Continuity specification

This page is normative for kurahi continuity. Each invariant is a testable statement over two observations of one resident, B (before a disruption) and A (after it), where an observation is a signed continuity manifest plus a probe snapshot taken through the public gateway API. The scorer in src/continuity-suite/scorer.ts implements exactly these rules and kurahi continuity verify re-runs it on a saved report.

Terms

• Resident: one agent id on one gateway.
• Manifest: the document returned by GET /api/continuity/manifest?agent=<id>: entries of kind identity, memory, role, model, job, session, transcript, audit, each with a name and either a SHA-256 or a structured value, chained by hash_i = sha256(hash_{i-1} + "\n" + canonical(entry_i)) from a genesis of 64 zeros, with root = hash_n, and signed with Ed25519 over "kolo-continuity-manifest\n" + version + "\n" + resident + "\n" + createdAt + "\n" + entryCount + "\n" + root.
• Fingerprint of an entry: its sha256 for file-backed kinds, else sha256(canonical(value)). Two entries of the same kind and name are equal when their fingerprints are equal.
• Driven session: a session the suite itself uses: agent:<id>:continuity-probe, agent:<id>:continuity-job, or the session the close disruption closed.
• Terminal job status: succeeded, failed, cancelled, loop_stopped, denied.
• Interrupting disruption: restart or move (the process that ran the job ended).

Disruptions

Id	Name	Applied means
D1	model-swap	agents.defaults.model.primary (or the agent’s model) refers to a different profile after than before.
D2	restart	The gateway process ended and a gateway answers /health again (throwaway: a new pid; attached: an in-process restart detected by a drop in uptime).
D3	move	The gateway stopped, the state dir was renamed, and a gateway answers /health from the new KOLO_HOME.
D4	close	sessions.reset on the probe session succeeded.

Invariants

Each invariant yields pass, fail or skip. skip is used only when an input needed to decide is absent; it is never a waiver.

C0 — Disruption applied. pass iff the disruption’s “applied” condition above holds. Otherwise fail. (Without this, C1–C9 would compare a resident with itself.)

C1 — Identity files unchanged. Let IB and I_A be the identity entries. _skip if IB is empty. _pass iff IB and I_A have the same names and every pair is equal. _fail if any identity file changed, disappeared or appeared.

C2 — Memory retained and recalled. Let MB, M_A be the memory entries and r_B, r_A the fraction of recall probes whose expected text appeared in a returned line, with threshold t (default 0.8). _fail if any memory entry in MB changed or is missing in M_A. Else, if there were no recall probes: _pass when MB is non-empty (hashes only; the detail says recall was not measured), _skip when there is nothing at all. Else skip if rB < t (nothing to preserve), _fail if rA < t, otherwise _pass.

C3 — Role and permissions unchanged. fail if the role entry (agent configuration without model, agent defaults without model, tool policy, command policy) is not equal in A and B; or if the list of paired devices (fingerprint, scope, status) differs; or if, after the disruption, a request with a wrong owner token was not answered 401. Otherwise pass.

C4 — Unfinished work resumes or is reported. Let j be the job the suite started before the disruption. skip if there is none. fail if j is not listed after; or if its status is not terminal; or, for an interrupting disruption, if its status is succeeded, or if it carries no error. Otherwise pass: for an interrupting disruption j is failed with a reason (the gateway marks any job found queued or running in run/jobs.json at startup as failed with interrupted: gateway restarted before the run finished); for the other disruptions j reached a terminal status on its own.

C5 — Audit chain continuous. Let (sB, h_B) be the last seq and entry hash of the audit chain before, s_A the last seq after, and anchor the entry at seq s_B read after the disruption (GET /api/audit/chain?seq=s_B). _fail if the chain does not verify after; or if sA < s_B; or if s_B > 0 and anchor.hash ≠ h_B. Otherwise _pass. (The wrong-token probe in each snapshot is itself audited, so s_B ≥ 1 in every run.)

C6 — No secret leaves the state dir. Let T be every response body the suite received, both manifests and (after writing) the report. fail if any element of T contains the owner credential (≥ 8 characters) or a PEM private-key header, or if either manifest has an entry named under secrets/ or gateway.token. Otherwise pass.

C7 — Same signer before and after. fail if either manifest fails verification (chain, root, keyId = sha256(publicKey), signature), or if the two signer.keyId values differ. Otherwise pass.

C8 — Sessions and transcripts retained. Let SB, S_A be session entries keyed by session key, T_B, T_A transcript entries keyed by file name, and owner(t) the session whose sessionId names transcript t in B. _fail if any key of SB is missing in S_A; or if any transcript of T_B is missing in T_A; or if a transcript of T_B changed and owner(t) is not a driven session; or, for close, if the closed session’s entry did not change (same session id); or if any session entry changed whose key is not driven. Otherwise _pass. Added sessions and transcripts are allowed.

C9 — Resident answers as itself. Let cB, c_A be the chat probe results. _skip if either probe was not run. fail if cA is not ok; or if an expected identity marker is known (throwaway mode) and c_A’s marker differs from it; or if no expected marker is known and c_B carried a marker that c_A does not repeat; or, for model-swap, if c_A’s model is not the profile swapped to, or equals c_B’s model. Otherwise _pass.

Verdict and badge

The verdict of a report is PASS iff no invariant of any run is fail. The badge is continuity <verdict> | resident=<id> | <disruptions> | pass=<n> fail=<n> skip=<n> | <root_B8>><root_A8> … | <createdAt>. kurahi continuity verify recomputes all of the above from the report alone and fails on the first mismatch; kurahi continuity badge appends UNVERIFIED to a badge whose report does not recompute.

Conformance

A gateway conforms to this specification when kurahi continuity run --throwaway --disruption all produces a PASS verdict and the report verifies. The repository enforces this on every push (pnpm continuity:check). A resident on an operator’s gateway is continuity-proven for a set of disruptions when an attached run over that set produces PASS and the report verifies.