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Privacy Gate Architecture (Zero-Trust in CI/CD)

The Privacy Gate is the security contract that prevents documentation pipelines from publishing sensitive material. It is intentionally designed as a fail-closed system.

In practical terms: when a security-class condition is detected, Zenzic stops the pipeline immediately instead of producing a "best effort" report.


Why the Gate Exists

Traditional documentation QA focuses on correctness (broken links, missing anchors, structural drift). Privacy risk is different:

  • A leaked credential can become an active incident within minutes.
  • A traversal or forbidden-term disclosure can expose internal topology, policies, or regulated information.
  • "Warning-only" behavior is incompatible with Zero-Trust governance.

The Privacy Gate therefore treats security findings as operational blockers, not style issues.


Zero-Trust Enforcement Model

The architecture follows four invariants:

  1. No trust in author intent. Security checks run on every scan path.
  2. No suppression for security class. Security findings are factual assertions, not advisory lint.
  3. Deterministic failure semantics. Exit behavior is stable and auditable.
  4. CI-first containment. The merge/deploy path is interrupted before publication.

This makes the Privacy Gate compatible with regulated pipelines where evidence and reproducibility are mandatory.


Architectural Scope

The Privacy Gate is not a single rule: it is a family-level control spanning the Z2xx security domain in the Z-Code Gallery.

For technical signatures, examples, and remediation playbooks, use the Z2xx Security family in the Finding Codes Gallery.


Operational Philosophy

The Privacy Gate enforces a strict distinction:

  • Quality findings can be triaged and scheduled.
  • Security findings must be removed or explicitly remediated before release.

This is the core Zero-Trust posture of Zenzic in CI/CD: documentation is treated as production attack surface.