What Synapse is not
- A message bus
- A networking layer
- An RPC framework
- A service mesh
- A generic agent communication protocol
- A transport abstraction
Core responsibilities
- Connect eligible Principals and capabilities
- Constrain authority, purpose, context, risk and policy
- Coordinate multiple bounded intelligence components
- Preserve causality, provenance, semantic integrity and actual effect state
- Contain localized compromise or failure
Transport and Principal model
Transport moves bytes. Synapse establishes constitutional meaning and legitimacy. Physical reachability does not imply authorization, and Principal identity remains distinct from execution location.
Synaptic Acts
DISCOVER · INFORM · QUERY · REQUEST · DELEGATE · OFFER
SUBSCRIBE · PUBLISH · NEGOTIATE · COMMIT · CANCEL · REVOKECommunication is not delegation. Information exchange does not imply authority transfer.
Capability model
A Synaptic Capability is a declared, versioned, contract-bound unit of functionality. Discovery, resolution, selection and invocation remain distinct stages; eligibility must be evaluated before optimization by speed, price or convenience.
Delegation
Delegation is explicit, bounded, monotonic, traceable and revocable. Downstream delegations preserve or narrow inherited constraints; they do not broaden authority.
Authority laundering
Synapse must prevent the use of authorized intermediaries to obtain access, information or effects that the originating request would not legitimately possess under direct constitutional evaluation.
Phase VI closure
Synapse enables ORVY to become increasingly distributed, proactive, collaborative and externally connected without allowing those properties themselves to become sources of authority.
Synaptic Channel lifecycle
PROPOSED → EVALUATING → NEGOTIATING → AUTHORIZED → ACTIVE
↘ SUSPENDED / REVOKED / CLOSED / DENIEDTransport connectivity is not an authorized Channel, and an active Channel does not authorize acts outside its capability, purpose, context or policy scope.
Purpose and Authority Binding
Nontrivial Synaptic relationships may be explicitly bound to legitimate purpose. Capability access alone does not establish permission for every purpose. An Authority Binding ties the Channel or action to the legitimate authority chain; authentication, connectivity, Passport or Visa possession, Assembly membership and discovery remain insufficient by themselves to establish action authority.
Representation Transparency
ORVY distinguishes Origin Principal, Sending Principal, Recipient Principal and represented authority where applicable. An Amplifier acting for a Subject does not become indistinguishable from the Subject.
Synaptic Envelope
The envelope preserves routing, identity, authority, semantic, integrity, causal and payload meaning. Intermediaries may not silently alter identity, authority, purpose, provenance or causal meaning; legitimate transformations remain attributable.
Control Plane and Data Plane
The Synapse Control Plane handles discovery, Channel lifecycle, authority binding, negotiation, routing state, capability metadata, revalidation, revocation and policy propagation. The Data Plane carries authorized queries, requests, results, events, context projections and coordination traffic. Control-plane authority does not grant blanket authority over transported capabilities or protected content.
Semantic Contracts and Capability Classes
A capability contract must preserve semantic meaning, not merely schema shape. ORVY recognizes observational, transformational, mutational, transactional, supervisory and constitutional capability classes, with risk-proportional mediation for higher-consequence operations.
Assemblies, Work and Derived Sub-Intent
Work decomposition does not transfer authority. A Derived Sub-Intent must remain within the parent intent unless separately reauthorized. Assembly topology is a coordination policy, not an authorization model.
Sub-Intent Scope ⊆ Parent Intent ScopeSide-Effect Barrier
Planning, analysis and simulation remain separable from materially consequential external execution. Crossing the Side-Effect Barrier may require fresh authority, stronger authentication, renewed confirmation, economic authority, current Context, Execution Integrity and Reflex validation.
Authority Composition Risk
Multiple individually permissible privileges, capabilities or Context accesses must not compose into an outcome that no participant was legitimately authorized to produce.
Reflex in Synapse
Reflex may deterministically enforce revoked Channels, Visa expiration, invalid authority, duplicate-effect suppression, event propagation limits, forbidden egress, risk ceilings, resource ceilings, quarantine and unsafe Side-Effect Barrier crossing. Reflex remains bounded rather than becoming a second generalized intelligence layer.
Passport and Visa Refinement
Passport / Visa eligibility ≠ task-specific runtime authorizationVisa expiration supports ecosystem hygiene, security evolution, compatibility evolution and constitutional alignment; renewal may validate capability contracts, deprecated interfaces, attestation requirements and current compatibility.
Zero-Implicit-Trust External Mediation
Principal identity and Workload Identity remain separable where risk requires. Attestation supplements rather than replaces authority. Synaptic Gateways translate between ORVY semantics and external systems while preserving limitations, provenance, effect identity and truthful external finality or uncertainty.