Alpha Engineering Portfolio · The laboratory
The figures, opened up.
What this is
Each figure in the paper is a compact view of an instrument here. An instrument is a deterministic simulator that runs entirely in your browser: you set its inputs, inject its failures and try to cheat it, and it computes a verdict that names its reasons and seals what happened into receipts you can check elsewhere. Nineteen are open. None is connected to a real estate, and every one is generic and illustrative: the behaviour is shown, the internals are not.
Every attack against every instrument, on one page: try to break all of it →
Everything you do here, in one chain you can rewind: the notebook →
- Instrument 1 · figure in § III.A
The routing fabric
Take links and nodes down and watch the route fail over or fail closed.
A network a team joins by declaring intent is only safe if every path is computed from policy, not remembered from a diagram.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 2 · figure in § III.A
Four ways a route disappears
Draw it the safe way or the trap way, and see which routes survive.
The routes that fail silently are the ones a design has to test for, because nothing will report them.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 3 · figure in § III.A
Who may open a front door
Change the type, the tag, the constraint and the rule, and see what is allowed to serve.
Exposure is a decision recorded in code before it exists, never a side effect of a deployment.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 4 · figure in § III.B
Moving a tier between estates
Fence, evidence, gate, land, soak, verify, retire, or roll back.
Build the new path before closing the old one, and keep the way back open until verification is signed.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 5 · figure in § III.B
Retiring long-lived keys
Replace, disable, soak and delete, or keep a key as evidence.
A secret that can be retired should be, and one under suspicion is evidence, not something to rotate away.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 6 · figure in § III.B
Emergency access, time-boxed
Request, approve, act and expire, or break the glass and be paged.
The fastest path to production is the one most worth making loud.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 7 · figure in § III.B
Drill: quarantine a compromised workload
Triage, isolate, quarantine one machine, preserve the evidence.
Containment is precise or it is an outage: quarantine the machine, not the fleet.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 8 · figure in § III.C
The evidence lab
Deny a source, tamper with a file, rewrite the ledger, sign as the builder.
A denied read is a gap, never an empty result; and a verdict nobody independent has checked is a claim, not evidence.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 9 · figure in § III.C
Exposure paths
Fix any finding and watch which paths, and how many findings, it retires.
A severity list says what is wrong with each thing; a model of the estate says which wrong things line up.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 10 · figure in § IV
The error budget
Set the objective and the incident, scrub sixty days, watch the alerts and the freeze.
Reliability is a budget the team spends deliberately, and the rules for spending it are written before they are needed.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 11 · figure in § IV
Which token reaches which environment
Present a token from a branch, a stack or a laptop, and see what it may do.
Environments do not share trust, and no person holds a deploy credential.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 12 · figure in § V
The policy court
Bring a request, mint and spend approvals, try to break the rules.
A verdict computed before execution, from rules that cannot be argued with, is the only kind an agent cannot talk its way past.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 13 · figure in § V
The governed agent turn
Plant an injection, reach for a forbidden tool, approve, decline, or let it expire.
An agent is a worker with a job description: it can propose anything and decide nothing that matters.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 14 · figure in § V
Which tier is this AI use case?
Answer three questions and get the tier, the controls and the sign-offs.
The more an AI system can do without a person in between, the more must be decided about it before it ships.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 15 · figure in § V
Is this model call screened?
Pick an entry point and a condition, and find out whether anything checked it.
A screening control is only as complete as the list of ways around it.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 16 · figure in § V
Rolling out screening
Inspect, tune, block, except and restore.
Enforcement that has not been measured first is a guess with consequences.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 17 · figure in § V
Drill: an instruction got through
Stop the agent, revoke its grants, trace it, and turn the lesson into a test.
Every incident ends with one more thing the system refuses by construction.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 18 · figure in § VI
The provenance ladder
Promote a claim as different actors, reword it, contradict it.
Memory is nominated and checked; being written down is not the same as being true.
Open the instrument → - Instrument 19 · figure in § VII
The build factory
Prepare, ignite, inject failures, change a finished contract, try to self-certify.
Implemented is not complete, and tested is not complete: only independently verified operation is done.
Open the instrument →