Deterministic trust infrastructure
Control before execution.
Vallum verifies identity, authority, policy, and evidence before consequential actions are allowed.
Under active development. Production qualification has not been achieved.Development status
The problem
Software acts on standing permission. Authority is inferred afterwards.
Most systems grant broad, long-lived access and then try to reconstruct who was allowed to do what from logs. Agents and automation inherit that access and act at machine speed. When a required security state is missing or stale, the default is usually to proceed.
Vallum inverts the order. A consequential action is not permitted until identity, authority, policy, and evidence have been verified, and the decision is recorded before the effect occurs.
Doctrine
The order of authority
- Humans establish legitimate authority.
- Vallum makes that authority enforceable.
- Agents and software may execute only what has been authorized.
Four commitments
What Vallum is built to do
Human authority
Legitimate authority originates with people. No system, agent, administrator, backup, or successor receives root authority automatically.
Deterministic authorization
Decisions are ALLOW or BLOCK, produced by explicit rules over verified inputs. No AI, probabilistic scoring, natural-language judgment, or conversational approval sits in the trusted path.
Enforcement before consequential effects
A named policy-enforcement point stops the effect on BLOCK. Enforcement is designed to happen before the action, not as a report after it.
Verifiable evidence
Every decision is designed to leave a record that ties the request, the identity, the policy, and the outcome together with cryptographic provenance.
Fail closed
Missing state is a BLOCK, not a guess.
When required security state is missing, stale, ambiguous, inconsistent, unavailable, or unverifiable, the intended architecture fails closed. The action does not proceed until the state can be verified.
Deployment profiles
One protocol. Three deployment profiles.
Vallum Home Computer, Vallum Business, and Vallum Enterprise share the same decision semantics. Enterprise adds scale, separation of duties, federation, assurance, and regulatory controls. No profile is generally available.
Vallum Home Computer
An individual operating their own machines and the agents that run on them.
Vallum Business
A team or company with several operators and shared systems.
Vallum Enterprise
Organizations that need separation of duties, federation across units, and assurance for regulators.
Current development status
Where the work stands
Vallum is in controlled laboratory development. Remediation is underway, beginning with canonical contracts and preserved assurance evidence. The full status panel is published and kept current.
- Internal pinned-repository static review:
- COMPLETE
- Software candidate
- BLOCKED
- Live customer pilot
- NO-GO
- Controlled laboratory development
- ACTIVE
- Complete rewrite required
- NO
- Production qualification
- NOT ACHIEVED
Request a technical briefing
For teams evaluating deterministic authorization for agents, automation, or privileged operations. Briefings cover the target architecture, the current development status, and the evidence that still has to be produced.