Abstract
This publication discloses methods and systems for governing the introduction of infrastructure artifacts into decision infrastructure through a governed configuration change validation pipeline. In one embodiment, any proposer — regardless of origin — submits content that is stored with a structural type distinguishing it from a sealed decision record. The submitted content undergoes deterministic policy evaluation containing no probabilistic components, no learning elements, and no runtime inference, ensuring that identical inputs always produce identical outputs. In one embodiment, structural bypass prevention ensures that no path exists from proposer output to sealed decision record that bypasses deterministic validation — the enforcement is a structural property of the system, not a configuration setting, and is not subject to administrative override, emergency paths, or configuration-survivable bypass by any means. Upon satisfaction of all validation conditions, a structural type transition occurs: the proposal becomes a sealed decision record eligible for downstream consumption. Execution authorization is derivable only from a sealed decision record, coupling validation-gated execution authorization to the decision’s validation status rather than to any actor’s identity or permissions. The pipeline applies uniformly regardless of proposer origin — the system validates what is proposed, not who proposes, establishing origin-agnostic governance. The structural type enforcement for proposals prevents non-normative proposal content from being consumed where sealed decision records are required, and type-level coercion prevention ensures no implicit conversion between proposals and sealed records. The disclosed validation pipeline relates to admission control as practiced in container orchestration and API gateway architectures, where deterministic policy evaluation governs whether proposed configuration changes are accepted and where structural validation of artifacts prior to deployment prevents unauthorized components from entering trusted environments. The disclosed approaches establish an artifact governance pipeline with deterministic validation boundary, decision-derived authorization, and origin-agnostic governance applicable to supply chain integrity verification, AI output governance, and enterprise infrastructure change management.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Winchester, Jayson, "Configuration Change Validation — Type-State Gated Approval with Structural Bypass Prevention", Technical Disclosure Commons, (February 19, 2026)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/9355