Sylvain Duchesne
2726f4a26f
Deux corrections indépendantes dans la doc vivante, les briefs et décisions
datés restant tels qu'écrits.
P1a et P1b ne disaient rien à personne. Six mois plus tard il aurait fallu lire
le code pour savoir de quoi on parle, et le coût de la recherche se repaie à
chaque lecture. Ils deviennent cap-surface — la forme des capacités, livrée le
2026-07-28 — et cap-enforcement — ce qui reste : le chiffrement par document et
les gardes d'écriture aujourd'hui décoratives. 28 occurrences.
Et api-contract.md se contredisait à quatre lignes d'intervalle : il annonçait
deux points d'entrée en tête, et en bas qu'il n'y en a qu'un depuis la fusion du
2026-08-07. Vérifié dans package.json avant d'écrire — exports mappe exactement
{".": "./src/index.ts"} et src/polyfill.ts n'existe pas.
Ce qui identifie un symbole polyfill-era ne change pas : le bloc marqué dans
src/index.ts et le test de vocabulaire, plus aucun chemin d'import.
3.5 KiB
Vision & principles of @ng-eventually/polyfill
Purpose
A stand-in faithful in SHAPE to NextGraph's future primitives. Single objective: that consumers (Festipod) be coded against the CORRECT mental model — the one of finished NextGraph — and have NOTHING to rewrite when NextGraph provides the real primitives.
What the polyfill is NOT
A security layer. The shared wallet (everyone shares the same keys) plus the absence of real crypto make the emulation infinitely less secure than a wallet-per-user — it is a dev/staging vehicle, not a goal. Insecurity is ACCEPTED. An attacker who bypasses the emulation is not our problem.
The only criterion: shape-fidelity, with RIGOR
The exposed surfaces must match the exact SHAPE of the future primitives, even where enforcement is simulated. The failure mode to avoid: exposing the wrong shape → the consumer codes against a model that will not exist → rewrite. The ACL inversion of ReadCaps was exactly that defect (an ACL where the real thing is key possession) — a lack of rigor.
Simulating crypto to PREVENT shortcuts
Without a minimum of crypto simulation, damaging shortcuts get taken (reading the plaintext, falling back on ACLs). The polyfill therefore simulates the final mechanism, enough to hold this invariant:
A
did(bare id, WITHOUT a ReadCap) and a NURI (WITH a ReadCap) are treated GENUINELY differently: the former does NOT allow reading the data; the latter is SUFFICIENT and REQUIRED.
Concretely, in the target: a document's data is stored encrypted (per-doc symmetric encryption, however lightweight); the ReadCap = the key; without it, decrypting/reading is impossible. No ACL, no plaintext accessible "on the side". Obtaining read access = holding the key, exactly as in the target model.
Not yet true here, and saying so matters. The shape is in place — possession decides, every access is confined to the connected virtual user, caps are stored and read back — but the cap value is the constant
OKand nothing is encrypted. Per-document encryption is the cap-enforcement work, and it is one function (mintCap, inemulated-verifier/caps.ts— this saidnuri.tsuntil 2026-08-10). Until it lands, nothing this library does may be described as anonymous or private.
Shape consequences (to respect everywhere)
- Everything is keys and URLs. There is no notion of membership, role, or authorization list in the model: only symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, URIs, and who holds which key. Any exposed shape that looks like an ACL, a
member, arole, or apermissionis a wrong shape, whatever scaffolding one may otherwise read in the current state of NextGraph. - Reading = possession of the read key (ReadCap =
{id, key}). A bare id (adidwithout a ReadCap) does not read. - Writing = possession of the write key — a key distinct from the read key, hence a distinct axis, but possession too.
- Sharing a cap = sealing it to a recipient (durable delivery, at share time — NOT an ACL re-declared every session).
- Revocation = re-key (new key; former holders keep the old state). Non-retroactive.
- Cap-less reference (naming/pointing without reading) distinct from the cap-bearing reference.
See readcap-and-nuri-model.md (the real model, verified in nextgraph-rs) and briefs/2026-07-20-caps-emulation-alignment.md (the alignment effort).