StellaOps Authority Audit Events

Audience: SOC/SecOps, Authority Core, compliance and evidence engineers. Scope: The Authority audit-event contract, its data classifications and event catalogue, PostgreSQL persistence, and the EvidenceLocker EU regulatory audit catalogue.

Related: Authority threat model · Authority scopes · EU regulatory audit-event contract (../contracts/eu-regulatory-audit-events-v1.md).

StellaOps Authority emits structured audit records for every credential flow and bootstrap operation. The goal is to provide deterministic, privacy-aware telemetry that can be persisted offline and replayed for incident response without leaking credentials.

Contract

Audit events share the StellaOps.Cryptography.Audit.AuthEventRecord contract (defined in src/__Libraries/StellaOps.Cryptography/Audit/AuthEventRecord.cs). Key fields:

• EventType — canonical identifier such as authority.password.grant, authority.client_credentials.grant, or authority.bootstrap.user.
• OccurredAt — UTC timestamp captured at emission time (defaults to DateTimeOffset.UtcNow; deterministic callers set it explicitly).
• CorrelationId — stable identifier propagated across logs, traces, and persistence (nullable).
• Outcome — AuthEventOutcome enum: Unknown (default), Success, Failure, LockedOut, RequiresFreshAuth, RequiresMfa, RateLimited, or Error. When persisted, the outcome is normalised to a lowercase snake-case string (success, failure, locked_out, rate_limited, error); any other value — including Unknown, RequiresFreshAuth, and RequiresMfa — is persisted as unknown.
• Reason — optional failure or policy message.
• Subject — AuthEventSubject carrying subject identifier, username, display name, optional realm metadata, and an Attributes list of additional classified properties (e.g. subject.email). All core subject fields are tagged as PII.
• Client — AuthEventClient with client identifier (PII for confidential clients), friendly name, and originating provider/plugin.
• Tenant — ClassifiedString tenant identifier associated with the authenticated principal or client (defaults to ClassifiedString.Empty).
• Project — ClassifiedString project identifier (optional; defaults to ClassifiedString.Empty).
• Scopes — granted or requested OAuth scopes (IReadOnlyList<string>; deduplicated and sorted ordinally before persistence).
• Network — AuthEventNetwork with remote address, forwarded headers, and user agent string (all treated as PII).
• Properties — additional AuthEventProperty entries for context-specific details (lockout durations, policy decisions, retries, request.tampered/request.unexpected_parameter, client.confidential, bootstrap.invite_token, tenant compliance-profile attributes, etc.).

Records are written through the IAuthEventSink interface; the Authority host’s implementation is AuthorityAuditSink (src/Authority/StellaOps.Authority/StellaOps.Authority/Audit/AuthorityAuditSink.cs).

Data Classifications

Every string value uses ClassifiedString to assign a data classification:

• None — public or operational metadata (event type, outcome).
• Personal — personally identifiable information (PII) such as subject identifiers, usernames, remote IP addresses, and user agents.
• Sensitive — secrets or derived credentials (client secrets, retry tokens). Avoid storing raw credentials; emit only hashed or summarised data when the classification is Sensitive.

Downstream log sinks and persistence layers can inspect classifications to redact or separate PII before export.

Event Naming

Event names follow authority.<surface>.<action> dotted notation. The set below is the catalog of EventType values actually emitted to AuthEventRecord as of this writing (grouped by surface); it is not necessarily exhaustive across future releases. Note: OpenTelemetry activity/span names such as authority.token.validate_access, authority.token.handle_password_grant, authority.token.persist, and authority.token.revoke are tracing names, not audit EventType values, and are not persisted as audit records.

Token grants and tampering (OpenIddict handlers):

• authority.password.grant — password grant handled by OpenIddict.
• authority.client_credentials.grant — client credential grant handling. (The legacy form authority.client.credentials still appears in older fixtures.)
• authority.token.tamper — suspicious /token request detected (unexpected parameters or manipulated payload); carries request.tampered / request.unexpected_parameter properties.
• authority.token.replay.suspected — replay heuristics detected a token being used from a new device fingerprint.

DPoP sender-constraint validation (DpopHandlers):

• authority.dpop.proof.valid — DPoP proof validated successfully.
• authority.dpop.proof.challenge — DPoP nonce challenge issued.
• authority.dpop.proof.bypass — DPoP enforcement temporarily bypassed (configured).
• authority.dpop.proof.disabled — client requires DPoP but server-side DPoP is disabled.
• authority.dpop.proof.error — DPoP validation aborted due to an error.

Bootstrap and invites:

• authority.bootstrap.user and authority.bootstrap.client — bootstrap API operations.
• authority.bootstrap.invite.created — operator created a bootstrap invite.
• authority.bootstrap.invite.consumed — invite consumed during user/client provisioning.
• authority.bootstrap.invite.released — invite released back to the pool.
• authority.bootstrap.invite.expired — invite expired without being used.
• authority.bootstrap.invite.rejected — invite was rejected (invalid, mismatched provider/target, or already consumed).

Delegation, AI, and deprecation:

• authority.delegation.revoked — a delegated service-account grant was revoked.
• authority.advisory_ai.remote_inference — Advisory AI remote inference request audited.
• authority.api.legacy_endpoint — a deprecated legacy auth endpoint was invoked (LegacyAuthDeprecationMiddleware).
• authority.tenant_compliance_profile.read — tenant compliance profile read.

Resource authorization (StellaOpsScopeAuthorizationHandler):

• authority.resource.authorize — scope authorization decision for a protected resource.
• authority.audit.authorize.emitted — companion audit-emission marker.

Standard plugin (StandardCredentialAuditLogger):

• authority.plugin.standard.password_verification — password verification result from the standard identity plugin.

Console read endpoints (ConsoleEndpointExtensions):

• authority.console.tenants.read, authority.console.profile.read, authority.console.token.introspect, authority.console.dashboard, authority.console.filters, authority.console.branding.read
• authority.console.vuln.findings, authority.console.vuln.finding, authority.console.vuln.ticket
• authority.console.vex.statements, authority.console.vex.events

Console Admin endpoints (ConsoleAdminEndpointExtensions, ConsoleBrandingEndpointExtensions):

• Tenants: authority.admin.tenants.list / .create / .update / .suspend / .resume (plus failure variants such as authority.admin.tenants.create.propagation_failed and authority.admin.tenants.create.client_grant_failed).
• Operator config: authority.admin.operator_config.read / .update / .approver.assign / .approver.revoke / .pack.enable / .pack.disable / .pack.mode_change / .retention.change.
• Users: authority.admin.users.list / .create / .password.set / .update / .disable / .enable.
• Roles: authority.admin.roles.list / .create / .update / .preview.
• Clients: authority.admin.clients.list / .create / .update / .rotate.
• Tokens: authority.admin.tokens.list / .revoke.
• Audit and branding: authority.admin.audit.list, authority.admin.branding.read / .update / .preview.

Future additions should preserve the authority.<surface>.<action> pattern to keep filtering deterministic.

Note: break-glass session events use a separate BreakGlassAuditEvent contract (BreakGlassSessionManager), not AuthEventRecord, and are out of scope for the fields described above.

Persistence

The Authority host (AuthorityAuditSink) converts audit records into AuthorityLoginAttemptDocument rows for PostgreSQL persistence (schema authority). The mapped document:

• Preserves EventType, CorrelationId, SubjectId, Username, ClientId, Plugin (the client provider), Outcome (normalised lowercase snake-case), Reason, Tenant, and OccurredAt.
• Stores the remote address in RemoteAddress (falling back to the forwarded-for address), classified as PII.
• Includes a summary Successful boolean (true only when Outcome == Success) to accelerate lockout policy checks.
• Persists deduplicated, ordinally sorted Scopes.
• Flattens subject, client, network, and contextual Properties into AuthorityLoginAttemptPropertyDocument child rows, each carrying its own Classification (none / personal / sensitive). Subject attributes are namespaced as subject.attr.<name>; network values as network.remote / network.forwarded_for / network.user_agent.

Tenant compliance-profile enrichment

When a tenant compliance-profile provider is registered and the record carries a known tenant, AuthorityAuditSink enriches the record with tenant.compliance_profile.* properties before persistence (schema version, presence flag, canonical SHA-256 hash, LEI, jurisdiction, responsibility locus, regulated regimes, and NIS2/CRA flags). Enrichment is skipped when the record already carries compliance-profile properties or the tenant is not found.

Timeline dual-write

In addition to the PostgreSQL row, AuthorityAuditSink performs a best-effort dual-write to the Timeline unified audit sink via IAuditEventEmitter (AuditEventPayload, Module = "authority", Action = EventType). This write is fire-and-forget: any failure is logged and never affects the local write or the calling endpoint. Severity is derived from the outcome (Failure/LockedOut → warning, Error → error, otherwise info).

When exporting to external SIEMs, honour the ClassifiedString.Classification tag (None / Personal / Sensitive) to avoid shipping PII into restricted environments.

EvidenceLocker EU Regulatory Audit Events

EvidenceLocker owns the EU regulatory audit event catalog used by CRA, NIS2, DORA, RoI, TLPT, and standards-mapping artifacts. The authoritative contract is docs/contracts/eu-regulatory-audit-events-v1.md.

Catalog names (from RegulatoryAuditEventNames in src/EvidenceLocker/StellaOps.EvidenceLocker/StellaOps.EvidenceLocker.Core/Regulatory/RegulatoryAuditEvent.cs):

• evidence.eu.artifact.generated
• evidence.eu.artifact.exported
• evidence.eu.control.lifecycle_recorded
• evidence.eu.control.snapshot_published
• evidence.eu.artifact.approved
• evidence.eu.artifact.rejected
• evidence.eu.retention.override_recorded
• evidence.eu.schema_pin.changed
• evidence.eu.artifact.signed
• evidence.eu.artifact.verified
• evidence.eu.artifact.handed_off
• evidence.eu.submit.attempted
• evidence.eu.public_metadata.published

Each event carries tenant id, actorKind (stella-manufacturer or customer-operator), regime, artifact type, artifact hash, schema/taxonomy pin ids, signer key/fingerprint where applicable, approver id where applicable, and prior/new value hashes for overrides. Classified properties are redacted before persistence: personal values become SHA-256 hashes and sensitive values become [redacted].