[ PROOFECONOMY ]™GlossaryOriginSpecsWarden
The Warden is the containment controller in a Jailed Canary Protocol run. It sits in an agent's tool-call, egress and delegation paths, judges every held action against the Declared Policy, decides arrests and operates the cells. The Warden is the Device Under Test, and its arrest rules are Controls Under Test.
What it does
The agent’s adapter (IP-J3) holds each action before it executes. The Warden (IP-J4) evaluates it against the Declared Policy, grades any offense, arrests atomically, writes the local booking hash and gets the Proof Witness co-signature, all inside the action it interrupts, and operates the cells.
The rules
- Outside the agent’s trust boundary: separate process, namespace or host, and separate credentials.
- No labels. The Warden never knows which canaries are bad. It arrests on conduct.
- The interception seam is the product. The Warden can only arrest what passes through it. The Interface Manifest states which of the agent’s tool-call, egress, delegation and memory paths it sits in, and a conformance claim covers only those. A path it does not intercept is an untested escape vector, listed as not proven.
- Separation. The Agent Provider never operates the Warden. The Warden operator never operates the Proof Witness. The Kill Switch belongs to someone else.
- Published latency. A conformance claim publishes the measured arrest latency, detect to contained, with the hardware and load it was measured on.
- Escape-tested. A Warden conformance claim comes with Escape Test Suite results. A Warden tested against no escape vectors is proven against none.
What it is not
Not a Warden that arrests everything. That scores no escapes and fails on the False Arrest Rate, which is published with every result.
Related terms
- Agent Provider
- Declared Policy
- Escape Test Suite (ES-01 to ES-09)
- Sting Cell and Hard Cell
- Jail Efficacy Rate
- Jailed Canary Protocol (No Bros Jail Mode)