Distributed Security Architecture

Documentation status: guide — see Maturity and evidence.

A secure distributed architecture combines identity, transport protection, authorization, secret isolation, audit, and trust-domain governance. No single cryptographic mechanism is sufficient to secure the system.

Principles

• authenticate users, services, and peers;
• encrypt transports where required by the context;
• authorize operations at published capability boundaries;
• keep secrets out of models and object references;
• propagate audit context without exposing sensitive information;
• separate trust domains and constrain cross-domain propagation;
• treat the local Runtime itself as a trust boundary.

Identity and authorization

Peer identity, service identity, user identity, and Runtime-object identity are distinct concepts. A successful connection or a reachable object grants no implicit permission.

Authorization decisions should apply to the requested capability and call context, not only to the network address.

Secrets

Keys, passwords, tokens, and certificates should come from protected configuration or a secret manager. They must not be serialized into business metadata, logs, or object references.

Communication and resilience

TLS or an equivalent mechanism protects transport but does not replace authorization. Retries must never bypass a security decision. Distributed operations should preserve correlation IDs, operation identifiers, and audit information required for investigation.

P2P deployments

In a P2P topology, discovery and routing must respect groups, roles, and trust domains. A discovered peer is not automatically an authorized peer.

Internal cryptographic details and private certificate formats are not public framework contracts.