Fail-Closed Adapters When the Daemon Is Unreachable

The Fallback Trap

Many proxy designs default to allow when the policy service times out. The reasoning sounds pragmatic: 'We cannot block production.' But that converts your governance layer into optional decoration — attackers and incidents simply wait for the outage window.

ActantOS inverts this: fail-closed by design.

Adapter Contract

Pi and MCP adapters enforce a short decision timeout. On timeout, connection error, malformed JSON, or daemon crash:

• The tool call is terminated
• For shell hooks, the parent session may be terminated
• No action executes without an explicit allow decision and valid decision_token

Operational Reality

actantosd runs under a supervisor with liveness checks. During restart, adapters continue to hard-fail closed. That is intentional pain — it forces operators to treat the enforcement kernel as critical infrastructure.

What This Means for Your Stack

If you integrate via the HTTP API, implement the same contract. Never catch policy errors and proceed. Never cache stale allow decisions beyond token expiry.

Learn more: Security · Architecture · API reference