EAF-4 — Authority–Scope Mismatch

Verified authority exists — for a different scope than the one this execution mutates.

DENY authority explicitly does not cover the declared scope
ESCALATE coverage partial or unknown

Definition

The execution carries real, verified authority — but that authority covers a different environment, system, or object set than the one about to be mutated. A staging approval reused for production. A change request for service A cited while mutating service B.

This class is the most dangerous in systems that check authorization as a boolean. “Is the actor authorized?” returns true; “is the actor authorized for this scope?” was never asked.

How it appears

Approvals with no scope written into them, reused across environments.
Wildcard roles (“admin on the account”) treated as intent-specific permission.
Change requests cited by executions that touch systems the request never mentions.
Agents granted write-capable tools when their authorized task only requires reading.

Across actors

Agent

An agent is authorized to triage issues in one repository. Its tool grant, however, spans the whole organization, and it “helpfully” edits a workflow file in another repo. Authority existed; coverage did not.

CI / pipeline

A pipeline approved to deploy to staging is re-pointed at production during an incident. The approval it carries is real and verified — for staging.

Human operator

A DBA authorized to migrate the analytics database runs the same migration on the transactional database “while at it.”

Why it defeats admissibility

Authority that is not bound to a scope is ambient power, and ambient power expands silently. The admissibility question is comparative: does the coverage of the verified authority contain the declared scope of this execution? A boundary that skips the comparison converts every broad role into a standing production permission.

Remediation

Bind every approval and role to an explicit scope, and write that scope into the record.
Compare authority coverage against declared scope at the boundary — as data, not as judgment.
Expire scope bindings; grant agents least-scope tools per task, not per platform.

In the JExec Record

Primarily affects: authority, scope. The JExec Protocol maps EAF-4 to the consequences above; JExec Check detects it deterministically and links back to this page.