OUT
Outbound-connected
The customer Embassy establishes the connection. The vendor does not need an inbound management port or VPC peering route.
Security is enforced where the customer’s risk lives.
Legation does not ask the customer to trust a vendor tunnel. It places verification, policy, execution control, evidence, and recall inside the customer’s own environment.
01 / Security posture
No inbound control path. No central execution dependency.
LOC
Local enforcement
The Embassy controls admission, execution, output, evidence, and recall next to the workload.
SEP
Separated duties
The hub coordinates fleet connectivity; the customer boundary retains the decisive enforcement function.
02 / Identity
Every Embassy and workload must prove what it is.
Legation’s trust spine includes non-human identity, workload identity, key custody, proof of possession, signature verification, and revocation-aware lifecycle controls.
- Embassy identity
- Workload and cargo identity
- Per-call proof of possession
- Operator and auditor identity separation
- Key rotation and custody paths
03 / Transport
Mutually authenticated, sealed, replay-aware communication.
The secure Legation link carries addressed requests and governed responses over an outbound-established connection. Mutual authentication verifies both ends while sealed envelopes and anti-replay controls protect request integrity.
Not a generic remote-access tunnelLegation transports approved application operations. It does not create unrestricted network reachability from the vendor into the customer VPC.
04 / Commit-then-act
Actions are constrained to an approved plan.
The governance model binds workloads to signed mandates and treaty rules. A customer-side agent or service must operate within the approved action surface rather than treating authorization as an after-the-fact log review.
Before execution
- Verify cargo identity
- Verify policy and mandate
- Validate requested capability
- Apply replay and lifecycle rules
During execution
- Authorize each tool action
- Refuse off-mandate behavior
- Capture decision evidence
- Enforce recall and boundary controls
05 / Projection
Customer data can stay in place while useful results return.
Legation provides a customer-side projection and redaction boundary. The goal is to return the permitted answer, structure, count, decision, or evidence reference—not unrestricted underlying customer data.
Content-blindness by constructionProjection is no longer content-blind only by test—it is content-blind by construction. Every projection passes through a single chokepoint (
Enclave::run), where a closed, versioned egress schema gate (legation-enclave::evidence::validate_egress) validates the payload against the closed schema for its kind before it may cross. An unknown kind fails closed (EnclaveError::EgressRejected). The MCP-direct projection path (legation-mcp) is closed the same way: typed projections with deny_unknown_fields and an enforced mcp_projection_is_closed guard before sealing.References, never excerptsThe first strictly-typed egress payload is CMMC / NIST 800-171 control evidence (
ControlEvidenceSet): closed enums for status, severity, and gate, plus references only—SHA-384 digests and bounded identifiers. It carries no excerpt, message, snippet, or filename. Because a filename can itself be content (for example customer_ssn_dump.rs), locations cross as digest-only.Precise claimData isolation and IP protection depend on deployment tier and workload design. Hardware-backed protection against a malicious host belongs to the Sovereign/TEE profile, not every commercial deployment.
06 / Monitoring and evidence
Continuously monitored. Governance that can be inspected and defended.
A metadata-only monitoring lane continuously reports embassy liveness, seal integrity, treaty adherence, and behavioral anomalies—never carrying customer data across the boundary. It is backed by tamper-evident transparency mechanisms, SIEM-oriented events, compliance evidence snapshots, OSCAL-related structures, observability, and separate operator and auditor surfaces.
- Hash-linked and signed evidence mechanisms
- Workload and policy identity in event records
- Customer-local execution evidence
- Operational telemetry and health signals
- Auditor-oriented views and export paths
AssuranceReceipt—the artifact an auditor filesAn in-VPC assurance run emits an Ed25519-signed, offline-verifiable receipt (
legation-compliance::receipt) that binds the verdict (gate plus evidence_sha384), the harness_digest for the sealed check that ran, the scope (the sealed bag’s Merkle root, treaty digest, and tier/epoch—identity by reference, never code or data), the authorizing mandate’s id, task, session, and clause together with the mandate signature, and the enclave’s hash-chained audit-head. Any tampered field breaks the signature. It verifies with no clock and no network, answering the “reproducible?” and “attributable?” questions a bare pass/fail cannot.07 / Compliance frameworks
Built to be evaluated—across the frameworks your customers answer to.
Legation does not reimplement compliance; it provides controls, evidence, and hardening that map to the frameworks a security team must satisfy. The tier dial sets the floor, from commercial assurance up through DoD sovereign.
| Framework | Typical tier | What Legation contributes |
|---|---|---|
| SOC 2 | Commercial | Access control, audit evidence, and identity and change governance signals |
| HIPAA | Commercial / Regulated | Customer-local processing, projection, and metadata-only audit of PHI paths |
| PCI DSS | Commercial / Regulated | Network segmentation, no inbound access, and scoped data-handling boundaries |
| GDPR · EU AI Act | EU / Regulated | EU-resident hosting, customer-local processing, and metadata-only audit and logging aligned to EU AI Act Art. 11/12 |
| FedRAMP Mod/High · NIST 800-53 | Regulated | Control-aligned SSP inputs, immutable evidence, and hardened endpoints |
| CMMC L2 · NIST 800-171 | Regulated / Sovereign | AC/AU/IA/SC/SI control support, SPRS-oriented evidence, and sealed accreditation |
| DoD IL5 · CNSSP-12 | Sovereign | CNSA 2.0 cryptography, hardware custody path, and STIG-mapped runtime |
Positioning, stated honestlyLegation provides controls and evidence aligned to these frameworks. It is a compliance-aware substrate—not an automatic certification or authorization. Formal attestation depends on the deployed system, procedures, and assessor determination.
08 / Hardening tiers
Match the protection model to the customer’s threat model.
| Capability | Commercial | Regulated | Sovereign |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outbound mTLS | Included | Included | Included |
| Local policy enforcement | Included | Included | Included |
| Immutable evidence path | Optional | Expected | Expected |
| FIPS-oriented endpoints | Optional | Profiled | Profiled |
| Hardware key custody | Optional | Optional | Core profile |
| Host-resistant workload protection | Not claimed | Deployment-specific | TEE/HSM path |
09 / Honest limits
Architecture creates controls. Authorization still requires proof.
Legation should be positioned as a hardened, compliance-aware deployment substrate—not as an automatic certification. Formal FedRAMP, IL5, HIPAA, PCI, or other authorization claims depend on the deployed system, operating procedures, evidence, validation scope, and assessor determination.
The egress gate constrains projection to closed, typed, reference-only payloads; it is not a substitute for human review. A diff or raw excerpt still cannot cross the boundary—that review happens in-VPC.