Beer Can Labs
Staff / Bouncer
Front desk

Bouncer

Head of Authorization

Decides who may do what. A person has roles, a role holds privileges, and every route on the control plane asks for exactly one. The Bouncer also holds sensitive agent actions until a person approves them.

Design rules
A2, E4, E9, SK3, E12
Contracts offered
3
Key flows
3

On the job

  • Answers authorize for every route
  • Derives agent-owner, agent-member and requester from data, never from a credential
  • Decides which outbound requests and tool calls are held
  • Keeps the approval record and says who may decide it

Not my job

  • Verify a credential. That is the Gatekeeper.
  • Forward the held request. The egress does that after approval.
Key product flows

What Bouncer does, step by step

Flow

Authorize a request

A user maps to roles; a role maps to privileges; never a user to a privilege.

  1. The Gatekeeper authenticates the caller and passes the principal.

    Works with Gatekeeper· contractauthorize →

  2. The route names one privilege. authorize takes the principal, the privilege and an optional resource such as the agent.

  3. Derived roles join the principal’s own: agent-owner if the person is on the agent’s configuration record; agent-member if they hold an agent role; requester if their message started the run.

    Works with Registrar· contractVersionedConfigStore →Owners are stored on the configuration record (SK3).

  4. It returns allowed, or the missing privilege. A conformance test fails if a route is missing from the matrix.

Flow

Hold an action for approval

E9. The egress asks; the Bouncer decides; the egress enforces.

  1. The Gatekeeper’s egress passes a request to checkHold with the agent’s hold rules.

    Works with Gatekeeper· contractcheckHold →

  2. If it is held, the Bouncer stores a reviewed copy, its hash and a size-limited body in an approval record.

  3. The run is blocked and the requesting user is asked to decide.

  4. Tool calls that need approval go through checkToolApproval before the Keymaster releases a credential.

    Works with Keymaster· contractcheckToolApproval →
Flow

Decide an approval

Who may say yes depends on who asked.

  1. For an agent’s action the agent is the actor and the requesting user is the reviewer and approver.

  2. If the run has no requesting user, an agent owner decides. A global admin or approver may decide any agent’s.

  3. The control plane acts on the decision: blockRun to stop, deliverDecision to continue.

    Works with Landlord· contractcreateRun and the run lifecycle →

  4. The decision, with who decided it, is ledgered.

    Works with Auditor· contractLedgerStore / verifyChain →

Contracts Bouncer keeps 3 offered