Plain-language verdict semantics for auditors and dispute teams reading
the output of farigate-cli verify-evidence-pack or the
browser verifier. Adapted from docs/WHAT-PASS-MEANS.md in the
FARIGATE repository.
PASS
A PASS on an agent-transaction dispute pack means the verifier answered,
in this order and from cryptographically verified material only:
Was the action authorized?The decision receipt is signed, intact, and records the gate's decision for this exact action digest.
By whom?The presenting actor recorded in the pack plus the mandate user principal key (and, for human-not-present flows, the agent key bound in the mandate chain).
Under what policy?The policy set id and policy snapshot hash bound into the signed receipt, with the recorded Cedar policy decision replayed.
Within mandate?The attached AP2 mandate bundle re-verified offline at the decision time recorded in the signed receipt, and the result matches the gate's recorded verification.
Is the record intact?Manifest artifact digests, the receipt hash-chain link, the signed receipt binding, and the signed evidence-pack binding all verified.
Each question is reported as YES, NO, or
NOT VERIFIED, with the checks that produced the answer. A
PASS is a statement about the evidence in the pack — nothing more.
What a REFUSE pack proves
A denied payment produces a complete, verifiable pack with the same
structure. PASS on a refusal pack means the refusal itself is proven: the
signed receipt records the deny decision, and the verifier reproduces the
recorded failure offline. A refusal that cannot be reproduced from the
attached material fails verification. (Stated exception: gate-side
failure kinds are reported as recorded, with the verifier's own
re-verification outcome reported but not matched.)
Trust labels: demo vs. FARIGATE Cloud
Every verdict names the trust that produced it.
DEMO TRUST — the repo's demo fixture material. A verdict over
it proves pack shape and verifier behavior, never production or
customer readiness. The CLI refuses to combine
--require-regulated-evidence PASS with demo roots.
FARIGATE CLOUD TRUST (HOSTED GATE) — the published hosted-gate
trust: a per-deployment signing key generated at first boot plus the
published FARIGATE Cloud governance/mandate set. It proves a pack was
signed by that hosted gate under that governance. It is NOT a key
ceremony and proves no production or customer readiness.
PARTIAL
Everything present verified, but something was not established (for
example: no agent-mandate trust supplied, so mandate re-verification is
reported NOT VERIFIED (skipped) — never silently passed).
Label nuance between surfaces: the CLI reports PARTIAL by default even
when every present check verified (its standing reminder that
--require-regulated-evidence was off), while the browser
verifier reports PASS in that case and reserves PARTIAL for packs where
something present could not be verified. The underlying check results are
identical. A partial result is never a pass.
What tampering looks like
Verification fails closed at the first broken link, naming it — a
manifest digest mismatch, a receipt signature failure, a mandate whose
recorded verification no longer matches, a broken chain link. All five
dispute questions then read NOT VERIFIED. One changed byte
anywhere in a bound artifact produces a FAIL, not a degraded PASS.
What FARIGATE does NOT guarantee
Not an enforcement guarantee. FARIGATE is evidence
infrastructure. A PASS proves what the gate decided and verified; it
does not prove the payment (or any action) could not have happened
through some other system.
Presence mode is structural — derived from the AP2 mandate
chain shape, not from a biometric or liveness check.
Cumulative and velocity limits are gate-side. The pack records
the constraint and the policy decision; offline verification replays
that decision but cannot re-derive the gate's runtime state.
Policy replay carries an engine-version caveat. The verifier
replays the recorded Cedar policy with the engine version it was built
with (stated in its output).
A verdict over demo trust material is local validation; a verdict
over FARIGATE Cloud trust is hosted-gate validation. Neither is
production or customer readiness.