提出原子决策边界,确保自主系统执行时的权限控制精确无误。
Atomic Decision Boundaries: A Structural Requirement for Guaranteeing Execution-Time Admissibility in Autonomous Systems
- 将决策与状态变更合为不可分割的单一动作步骤
- 证明分离式系统无法在执行时保证权限正确性
- 适合关注实时安全与权限控制的系统设计者
自主系统越来越多地执行直接修改共享状态的操作,亟需对允许的状态转移进行精准控制。现有治理机制在执行前评估策略或事后重构行为,但无法在状态转移发生的瞬间强制执行合法性。本文引入原子决策边界:在标记转移系统(LTS)模型中,决策与状态转移被共同确定为一个不可分割的步骤。我们区分两类系统:原子系统中,评估与转移在同一LTS步内耦合;分裂评估系统中,二者分属不同步骤,由环境动作穿插。这种分离导致架构间隙——决策在某一状态评估,转移在另一状态触发——任何策略都无法在分裂架构内弥补。在真实并发环境下,我们通过构造反例轨迹证明:任何分裂系统都无法在合法性方面等价于原子系统。由此得出三个推论:分裂系统无法实现执行时保障、外部状态增强不足、合法性应是执行时而非评估时属性。我们进一步形式化了‘升级’结果(Escalate),证明其只是转移而非消除原子性要求:只有当解决过程本身是原子的,才安全。我们将RBAC、ABAC、OPA、Cedar、AWS IAM归类为分裂系统,ACP为原子系统,构建了现有治理机制的结构分类体系。合法性是执行属性,而非评估属性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Autonomous systems increasingly execute actions that directly modify shared state, creating an urgent need for precise control over which transitions are permitted to occur. Existing governance mechanisms evaluate policies prior to execution or reconstruct behavior post hoc, but do not enforce admissibility at the exact moment a state transition is committed. We introduce the atomic decision boundary, a structural property of admission control systems in which the decision and the resulting state transition are jointly determined as a single indivisible step in the labeled transition system (LTS) model of execution. We distinguish two classes: atomic systems, where evaluation and transition are coupled within a single LTS step, and split evaluation systems, where they are separate transitions interleaved by environmental actions. The separation introduces an architectural gap -- the decision is evaluated in one system state; the transition fires in a potentially different one -- that no policy, regardless of sophistication, can close from within a split architecture. Under realistic concurrent environments, we prove via a constructive counterexample trace that no construction can make a split system equivalent to an atomic system with respect to admissibility. Three corollaries follow: impossibility of execution-time guarantees in split systems, insufficiency of external state enrichment, and admissibility as an execution-time rather than evaluation-time property. We further formalize the Escalate outcome -- absent from classical TOCTOU analyses -- proving that it transfers rather than eliminates the atomicity requirement: resolution is safe if and only if it is itself atomic. We classify RBAC, ABAC, OPA, Cedar, and AWS IAM as split systems and ACP as atomic, providing a structural taxonomy of existing governance mechanisms. Admissibility is a property of execution, not evaluation.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。