Who caused this

A person asked for something, through a tool, through an agent, through a repository, through a pipeline, and something happened in a system three removes away. Lineage is the record of that path, and it is the question nobody else in the stack can answer, because answering it needs the ledger of every seam rather than the log of one system.

It is also what makes the finding on this page possible at all.

Propagate where you can, stitch where you cannot

Method

propagated

The correlation id was carried. It rides in commit trailers, pull request bodies and pipeline claims, and it survives a handoff to another agent because the briefing carries it too.

claimed

A system asserted the link itself, such as a pipeline naming the change that triggered it. Trusted at the level the system is trusted.

inferred

Nothing was carried, so the hop was joined on actor, resource and time. Useful, and never presented as anything else.

The counterfactual is computed, never imagined

When an action is denied, the record says what it would have reached, derived from the reachability already measured on that machine and from the attempt that was actually made.

It is not a story about what an attacker might have done next. A denied read of a credential file names the resources that credential opens, because those are facts already on disk, and nothing beyond that is claimed.

The escalation no single verdict can see

This is the part a runtime on one machine cannot do, however good it is.

1
One agent reads a credential hint
Permitted. It is inside what that agent holds, and there is nothing wrong with it.
2
A second agent touches a repository
Permitted, on another machine, by another evaluator that has never seen the first action.
3
A third reaches the cloud
Permitted. Every hop was inside its own authority, and no local evaluator saw anything to refuse.
4
Joined on the lineage, the three are one escalation
Detected on the chain rather than on the action. That requires the fleet's ledger and the hops stitched across systems, which is the clearest reason the hosted half exists.

Pattern

privilege_escalation

Authority accumulated across actors that none of them held alone.

data_movement

Material reaching a destination no single hop was refused for.

credential_relay

A secret passing between actors, each of which was entitled to it.

One action, and what it set off

Opening an action in the console's timeline and tracing it follows the recorded parent of each action both ways, across agents and machines: up to the action that started it, and down through everything it set off. The walk is bounded in depth and size and says when a bound stopped it, and it marks a chain whose far end left the machine, which is what turns one agent starting another into something a person has to look at.

Containment is proposed, and a person confirms it

A detector acts alone only once the ledger shows it is right often enough, and until then a chain finding proposes containment rather than taking it. Every detector carries its precision to date, because a detector nobody measured is a mute button waiting to be pressed.

Activity and audit

The hash-chained record each hop is written to.

Coverage and containment

Stopping an agent everywhere, and the machines a stop did not reach.

Is this actually working

The same ledger, read for what an agent never needed.