7.2 What Is Not Recorded

The gaps in peipkg's audit trail are specific, and each one is a place where something happened and nothing was written.

  • An install or upgrade event carries no source repository, although one is known at the time.
  • A committed cross-root operation's success event carries no transaction identifier, so it cannot be correlated with the rest of its transaction.
  • Automatic recovery at the head of an ordinary operation emits nothing. Only recovery through peipkg recover produces peipkg.recovery.
  • peipkg recover's failure paths emit nothing. A recovery that fails leaves no record that it was attempted.
  • Declining at a prompt emits nothing.
  • Enabling insecure transport emits no authorisation record, and so does installing unsigned content under an optional policy — the two decisions most worth recording are the two that are not.
  • peipkg-compose emits nothing at all. Image composition is entirely unaudited.

7.2.1 Reading the trail with these in mind #

Two consequences follow for anyone building on this stream.

Absence is not evidence. An operation with no event may have been performed by a caller without the audit privilege, may have taken one of the paths above, or may not have happened. The three are indistinguishable from the stream.

Transaction correlation is incomplete. txn_id ties an operation's events together, but the cross-root success case omits it, so a reconstruction keyed on txn_id will silently drop those.

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