Audit private-protocol allocations after lexical JSON preflight #148

Outcome

Audit call sites that perform lexical JSON node preflight and then ordinary Serde deserialization. The bounded typed decoder's reserved-key repair does not establish allocation admission for arbitrary later Serde visitors; this is an audit task, not a demonstrated exploit on a public endpoint.

Acceptance Criteria

• Inventory the actual preflight-plus-ordinary-Serde paths, their input trust, visitors, permitted private protocols and allocation owners. Distinguish syntactic wire-node counting from a bound on a visitor's later allocations.
• Exercise reserved and escaped private protocol spellings, nested/flatten paths, ordinary values and legitimate enum/numeric-map cases against each affected admission boundary. Vary decoded expansion independently of lexical size.
• For a real gap, establish a reviewed bounded decoder/admission fix and cause-specific positive/negative controls without exposing sealed raw response bodies or introducing a duplicate parser. Document safe and intentionally limited paths.
• Retain the existing bounded decoder guards and source/candidate one-shot budget semantics; compilation or passing syntactic counts alone do not prove arbitrary visitor safety.

Relationships

Parent: #14. Coordinate response-resource proof with #9. No new global release blocker or production vulnerability is asserted before the audit establishes one.

Source

Retired response-decode ledger and bounded decoder contract.

Priority, Size and scheduling require triage; project Status is Backlog.

Resource Proof Responsibilities

Responsible technical role: decoder-audit maintainers.

Next verification action: audit the actual preflight-plus-ordinary-Serde inventory with independently varied lexical size and visitor expansion, including reserved/escaped/nested/flatten protocols. Apply a reviewed bounded fix only for a demonstrated gap. This responsibility adds neither an asserted exploit nor a new global release blocker.

Source: approved shared resource ownership contract, delivered for review in #162. This records responsibility and the next verification action, not completed proof, target qualification, changed workload limits or permission to close this issue.