Security controls and trust assurances

Trust boundaries

Customer systems define policy and business intent. Kern enforces orchestration, execution controls, and validation policy before returning final structured results.

Tenant isolation

Requests are scoped to tenant credentials and policy context. Isolation boundaries are maintained throughout task creation, execution, and result delivery.

Dual-AI validation assurance

Critical verification paths apply dual-model review to reduce single-model bias. Final status decisions include conflict handling logic and auditable state transitions.

Idempotency

Use a stable idempotency key per logical request to avoid duplicate task creation during retries or network failures.

await kern.tasks.create(payload, {
  idempotencyKey: "task-2026-02-14-store-123",
});

Rate limiting

Endpoints enforce request budgets to protect platform reliability. Handle 429 responses with exponential backoff and jitter while preserving idempotency keys.

Webhook signing

Verify webhook signatures before processing events.

import crypto from "node:crypto";

function verifySignature(rawBody: string, signature: string, secret: string) {
  const expected = crypto
    .createHmac("sha256", secret)
    .update(rawBody)
    .digest("hex");

  return crypto.timingSafeEqual(
    Buffer.from(signature),
    Buffer.from(expected)
  );
}

Evidence integrity

Evidence payloads are tied to task identity and lifecycle metadata so downstream automation can apply deterministic acceptance and escalation criteria.