Ship a second parity-tested Rego policy that flips the cascade's
leaf-allow-overrides-parent-deny rule for NIST AC-6 conformance.
Standard cascade (existing access.rego, mirrors internal Go evaluator):
Bottom-up walk; first explicit match wins; deny-first within a level.
A leaf-level allow CAN override an ancestor's deny. This is the
cascade's intentional delegation property — a project-owner who
re-allows a previously-denied collaborator works as expected.
Federal mode (new access_federal.rego):
Any deny anywhere along the chain is absolute. An allow only matters
if no level (any depth) has denied the same email. Required by
NIST AC-6 default expectations: a central admin's deny at the root
must be unbypassable by a tenant who controls a subtree's .zddc.
Operators run real OPA with this Rego and point ZDDC_OPA_URL at it;
the internal Go evaluator stays on the commercial cascade. The
toggle is "which policy does your OPA evaluate," not a knob inside
zddc-server.
Surfaced via --print-rego flag:
zddc-server --print-rego # standard (default)
zddc-server --print-rego=standard # same
zddc-server --print-rego=federal # AC-6 strict variant
Parity test (federal_parity_test.go) compiles both Regos and asserts:
* They AGREE on every cascade scenario where no ancestor-deny
intersects a leaf-allow (most cases).
* They DISAGREE — by design — on the three scenarios where the
AC-6 rule differs:
- "leaf allows what parent denied" → standard allows, federal denies
- "deep leaf re-allows after middle deny" → same
- "glob deny at root + specific allow at leaf" → same
Cross-checks the divergence flag explicitly so any future change that
accidentally collapses the two policies fails the test.
Closes the AC-6 row of the federal-readiness gap analysis (now marked
"partially complete" in zddc/README.md — the full bullet would be a
built-in --policy-mode=federal toggle that also flips the in-process
Go evaluator).
Production binary unchanged at 13.1 MB (Rego files embedded as bytes;
OPA library remains test-only).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
ZDDC
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