Purpose

Define ISO-17020-aligned governance constraints for evidence handling, audit traceability, and deterministic compliance checks in protocol operations.

Scope

Applies to governance records and governance-relevant procedures documented under docs/governance/. Applies to evidence references and audit metadata carried in governance record metadata.

Definitions

• EvidenceRef: External evidence locator or identifier referenced by hash or immutable ID.
• Trace Link: Deterministic linkage between decision and execution records (for example authDecisionEntryHash).
• Audit Trail: Replayable sequence of records that proves what decision enabled which action.

Governance Constraints

1. Evidence immutability:

• Governance records must not embed mutable evidence payloads.
• Evidence content must be referenced by deterministic identifiers or hashes.

2. Traceability:

• Every authorized execution action must be trace-linked to the governing access decision.
• Trace links must be verifiable from ledger history only.

3. Deterministic auditability:

• Compliance outcomes must be reproducible from ledger replay with no external dependency.
• Audit checks must not depend on runtime clock, locale, or mutable infrastructure state.

4. Confidentiality by design:

• Sensitive evidence content must remain off-ledger.
• Ledger metadata may contain only approved trace fields and bounded key-value metadata.

5. Retention compatibility:

• Evidence references must remain stable for the retention period defined by applicable governance procedures.
• Replacement of an evidence reference requires a new governance record, not mutation.

Enforcement Layer (Code/Doc)

• Code-level verification:
  • packages/core/governance/verifyFullGovernanceIntegrity.ts
  • packages/core/governance/verifyCrossDomainGovernanceIntegrity.ts
  • packages/core/settlement/verifySettlementAuthorization.ts
  • packages/core/settlement/verifySettlementEventAuthorization.ts
• Documentation constraints:
  • docs/governance/METADATA_KEY_ALLOWLIST.md
  • docs/governance/CROSS_DOMAIN_DEPENDENCY_MATRIX.md
  • docs/governance/protocol/PROTOCOL_GOVERNANCE_INVARIANTS.md

Open Questions

• Evidence retention duration and purge policy should be cross-referenced to one canonical lifecycle document.
• A single normalized key set for evidence references should be standardized if multi-rail evidence providers are expected.