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A SeedID says who she is; it cannot tell the kernel whose hands are on the files. Split logical identity, node commission, and the local Unix principal, then make creation and health prove all three.\n\nSouvie, Annie, and Vanguard get distinct node-local accounts. The existing souveraine user stays where it belongs: under the machine signer. The boundary has teeth only when each turn and its tools run in an agent-owned worker, so the shared-UID compatibility state is named acting-as-human instead of polished green.\n\nAdmission projects an operating skill from real capabilities. The prose teaches the reach; it never grants it.
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Session authority
The Souveraine session has one authority. sessiond receives evidence from the
system, applies Souveraine policy, exposes named verbs, and keeps the trail.
The shell is its face. It is not a second policy engine.
This chapter owns the living architecture. The longer doctrine and audit
records remain in SouveraineOS under docs/SESSION-AUTHORITY-DOCTRINE.md,
docs/SESSION-TRUST-ARCHITECTURE.md, and docs/TRUST-BOUNDARY-MATRIX.md.
The authority it is, and the authorities it consumes
Classical Linux gives ambient authority to processes sharing a UID. It has several narrower authorities, but no single object that means "the state and permission of this person's session." Souveraine does not replace those authorities with hand-maintained booleans. It consumes them:
- the compositor owns what is presented and the Wayland lock protocol;
- logind owns seat/session facts,
LockedHint, suspend, shutdown, and inhibitors; - PAM owns authentication;
- Wayland idle protocols own compositor-observed idleness;
- NetworkManager owns link and bearer facts;
- the kernel and their owning daemons own device evidence.
sessiond is the one place where those truths become Souveraine policy and
action. A shadow copy is not a second truth. If it can drift from the owner, it
may be a cache with explicit invalidation, but it may not decide.
Sixty percent agent, forty percent user
The agent owns device operation. If the system can perform an ordinary device operation, there should be an agent-reachable verb for it. A missing verb is a defect unless the operation crosses a user-only invariant.
The user uniquely owns being the user: credentials, fresh authentication, step-up consent, and the decision to cross a boundary whose meaning cannot be delegated. The user is not required to act as a remote control for mundane operations merely because the agent's path was never built.
This is the 60/40 split. It is not a percentage implemented in code. It is a design test for every capability surface.
Requests are not acknowledgements
The authority distinguishes intent, attempted action, and observed fact.
screenLocked can express a request or policy state. screenLockSecure means
the compositor has actually established the secure lock. A request to lock is
not permission to blank as though the lock were already held. The dark-panel
path therefore requests lock, waits for acknowledgement within a fixed budget,
and records a security error if the acknowledgement never arrives before the
panel is blanked.
The same rule applies elsewhere:
- starting a systemd unit is not readiness;
- issuing a compositor command is not proof that a surface arrived;
- accepting a socket write is not proof that a state transition committed;
- a green package build is not proof that the device installed or exercised it.
The session start graph and its readiness boundary live in session start.
Capability tiers
Tier is metadata on the verb being guarded, checked at the authority. It is not a separate permissions subsystem in the shell.
| Tier | Requirement | Typical reach |
|---|---|---|
ambient |
no authentication | time, weather, timers, media transport, non-personal questions |
personal |
the session is genuinely unlocked | messages, memory, contacts, fleet and conversation state |
stepUp |
fresh authentication for the named family | send, delete, publish, payment, physical access, revealing personal content on lock |
Step-up does not unlock the session. It can grant a narrow action family or reveal content in place on the lock surface. A future grant therefore needs an action family, freshness, provenance, and expiry; "fingerprint succeeded" is not itself a session-wide capability.
Verbs, refusals, and inspection
Every operation exposed by sessiond should have one stable name and one decision point. The same capability may be rendered as a shell button, a body tool, or an agent request, but those are clients of the verb, not parallel implementations.
An authority-grade verb carries enough structure to answer:
- what was requested and by whom;
- what current state and evidence it used;
- which tier and inhibitor applied;
- whether it accepted, refused, or failed;
- what observable acknowledgement completed it;
- what belongs in the forensic trail.
Refusal is data. Stable refusal codes let a face explain, a caller retry only
when retry is meaningful, and the trail distinguish policy from breakage.
describe is the inspection surface: clients should not copy a verb list and
guess which actions are live.
Idle and inhibitors
Idleness is evidence from the compositor, not a timer duplicated in every surface. Applications and system work can inhibit consequences, but an inhibitor is scoped, named, and inspectable. It is not a permanent alternate writer of panel or lock state.
The authority may decide to dim, lock, blank, doze, suspend, or stay awake. The state machine records that decision and the executor performs the action. No shell timer, hypridle listener, or device script gets an independent vote.
The boundary that exists today
The current local session socket is mode 0600 and accepts same-user callers.
That is a useful local boundary, not the eventual attested capability system.
A process running as the user can still reach more than the doctrine intends.
The account and process boundary that turns peer credentials into an actual
agent identity is specified in
agent principals. Until it lands, Agent
Health must describe a live agent as acting-as-human, not infer personhood or
authority from a SeedID alone.
Also not yet true:
- step-up metadata is not wired across send, delete, push, or physical-access verbs;
- fingerprint authentication and short-lived reveal grants are not live on blueline;
- callers do not present capability tokens or binary attestation;
- every device operation does not yet have a complete
describe-derived control surface; - refusal and acknowledgement shapes are not yet uniform across every family.
Those are security and control gaps. A polished button does not close them.
Proof
Keep four claims separate:
- source — the authority and verb exist in the tree;
- package — CI built and signed the owning files and dependencies;
- installed — the device owns those package files and no higher-priority local splint shadows them;
- exercised — the real caller, authority, executor, and acknowledgement ran on the intended body.
The last is the only proof that a lock was secure, a panel moved, or an action crossed the boundary it claims.