Open_Ultra_SAST/.kiro/specs/pre-push-safety-net/release-milestones.md

Release milestones: prove usefulness, then speed and transfer

Accepted direction: 2026-09-14. The maintainer agreed to the five-step path and asked for it to be recorded in the roadmap as a spec. This amendment defines the order and observable exit criteria for the remaining release work within pre-push-safety-net. It preserves the approved requirements, completed tasks and existing owner boundaries. It does not approve an unreviewed implementation design or enable any capability.

Current position

Next milestone: M1a. None of M1–M5 is verified yet. The 26/27 completed executable tasks measure implementation progress, not release readiness. Task 8.3 remains blocked. The published v1.2.0-alpha.1 is an experimental implementation release, not a qualified advisory rollout. See current status for measured evidence and limitations.

The immediate goal is one real changed-code defect, a defensible explanation, and a fixed twin that stays quiet. M1a first shows the raw detection with every admission veto recorded rather than applied; M1b repairs only the vetoes that fired. A longer, explicitly named development budget is acceptable for M1; it cannot satisfy the hook's latency gate. Runtime optimization is the next milestone after this useful result is demonstrated.

M1 — One real security change works end to end

Status: NEXT — not verified. Dependencies: existing immutable replay and scan machinery. M1 is split into M1a (diagnose with vetoes recorded, not applied) and M1b (repair only the vetoes M1a showed to matter). M1 is verified only when M1b passes.

Why the split: the detector already reports the NodeGoat contribution injection. The 2026-09-14 post-census bundle carries the raw <lambda>2 witness at contributions.js lines 32–34, and the same bundle carries thousands of context_incomplete, graph_incomplete, vendor_semantics_unresolved and ambiguous_line_correspondence reasons that discard it before any developer sees it. Four independent admission vetoes are known: no context producer for dominance/config families, vendor exclusion acting as a global completion veto, line ambiguity inherited by every question, and query identity differing from witness identity. Requiring all four repaired before the first visible result is a full production pass, not one detection.

M1a — Show the detection with every veto recorded

Status: NEXT — not verified. Time box: one week of maintainer effort from the first M1a run. Missing the box is a finding, not a reason to extend silently.

• Use the pinned NodeGoat contribution injection case, its fixed twin and an unchanged vulnerable revision as development data. Record exact base/head revisions, expected operation and outcome before running. Exercise the shipped replay path, existing ranker and physically vendor-free graph; do not substitute a hand-selected slice or hard-coded target function.
• Run all three revisions under an explicit experimental evaluation flag that records each admission and comparison veto per finding instead of applying it. The flag is task-local, off by default, cannot enable any hook capability, and every output it produces is labeled experimental. A longer, explicitly named development budget applies; it cannot satisfy the hook's latency gate.
• Deliverable: the raw finding on the vulnerable revision with location and witness, the fixed twin genuinely analyzed and quiet, the unchanged revision not reported as a new regression, and for every finding the exact list of vetoes that fired and why. Silence from failure is not a pass; a fixed twin that timed out or was not analyzed fails M1a.

Exit evidence: a replayable three-revision record under the experimental flag with exact revision, question and operation provenance, the per-finding veto list, and readable source and census receipts. Kill criterion: if the fixed twin is not quiet under the recorded-veto run, M1 has a detector problem, and M1b does not start until that is diagnosed and recorded.

M1b — Repair only the vetoes M1a showed to matter

Status: PENDING M1a.

• From the M1a veto list, repair only the context/family/identity contracts this case actually needs. The owner diagnosis expects query-to-operation provenance and question- owned vendor relevance to be the two that fire here; M1a confirms or corrects that. Vetoes that did not fire on this case stay as they are and their families stay experimental. Resolve vendor and correspondence boundaries through evidence of dependency and ownership; unknown relevance remains unresolved.
• Rerun the three revisions without the recorded-veto flag through the production evidence and comparison rules. Demonstrate a developer-readable evaluation finding with a supported security consequence, exact location, witness, change attribution and concrete repair direction. Verify the fixed twin is analyzed and produces no actionable defect, and the unchanged vulnerable revision is not reported as a new regression.
• Keep qualification eligibility disabled. The demonstration uses explicit experimental evaluation output; it cannot advertise an unqualified normal hook alert.

Exit evidence: a replayable vulnerable/fixed/unchanged comparison record through the production rules, exact question and operation provenance, completed required checks, reviewed explanation, readable source and census receipts, task-local regression verification, and a list of which vetoes were repaired and which remain. Raw findings, rank positions, synthetic-only controls and screenshots alone do not satisfy M1b.

Owners: contributor-scan for query/operation/context evidence; pre-push-safety-net for comparison, admission, the recorded-veto flag and reporting. Requirements: 1.1–1.4, 2.1–2.4, 3.1–3.5, 6.3, 7.1–7.3.

M2 — The same useful analysis fits the push budget

Status: PENDING M1.

• Use the successful M1 case as a correctness baseline for a transaction-owned Joern session within the existing backend. The measured census probe supports investigating this design; it does not establish full-query equivalence or production readiness.
• Verify equivalent taint, dominance and configuration answers under matching semantics, fresh request receipts, isolated graph identities, cache invalidation, crash handling and process-group cancellation. Keep one deadline across the complete transaction.
• Rerun the frozen seven-class runtime profile with changed-code cases, cold starts, dependency/configuration edits, growth and multi-ref transactions. Retain all timeouts and unresolved checks. Identical-tip reuse cannot substitute for warm changed-code work.

Exit evidence: the M1 outcome remains correct; representative warm changed-code p95 is at most 30 seconds, cancellation/reporting at most two seconds, and supported-check completion at least 95%, under the predeclared profile. A fast census alone does not pass.

Owner: contributor-scan runtime, with pre-push-safety-net deadline/cache integration. Requirements: 4.1–4.4, 6.2–6.5, 7.3.

M3 — The shared design transfers across languages

Status: PENDING M2.

• Repeat the useful vulnerable/fixed comparisons with PMPro/PHP and VAmPI/Python, including the previously unresolved VAmPI SQLI query/path evidence. Preserve explicit limits for authorization and other families whose evidence is still unsupported.
• Keep framework knowledge in frontends/adapters and versioned facts. Equivalent normalized evidence must retain the same core ranking, scope and admission behavior.
• Record core and adapter changes separately. Any PMPro-driven core change must be frozen and replayed on Node/Express before claiming transfer; the initial Node-first repair does not remove that existing requirement.

Exit evidence: reviewed development/regression results for Node, PHP and Python, including positive, fixed and unchanged controls, exact provenance, coverage and runtime. Do not label these repeatedly inspected projects independent qualification. C/C++ bounds remain a separate unsupported abstraction; adding a new engine is not a prerequisite here.

Owners: contributor-scan shared evidence and framework adapters; pre-push-safety-net evaluation. Requirements: 6.2–6.4, 8.1–8.4.

M4 — Independent examples establish useful detection and low noise

Status: PENDING M3. Population preparation may proceed earlier, but evaluation follows the frozen candidate. Reserve untouched cases before examining their scan results.

• Freeze reviewed vulnerable, fixed and benign changes from projects not used to develop or tune the particular language/framework/family. Ghost remains reserved until its actual reviewed population exists. Node evidence cannot qualify PHP or Python.
• Measure actual actionable alerts, supported recall, fixed-side silence, benign interruptions, completed coverage and runtime together, with counts and uncertainty. Keep unlocated targets, unanswered queries and unsupported cases visible in their declared populations.
• Apply the existing acceptance profile: at least 95% observed actionable precision, at least 90% supported recall, at least 95% supported-check completion, the 30s/2s runtime gates, nonzero reviewed emitted alerts and positive controls, and zero known fixed/benign false alerts. Silence on everything fails. A core retune requires new untouched evaluation.

Exit evidence: reproducible, reviewed per-capability qualification with every mandatory gate passing together. Report failures honestly and leave those capabilities experimental; do not require every possible language or family to become eligible for a narrow release.

Owner: pre-push-safety-net task 8.3, consuming verified contributor-scan semantics. Requirements: 6.1–6.5, 8.1–8.4 and the accepted experimental acceptance profile.

M5 — Enable a narrow advisory rollout

Status: PENDING M4.

• Generate eligibility bound to the exact passing runtime, query, fact, ranking and policy identities. Enable only independently qualified capabilities; stale or missing evidence enables none. Advisory retains the same evidence bar as blocking.
• Revalidate the packaged vulnerable/fixed/benign push experience, compact reporting, truthful incomplete coverage, local no-model operation and preservation/removal of hooks.
• Publish the supported scope, limitations and evidence with the advisory release. Expand capabilities only when they earn qualification. Blocking deployment is a later, explicit decision, even though opt-in blocking plumbing already exists.

Exit evidence: passing packaged acceptance validation and exact eligibility for the declared advisory scope, with the release decision recorded. Only then mark task 8.3 and release readiness complete if their mandatory criteria are satisfied.

Owner: pre-push-safety-net admission, packaging and release validation. Requirements: 3.1–3.5, 5.1–5.5, 6.5, 7.1–7.4.

Execution and reporting contract

Use M1a → M1b → M2 → M3 → M4 → M5 as the critical path. Preparation may overlap, but later milestones cannot substitute for missing earlier evidence. Necessary runtime repairs that make M1 executable are allowed; a standalone speed benchmark cannot close M1. Keep ranker-owned scope, vendor exclusion, language-agnostic core behavior and all acceptance thresholds unchanged. No new source IR, second detector, differential graph mutation, learned ranker or unrelated backlog is introduced by this amendment.

Before production edits, make the required owner design/task amendment concrete and apply the existing Kiro approval, review and verification workflow. Prior authorizations remain valid within their scope; this milestone record does not reset them.

Progress updates shall lead with the current milestone, observed developer outcome, remaining blocker and next concrete action. Report implementation task counts separately. Change a milestone to verified only with linked evidence; do not infer progress from elapsed effort or a completed experimental release tag.

Immediate next action (M1a): add the task-local recorded-veto experimental flag, run the NodeGoat vulnerable, fixed and unchanged revisions under it, and produce the per-finding veto list alongside the <lambda>2 witness. Then trace that witness into the declared contribution handler and turn the vetoes that actually fired into the smallest owner fix (M1b). Use remediation research as the starting record; do not begin another broad timing campaign before the M1 outcome exists.