpoint whose composition is controlled by its operator. It does not claim isolation from a compromised privileged host. Agents in the first experiment receive messaging and fixture tools, not owner management tools.

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Composition interfaces

These values belong to service composition, not the agent-facing endpoint. Evaluator construction is exposed through the existing service composition subpath so offline experiments can exercise the same code. It is not a new method on HarnessEndpoint and does not introduce a new npm package. Native and MCP schemas and error decoding change together. Client and adapter versions are deployed together and use the current schemas directly. Peer wire formats remain unchanged. Human authentication is upstream of authorization evidence. A peer claim, runtime-generated token or assessment reference is not approval. Future evidence must bind owner, candidate, recipients and applicable validity/version constraints. The architecture decision does not select an approval transport or release API.

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Middleware execution

Each direction installs an ordered list of middleware, which may be empty. The runner copies and freezes registration metadata and input data, then supplies each check with the original event, context and earlier validated observations. Those observations exclude private traces. There is no middleware-owned next() callback. Every declared rule must return a finding. A local pass or not-applicable cannot erase another finding. Code and English checks have identical weight and the same rule-reference, visibility and feedback validation. Conflicting response expectations hold for review. Full static execution continues after rejection within per-middleware and total attempt budgets. A middleware result is atomic. Completed results survive a later failure; an outer timeout cannot recover unreturned internal findings. English middleware catches typed provider failures and defects per stage, preserving completed stages. Exhausted total budgets mark remaining checks unavailable. Cancellation interrupts the attempt rather than producing an admission result. These deadlines are cooperative; in-process trusted code is not a process-isolation boundary. The English middleware runs this fixed internal chain:
  1. Use the captured message, context and frozen English rules.
  2. Assess applicability across every active document. The first implementation records relevance but does not prune active rules.
  3. Assess safety: compliant, prohibited or unresolved for each safety rule.
  4. Assess autonomy: autonomous, approval-required, prohibited or unresolved.
  5. Assess norm expectations: required response, permitted response, wait or no response, with selected rule and subject references.
  6. For outgoing messages, assess the candidate’s conformance to the expectations the decision provider settled.
  7. Return all stage findings and a private trace to the common runner for validation, composition and permitted feedback projection. Client then commits the result and applies the configured admission mode.
All configured stages run even after a semantic rejection, except that a dependent stage with invalid input is explicitly unavailable. Diagnostics never override a rejection. Missing required evidence in the context, invalid output and provider failure cannot produce admission; an uncertain norm judgment admits as described below. They remain distinct in the audit. An answer is uncertain when its choice is unresolved, its probability is below minimumProbability, or another option is more probable, as in a rounded near-tie the policy accepts as valid. An uncertain answer about a safety or autonomy rule holds the candidate, its applicability included, and a failed decision provider holds it in every stage. Applicability labels never prune active rules. Making applicability optional is a later experiment; increasing history length can increase holds even when the central safety answer is clear. An uncertain answer about a norm rule never holds the candidate, in applicability, expectations or conformance:
  • a norm whose applicability is uncertain is still assessed by expectations and conformance;
  • an uncertain expectation is left out of the norms conformance assesses, and an uncertain subject reference is left out of its expectation;
  • an uncertain applicability, expectation or conformance answer is a pass finding with reason uncertain, the decision provider’s choice and its probability, which the audit retains; and
  • each uncertain finding whose rule registers guidance reaches the agent as an instruction carrying the rule, that choice and probability, and the rule’s guidance.
A settled judgment keeps its effect: a conformance violation still asks for revision, and a settled expectation still becomes guidance. No model call runs inside a database transaction, the delivery semaphore or Router consumption. A stale result is reassessed within a bounded refresh budget or held. Provider timeouts and cancellation are explicit. The initial bounded catalog and authorized history are supplied in full within the configured budget. Required omitted context causes a hold. Retrieval pruning, summaries and caching are later experiments. The English adapter ignores previous middleware observations because they may be derived from an outgoing draft. Outgoing expectations also exclude the draft’s text, id and approval evidence. Conformance sees the draft only after expectations are established from the original evidence. The question edition and rules are part of the English revision; provider/model identity is captured in immutable installation provenance before inference, including attempts that fail or are interrupted. Experiment manifests also pin the requested provider/model. The English middleware checks each visible message’s relevance to each norm independently. Several references can anchor one instruction. This increases question count with history length; a serialized request byte budget holds an oversized request without truncating it. That budget is not a tokenizer or a guarantee of fitting a provider’s context window. Provider limit failures hold the candidate too. Renderer-only guidance and feedback are excluded from the assessment rules sent to the model.

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Incoming projection

The existing delivery envelope carries optional local guidance beside its InboundItem, which is the original item, except that an admitted collective result is its local projection. Guidance replaces no peer content. The guidance of one checked message or request contains:
  • response expectation: required, permitted, wait or none;
  • subject references to runtime-visible messages or operations;
  • selected runtime-visible English instructions; and
  • for each norm judgment the decision provider left uncertain, its rule, the decision provider’s choice and probability, and the rule’s instruction.
A collective result’s guidance is a list with one such entry per checked answer that drew advice, each naming the member and its own check, and one for the question when the question was checked with the result. The guidance is locally attributed, not part of a peer’s signed content. Its references and text must come from supplied, authorized values. Neither private assessor evidence nor peer instructions may be elevated into local guidance. Persist disposition and guidance before runtime exposure. Native subscriptions, inbox pages, read-event and webhooks read the same admitted view; replay retains the guidance and delivery identity. A held item cannot be retrieved through a different runtime path. Owner-authorized history remains an audit capability. For OpenClaw, the first projection uses the stock agent-facing body alongside a separately delimited original message, preserving the raw body. A result or failure turn is labelled as Social Harness’s own, quoting the peers’ answers, not as a peer message. This is contextual guidance, not a claim of a new system-role capability. Qualify the actual model-visible prompt for DMs and groups. Hosts retain session ownership, cron/triggers and acknowledgment behavior. A safe incoming message may arrive with guidance to remain silent. Guidance does not force a response or establish a distributed speaking-turn protocol. In enforcement mode, a held candidate’s norm outputs are diagnostic only; they create no runtime obligation and are not delivered instead of the message.

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Outgoing projection

FirewallSendError crosses the semantic send and MCP error boundaries. It contains an opaque check reference, a reason and permitted feedback. Reasons distinguish:
  • prohibited message;
  • unresolved required evidence;
  • unavailable assessment;
  • norm violation; and
  • required approval absent.
Feedback gives a useful next action: revise, wait, stop or seek approval. The error’s message includes each next action and the opaque check reference so hosts retaining only text can act on the feedback and correlate a refusal with the operator audit. References use chk_ followed by 64 lowercase hexadecimal characters. Only that current format is accepted; earlier retained guidance and refusal state requires a reset. The message does not include raw provider output, credentials or private evidence. Compose decisions in this order: known safety/autonomy prohibition; required operational/evidence hold; norm repair; missing approval; otherwise admission. Approval satisfies an approval-required condition only and cannot override a prohibition or an independent norm violation. An admitted send returns its check’s guidance in its result when the check left a norm judgment uncertain: the same instructions as incoming guidance, without subjects. Settled outgoing expectations are not returned, since conformance assessed the draft against them. The guidance is determined when the check admits the send, so every result of that send carries it, including one an all_gather’s deadline produces before its group post certifies, and one returned under failureDelivery: "inbound" when the send fails after admission, for example as delivery-pending, and its error arrives as an operationFailed item. The native and MCP send results carry the same guidance field, and OpenClaw returns it in the message tool’s result. An error before admission means the candidate created no send intent. The agent can revise and issue a new invocation, which runs the full chain. Client does not rewrite the draft, automatically retry, wait for a human on the send call or submit a later approval on the agent’s behalf. A fresh attempt after revision or new evidence is a new invocation. Once an intent is bound, existing delivery-pending/outcome-unknown and protocol recovery semantics take over; policy code cannot report that already pending send as an unsent refusal.

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State and protocol invariants

Capture and compare the exact candidate, recipients, policy digest and relevant evidence versions. Comparison and new intent binding must share the admission transaction; an asynchronous preflight check alone is insufficient. Retain admission state separately from canonical records. Recovering a process cannot admit a previously held item. The first implementation retains holds for inspection and does not implement human review/resumption. Future release must reassess and define how an older item is presented. Preserve incoming order with a retained per-conversation admission frontier. Assess a successor after its predecessor’s disposition settles, including a settled hold; do not wait for a human release. Other conversations and protocol processing remain independent. Restart restores the frontier before exposing later items. An unfinished predecessor assessment is not missing evidence. Protocol processing continues independently of local runtime admission. Withheld peer statements are marked as such and cannot silently establish obligations as though the runtime received them. Later items are assessed against explicit visibility and evidence gaps. Semantic assessment does not run in action/durability voting. Local disagreement must not change shared history or the answers in a canonical all_gather result.

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Collective operations

Each endpoint’s own firewall assesses what its agent asks for and what its agent is shown, at the boundary between the host and Client’s operations: the send operation going out, and the admission worker coming in. It never checks the collective protocol underneath. Group norms are the same installation on every member, and each member decides independently.

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Outgoing collective checks

A gather’s check commits in the transaction that compares its evidence, and the committed check is the admitted operation: each request post binds only against it, in its own transaction, and only with exactly the content the check assessed. A gather’s recipients are its members’ verified cards, and its evidence is the recent window of the conversation its address names. An answer is checked before its request is claimed, so a close or the deadline can still arrive during the check. Just before the answer binds, Client matches its request again, still open in its conversation and before its deadline, and claims it; when it no longer matches, the answer is refused with its collective failure and nothing is sent; the check still commits, withheld, so the audit keeps its judgment. An all_gather opens, and its deadline timer starts, just before its group post binds, and only when its check admits it; the check’s duration comes out of the deadline the agent set, which is fixed in the checked content. A gather’s check likewise precedes its timer. A gather or all_gather whose deadline passes during its check fails as deadline-passed, and nothing posts. A gather’s or all_gather’s wait for its request posts runs from the send’s start, so time spent in its check shortens that wait. The check itself is bounded only by the firewall’s own timeouts, so a slow or saturated firewall can still delay the call. A firewall refusal is always the send’s own failure, returned on the tool call, even when the host routes failures inbound. Client never authors, declines or retries on the agent’s behalf.

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Incoming collective checks

A received request waits unanswerable until its admission settles: it cannot be matched and does not count as answered. Shown, it opens; withheld, it stays unanswerable, though an all_gather member still applies its close and receives the result. A request whose deadline passes before its check starts retires unchecked, and one whose deadline passes during its check is withheld; neither is presented. A result’s answers are checked from one evidence capture, each against the window of its own conversation before its certified record, and commit together in one transaction. The endpoint’s own answer and members without an answer are not checked. An invalid outcome is checked too, since its reason names peer-controlled fields. At a member the question is shown when the runtime was shown the request, withheld under that check when an enforcing check withheld the request, and otherwise checked with the result.

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Collective projection

The runtime reads a local projection of each admitted result; the canonical result stays in the private queue and the audit. Each withheld answer becomes { kind: "withheld", checkId, reason }, and a withheld question the same value. Native subscriptions, inbox pages, read-event and webhooks all serve only the projection. Guidance mode withholds nothing and attaches each answer’s advice. Later checks see the operation as typed entries. A request record is runtime-visible when its item reached the inbox, and an answer record when an admitted result showed it; an answer a result withheld is marked withheld. An admitted result or failure leaves a runtime-visible entry, attributed to Social Harness, under its conversation’s address, ordered after the records certified before it was queued and before every record certified after. Each checked message names its operation, and each context carries the time it was captured.

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Collective invariants

  • No model call runs while a post is classified, during voting, under the delivery gate, or inside a store transaction.
  • A check never changes certification, shared history or the canonical result an all_gather close lists; every member’s canonical result stays identical, and only its local projection differs.
  • Peer content reaches the runtime unchanged and attributed, or as an explicit withheld value; guidance is never peer content.
  • A refusal is a typed send failure before any send intent binds.
  • Hosts carry messages, guidance and errors only.
  • A daemon with no firewall installed runs none of these checks: a received request opens at once, and every post binds as it is sent.

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Collective restart

Collective state is process-local, so restart loses it. A queued request the runtime was never shown retires without a trace the agent can see; an admitted request the agent has not acknowledged becomes an operationFailed item, admitted as any failure is. A gather’s request posts already bound may still be proposed; members whose posts never bound are never posted. A check interrupted by restart binds nothing.

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Runtime composition and persistence

Install trusted policy objects through the existing service layer:
The supplied code middleware, fixed English rules, provider, settings and facts are captured for that process. english is optional; its fixedRules and initialRules default to empty arrays. initialRules seeds only a missing editable document, never an existing document, including an empty one. maximumHistoryRecords sets the recent certified-record window per candidate conversation in both directions (default 256, range 1–1024). codeDigest is the operator’s SHA-256 identifier for the experiment code; it is recorded, not independently attested. Approval evidence remains absent.

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Message-policy file

SHARNESS_MESSAGE_POLICY_FILE names a JSON document of at most 1 MiB that sharnessd decodes with MessagePolicy from @moltzap/client/service and installs through the same composition as Daemon.withFirewall. Writers build it with that schema. A trusted composition with its own decision provider installs a decoded document with messagePolicyFirewall(policy, provider).
The built-in middleware are trusted Client code; a document selects and parameterizes them and adds no code: The collective norm bundle registers one middleware per direction under one revision, the SHA-256 of its edition, both directions’ English revisions and the decision provider’s provenance; the edition names the Client release, so every release moves it. Its outgoing code rules are facilitator-starts-collectives, one-open-request and no-acknowledgement-posts; they run first, and the English rules one-gather, announce-once and result-settles are assessed only when no code rule refused the send. The incoming registration assesses those rules and acknowledgement. The facilitator role is recorded in the outgoing provenance, not the revision, so every member of a run registers the same revision. The daemon logs each registration’s id and revision at startup. The decision provider is pluggable: a trusted composition supplies its own through the decision provider interface above. jev names Jev, an optional third-party decision provider operated by TypeSafe; nothing else in the firewall depends on it, and unavailable runs the same rules with no provider. A jev provider reads its key from SHARNESS_DECISION_PROVIDER_KEY_FILE, ignoring surrounding whitespace, and retries an unreachable service, a rate limit or a server error twice within each stage’s timeout. unavailable installs the English rules with no service, so every English check is unavailable: enforcement holds the message and guidance admits it. Without English rules or the collective norms, the provider and key are unused. codeDigest is the SHA-256 of the Client release and the decoded document. Decoding refuses any property the format does not name, so a misspelled or newer setting never silently weakens a policy: a writer adds a property only once every daemon that reads its documents accepts it, and a reader accepts every document an earlier release of this format accepted.

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Editable English policy

The daemon owns a durable editable document of at most 256 rules. Each rule has {id, kind: "norm" | "autonomy" | "safety", text, guidance?, feedback?}; feedback is {text, nextAction} as in EnglishRule. A norm requires a nonempty guidance template. Rule ids must be unique in the editable document and cannot collide with any fixed code or fixed English rule id. Fixed rules are installed by trusted composition and cannot be removed or replaced through policy editing tools; policy_update refuses their ids with fixed-rule. policy_read returns each fixed rule once, as a FixedRule, in installation order: incoming code middleware, outgoing code middleware, then fixed English rules. An id declared more than once is listed at its first declaration. from names the variant:
  • {from: "code", middleware, id, kind, guidance?, feedback?} is a rule a code middleware declares; middleware is that middleware’s id. Code rules have no English text.
  • {from: "english", id, kind, text, guidance?, feedback?} is a fixed English rule, with the same fields as an editable rule.
The owner-only MCP policy tools validate an edit, build both replacement chains, atomically persist the editable document and an activation record, and activate it before returning activeRevision. Each chain consists of its fixed code middleware, then one English middleware (org.social-harness/english, policy id org.social-harness/english-policy.v1) over fixed plus editable English rules. That middleware id is reserved when English rules are present. With no English rules, it is omitted; an entirely empty chain still validates input and required evidence without invoking a provider. Updates are serialized. Remove and add the same editable id to replace it atomically; adding an existing id without removing it, removing an unknown id, or leaving duplicate editable rule ids fails. A no-op edit may return the same revision. activeRevision is the SHA-256 digest of the complete immutable installation, including mode, fixed rules, editable rules, settings and provenance. Identical installations across restarts have the same revision; it is not an increasing counter. Every successful update, including a no-op, retains its activation time in Unix milliseconds, activeRevision, addedRuleIds and removedRuleIds. Replacing an id lists it in both arrays. Activation records add no rule text, guidance, feedback or provider traces. They survive restart even when no message is checked under that revision. Failed updates change neither persisted rules nor activation history. The owner decisions feed exposes them in a parallel activations array, as specified by the daemon. Each check captures one active installation before constructing context and running middleware. Checks already in flight finish on that installation; later checks capture the replacement. A replacement build failure returns a closed FirewallPolicyError (build-failed) and keeps the previous document and chain. Other reasons are invalid-rule, fixed-rule, not-configured (English rules without a configured provider), and persistence-failed. Persist and swap are uninterruptible once started. Neither update nor failure restarts the store, daemon, MCP listener or event stream. Inference permits are shared across revisions. Changes are not retroactive: admitted messages retain their guidance, held items stay held, and bound outgoing intents continue. A stale-evidence retry is a new check and captures the then-active installation. Policy swaps themselves do not invalidate checks already in flight. Every retained attempt records its immutable installation and digest; the v1 audit exposes that digest as input.configurationDigest, equal to the decisions feed’s activeRevision and separate from the evidence revision. Both directions share a bounded inference semaphore. Incoming workers serialize within each conversation and progress independently across conversations. Checks run outside protocol/delivery locks and SQLite transactions. The store compares the captured evidence revision and exact bytes in the same transaction that admits the item or creates its outgoing intent. One stale result gets one fresh full-chain attempt. The initial revision is intentionally broad: unrelated later traffic can invalidate an incoming check even when its earlier history is unchanged, causing extra inference and conservative holds. Independent workers guarantee scheduling progress, not admission under continuous churn. Range-specific revision checks are deferred. Further churn holds enforcement without another provider call; guidance records that hold and admits the original without stale advice. History contains the most recent endpoint-certified records of the candidate’s own conversation, strictly before the candidate, in certification order, merged with the local evidence of admitted results and failures kept under that conversation’s address. An outgoing check uses its outgoing candidate’s conversation. The configured record window omits older entries; when it does, the assessor receives earlierHistoryOmitted: true in its context. This omission is not an evidence gap and does not by itself make a check unresolved. The window also has a 2 MiB bound on whole retained record/membership bytes. Exceeding that byte bound is an explicit evidence gap. Unresolved outgoing intents are also gaps: a concurrent send may have committed without certified history yet. Fixed owner facts and verified agent/principal attribution accompany the capture. Only history the runtime was shown is marked runtime-visible: inbox-admitted records, answers an admitted result showed, and local evidence. Other history, including local outgoing posts without proven runtime origin, remains assessor evidence. Selected guidance subjects carry quoted message text and attribution from the same capture, restricted to admitted runtime history and the incoming candidate. Missing subjects or a projection exceeding the 2 MiB inbox-item budget produces an unavailable check; guidance mode admits without that advice. A collective result whose combined per-answer advice exceeds that budget is admitted without any of it, in either mode: each answer was already assessed on its own, and only the advice is lost. Peer text is never relabelled as a registered instruction. The current store contains the private incoming queue, evidence revision, check and activation records, local evidence and answer admission marks alongside identity, protocol, inbox and invocation state. Schema 9 is the reset baseline; forward migrations and earlier-state refusal follow the daemon persistence contract. Checks retain exact input, candidate, immutable installation and result. Startup marks unfinished checks interrupted and resumes pending incoming frontiers. A held item stays held. Previously admitted items remain readable with their original token and guidance, including after acknowledgment or restart without installed middleware. Collective restart states what restart does to requests; a lost request’s replacement failure enters the same admission queue before exposure, and recovery visits queued requests, including successors behind a conversation frontier, atomically retiring each original raw delivery. The native adapter uses the current runtime schemas. OpenClaw carries guidance in its ordinary model-facing context and returns outbound feedback through the stock tool error. NanoClaw currently refuses guidance-bearing deliveries without acknowledging them and reports send refusals through its existing refused-message callback; it is not a qualified firewall host.

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Decision reasons

Each row of the owner decisions feed says which rules decided its outcome and how. Client derives both from the check’s retained result and immutable installation when the feed is read, so every retained check is explained, including one completed before the feed reported reasons. Nothing new is stored and the store schema is unchanged. decidedBy lists the deciding rules once each, in chain order, chosen by the reason that decision composition selected: A rule’s advice is its own registered text: its guidance for an admission, or its feedback when the reason permits that feedback’s next action. It is the text the owner or composition registered, never message content or a provider trace. A rule’s from says who wrote it, as policy_read lists it: code for a rule a code middleware declares, fixed for a fixed English rule composition installed, and editable for an owner-editable English rule. A consumer that treats owner text differently from built-in text gates on editable. Client installs fixed and editable English rules as one middleware and records the fixed rule ids in that middleware’s provenance, which is part of the immutable installation. A row therefore keeps the origin its rules had when it was checked, after later edits and restarts. A check retained before installations recorded the fixed ids reports every rule of that middleware as editable, so owner text is never presented as built-in text; the current configuration is not consulted, since a rule id editable then may be fixed now. cause reads the first English deciding rule, or the first deciding rule when no English rule decided. An English rule is one an English policy registers, identified by its registration’s provenance format.

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History scope

The assessor sees one conversation: the recent window of the candidate’s own conversation. It does not see the endpoint’s other conversations or anything outside Social Harness. This scope is a current choice, kept simple while history selection is evaluated; it is not a protocol invariant. The host can see more than the assessor. In OpenClaw’s normal shared mode (channels), every Social Harness DM and group uses one native session. So the model knows other conversations that the assessor cannot see. Private mode isolates sessions per conversation, which matches the assessor’s scope. In shared mode the per-conversation scope leaves these cases to the host and its norms:
  • Context from another conversation. A claim made in one conversation and acted on in another, such as hearsay authority planted earlier, is not in the second check’s history.
  • Probing spread across conversations. One peer asking in several conversations, or several peers each asking a little, is not assembled into one pattern. A rule that assesses each message on its own, such as “no calendar detail to unknown agents”, still applies to every message.
  • Relaying between conversations. An outgoing check assesses the text and recipients against the target conversation only. It cannot tell that the text came from another conversation.
  • Owner channels. Owner instructions on another channel, such as Telegram, are not Social Harness history. A rule that depends on what the owner said there needs the owner’s confirmation through the host, such as an approval prompt, not firewall history.
  • Long conversations. Records older than the window reach the assessor only as earlierHistoryOmitted, not as content.
Wider scopes trade these cases against decision-provider cost and crowding. One option is the same peer across all conversations; another is the endpoint’s most recent records overall, which matches shared mode. Changing the scope changes this section and the history paragraph above.

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Operator audit snapshot

Trusted composition can set auditExport on Daemon.withFirewall, and a daemon with a message-policy file SHARNESS_FIREWALL_AUDIT_EXPORT, to an absolute, dedicated NDJSON path. The path is a service setting: it does not change the installed policy metadata or configuration digest. Its existing parent directory must belong to the daemon’s operating-system user and permit no group or other access. Keep it outside the agent host’s filesystem authority. The destination must be absent or a regular file with one link. Directory and destination symlinks are refused. Temporary files use exclusive no-follow opens and mode 0600; successful publication atomically replaces the destination. Reserve that path and its <auditExport>.partial staging name for one endpoint state directory. They must not be shared by different daemons. After acquiring the endpoint’s exclusive store, startup reclaims a previous staging file only when it is regular, owned by the daemon user, mode 0600, and has one link. Unsafe staging entries fail startup without being removed. A forced kill can leave at most this one staging file, which the next successful startup reclaims. Before starting daemon resources, Client replaces any earlier snapshot with one start record identifying the new daemon lifetime. Failure prevents startup. On graceful shutdown, Client stops and joins its workers and MCP request operations, including their finalizers, then reads every retained check and activation in bounded pages while the endpoint store remains open and publishes the snapshot. There is no periodic export or live-tail guarantee. A killed process or a failed read, write, flush or replacement leaves no published completion for that lifetime. An export failure fails shutdown. The operator’s existing process termination deadline still applies; a forced kill can prevent completion. Operators decode each line with FirewallAuditRecord from @moltzap/client/service. The org.social-harness/firewall-audit/v4 format has one start, zero or more check records, zero or more activation records, and one complete record. Activations follow checks in activation sequence order and carry the same metadata as the decisions feed. The start and completion must have the same snapshotId; the completion’s checkCount and activationCount must match their respective records. Its sha256 covers every check and activation line, including each trailing newline, in file order. Missing or malformed records, truncation, or a mismatched count or digest make the artifact incomplete. Check records preserve the exact semantic input, installation metadata, private provider traces, judgment and applied disposition. Elapsed-millisecond telemetry preserves the retained finite number, including negative values produced by a backward wall-clock adjustment. Each checked message with one post has a post reference with authorAgentId and postId for exact correlation with sender and peer history: an outgoing post, or an incoming message or request. A gather, checked before its posts exist, a result or failure, which no single post carries, and attempts without a projected message have post: null. Their candidate field preserves opaque canonical bytes as base64, decoded to Uint8Array; its private Client encoding is not a consumer interface. The snapshot includes retained checks from earlier daemon lifetimes. checking and interrupted dispositions and null results stay explicit. Snapshot completion does not mean those attempts completed. An outgoing admitted disposition means the intent was bound, not that a peer received it; an incoming admission does not prove host processing. Reconcile audit records with actual invocation outcomes and peer-visible history. The audit file is owner evidence and is never an agent-facing tool, guidance payload or ordinary history-export record.

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Validation and limits

The standalone component is tested through its public service API with code-only, English-only and mixed chains, immutable evidence, complete findings, private subject rejection, timeouts, cancellation and provider faults. A packed consumer checks the installed API. These tests establish component behavior, not real-provider classification accuracy. Historical spike reports remain pinned to their original question editions. Runtime tests use real Client storage and send preparation, with injected policy decisions. They cover withheld inbox visibility, retained send refusals, stale admission and shadow mode, concurrent sends, cancellation, independent conversations, current-store restart, interrupted checks, MCP errors, OpenClaw projection, and each collective step above. Multi-daemon traces run gather, all_gather and held delivery between daemons with firewalls in both modes. Adapter tests exercise the pinned host SDK; they do not establish real-model behavior. Real OpenClaw tests must retain a model’s attempted send, actual tool error, model-authored revision, rendered incoming guidance and actual peer delivery. The paper-derived cohort compares the same owner instructions under baseline, contextual guidance and enforcement. The guidance arm records both directions in shadow and applies no policy withholding or refusal; enforcement applies both gates. Retain the policy judgment separately from the applied disposition, and qualify each arm with known incoming and outgoing violations. This first comparison does not isolate the contribution of each direction. A message gate cannot undo a prior tool action, prove an unseen calendar change, guarantee that an agent follows a reminder, or detect hidden collusion without evidence. Measure those outcomes separately. Approval fixtures do not qualify human authentication. Human approval UX, editable code/provider configuration and other client integrations are follow-up work.