ADR-1003: Introduce explicit quarantine and security gates
- Status: Accepted
- Date: 2026-03-25
- Deciders: avm
- Supersedes:
- Superseded by:
Related ADRs
Context
Some artifacts cannot simply remain “not promoted.” They must be held back from consumption, escalated for manual review, marked as suspicious, and preserved with a forensic trail.
Decision
Quarantine is introduced as an explicit state with its own operational model.
An artifact is moved into quarantine when:
- a high-risk verdict is produced;
- trust policy is violated;
- the source is considered compromised;
- there are signs of tampering;
- a security operator performs a manual isolation step.
Security gates and the quarantine model are applied explicitly rather than through informal operator conventions.
Consequences
Positive
- suspicious artifacts get a clear operational model;
- “not yet verified” and “dangerous” become distinct states;
- incident response becomes stronger.
Negative
- UI or API support is needed for investigation and override flows;
- rules are needed for leaving quarantine.
Neutral
- quarantine may be triggered automatically or manually.
Alternatives considered
- soft-fail only with no quarantine;
- simple deny with no separate state;
- deleting suspicious artifacts from the system.
Follow-up work
- [ ] define a taxonomy of quarantine reasons
- [ ] describe the release and unquarantine flow
- [ ] define the incident annotation model