Topic· 9 essays

Software supply chain authorization

Provenance tooling answers where an artefact came from. It does not answer who decided to ship it. These essays examine change control, package publishing, infrastructure applies and model promotion.

Start here What each standard proves is the reference piece behind this topic.

All 9 essays

AEO

When an AI approves the pull request, what is left of change control?

Branch protection counts approvals. It has never checked whether an approver read the diff. That worked while only humans could click the button.

Comparison

Signing the artifact does not prove who approved the deployment

Artifact signing establishes provenance: this binary came from that pipeline, building that source. It is silent on whether a human decided to ship it.

Developer

Model registries treat an API token as an authorised committer

Weights are executable in practice. A leaked registry token puts arbitrary code into inference clusters with no human decision anywhere in the path.

Developer

Auto-execute modes remove the only gate that was working

Agentic development tools offer a setting that runs commands without asking. Developers enable it because the prompts are tedious. The prompts were the control.

Developer

Replacing approval screenshots with something an auditor can check

Screenshots of chat approvals are the most common change-control evidence in software companies and among the weakest. They are also entirely avoidable.

Developer

The CI runner that can rewrite your entire cloud estate

Infrastructure pipelines hold the broadest cloud credentials, apply changes automatically, and have no step where a human commits to the change.

Developer

GitOps removed the deploy button, and the decision with it

A GitOps controller reconciles the cluster to whatever the repository says. That design means a repository write is a production deployment.

Developer

Package publishing authenticates the session, not the release

Registry compromises usually start with a stolen maintainer session, not a broken password. Login two-factor never reaches the publish endpoint.

Developer

Re-performing controls offline: what changes when evidence verifies

Auditors sample because reviewing evidence by hand is expensive. Machine-verifiable evidence makes the whole population testable in seconds.

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