Round 5. Two blocking P2s, both in the execution shell rather than the token
design, plus an overstated claim of mine.
**The degradation signals were defeating the token in exactly the case it exists
for.** A host crashing inside a container leaves a token that matches this
machine, boot and pid namespace perfectly — but the probe saw a container marker
or a multi-entry `NSpid` and answered `Unknown` for everything, so token-qualified
repair did nothing precisely where it had just become safe. Those signals are
guesswork about whether a bare pid is meaningful, and for an attributed pid that
is no longer a guess. Liveness is now asked with the module's attribution in hand:
a tokened pid goes straight to `kill`, while an untagged one still has to get past
the signals, because there they are the only protection left.
**Liveness now runs before the fresh snapshot, not after it.** The natural order —
verify the module, check liveness, unload — leaves the dangerous window open:
after `kill` returns ESRCH this process can be descheduled while the planned module
vanishes, a new host inherits both the pid and the module index, and its
differently-nonced arguments occupy that index. Nothing re-read those arguments, so
the reused index would have been unloaded. Asking liveness first means the
post-liveness fingerprint check catches that replacement, leaving only the
irreducible snapshot-to-unload interval.
**The nonce claim was overstated and is now true.** A token was minted once per
`Routing` session and reused for every subsequent reload, making it a host-session
nonce rather than a per-load one. It is now minted inside `load_module`, mixing a
bumped counter with the clock, so two loads by the same pid really do render
different arguments — which, combined with the reordering above, is what lets a
fingerprint tell a module from its replacement at the same index.
⚠️ **The first version of the attribution fix had no gate, and the mutation said
so.** Swapping `of_attributed` back to `of` passed all 254 tests, because on an
ordinary desktop the probe is not degraded and the two paths agree, while the
planner tests use a fake liveness closure that never touches the probe at all. The
new test constructs a *deliberately degraded* probe, which is the only state where
the distinction is observable. Both mutants — routing a tokened pid through `of`,
and re-applying the degradation gate inside `of_attributed` — now fail it.
Codex's answers to the questions I raised, recorded because they close them:
omitting the pid from the token loses nothing, since the canonical argument already
binds the token to exactly one pid; namespace inode reuse is real but only after
the old namespace is destroyed, so its host is necessarily gone and no live owner is
endangered; and refusing foreign tokens even under `--repair-legacy-untagged` is the
right line, because the flag speaks to missing evidence rather than wrong evidence.
No finding against the two-hole template derivation.
255 tests, clippy clean, fmt clean. All four live field gates re-run green: tokened
cleaned, foreign refused with and without the flag, untagged refused then cleaned on
request, A/B orphan removal byte-identical elsewhere, reference gate still firing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>