SDLC · Stage 04 of 07
Secure and govern
The safe path should be the easy path, and a check that isn't real yet should say so.
Principles: Paved roads, with security built in, Honest by design
Security works best when people barely notice it. If doing the right thing takes extra steps, people will eventually skip them, so the safe path has to be the default path.
Governance gates (SAST, image scanning, policy, SBOM) exist from day one as explicit extension points, and any gate that is still a stub says so loudly in its result and on the dashboard. Each is promoted to real enforcement on its own, and none is ever reported with more confidence than it has earned.
Identity comes from the platform, not from secrets the platform has to guard. The event broker authenticates callers with Kubernetes TokenReview against each pod's own projected token. Images and provenance are signed keylessly against a self-hosted Fulcio that trusts the cluster's own issuer, while commits are signed against public Sigstore, because a human's GitHub identity is what the public instance already trusts. Release policy validates the provenance attestation itself (which tasks really ran), in addition to the commit signature, not instead of it.
Tenancy is structural: every app gets a CI namespace and one namespace per environment, as peers, so pipeline permissions and running workloads never share a blast radius. Secrets come through External Secrets from Infisical, with no persisted credentials, and an admission policy closes the case RBAC cannot express.
Where Hangar does this
And for AI agents
An agent PR meets the same gates, plus two that are about agents
Agents are identities with a blast radius, not users with a token. Effective authority is the minimum of five inputs, and at runtime it can only go down. An agent's pull request passes every gate a human's does, plus scope and authority checks of its own.