EGAF Core profile: L1 assurance for verified delivery

2026-08-30 · Assurance

The Core profile is the default EGAF baseline. If a repo has no .egaf/profile.yaml, the evaluator uses core, so L1 mandatory controls always apply. Every other industry profile in this series extends Core and unions more frameworks on top. That is the whole composition rule: add, never loosen.

Pre-release, founder-operated system; current capability labels describe the evidence boundary.

How the Evidence-Gated Assurance Framework works

The Evidence-Gated Assurance Framework (EGAF) is a spec-first assurance bar. It is in flight. A project claims conformance to EGAF L1, L2, or L3 at a given commit, with evidence attached. It is not a certification, an accreditation, or an authorization. Independent assessment of any organization remains a separate question.

Three parts make a run:

1. A control catalog. Each control is either a machine check (an artifact an independent tool produced) or an evidence: attestation (a signed statement by a named principal). A named check with no backing artifact is DRIFT, never PROVEN. An empty-but-parsable file is not a verdict.
2. A deterministic evaluator. Same inputs produce a byte-identical conformance report. The evaluator does not run tests or scanners. It reads artifacts other tools already produced and records their digests. An agent cannot manufacture PROVEN without producing the artifact the check names.
3. A committed profile. .egaf/profile.yaml in the consumer repo is what CI evaluates. If that file is absent, the evaluator uses the bundled core profile, so L1 mandatory controls always apply. Profiles may only tighten a threshold; a loosening override is rejected at validation time.

Three levels. L1 Core is mandatory to claim any EGAF conformance: traceability, complexity and duplication caps, whole-codebase statement and branch coverage, mutation on changed files, verifier integrity, signed evidence, supply-chain hygiene. An EXCEPTION never satisfies an L1 control. L2 Regulated adds industry-profile controls (evidence packs, retention, model-risk records). L3 Safety-critical adds independence, structural coverage, tool-qualification inputs, and hazard linkage. Fail one applicable L1 control and the report's first line is L0.

Control status is derived from the seven check outcomes already used in Koinessa evidence bundles:

A level is achieved only when every applicable control at that level and below is PROVEN or NOT-APPLICABLE (L2/L3 may also count an unexpired EXCEPTION with an independent approver). The report always shows two honesty lists: Not proven (FAILED and DRIFT) and Accepted without proof (NOT-APPLICABLE and EXCEPTION). A clean badge over an empty honesty block is the failure the framework exists to prevent.

Frameworks are guidance. Controls are behavior. Evidence proves the behavior occurred. Organizational burdens — training, physical security, BAAs, a C3PAO assessment, DO-330 tool qualification, a SOC 2 Type II engagement — stay with the organization. The catalog cites clause identifiers and paraphrases; it does not reproduce normative text.

The catalog this series describes is a measured snapshot: 109 controls, vendored into Koinessa at pin 0.0.0-dev+98d08ef on 2026-08-30. The public specification repository is planned; until the operator creates its GitLab group, treat EGAF as a labeled pre-1.0 draft with publication pending. Koinessa's own first mainline conformance report is planned.

Read the Koinessa whitepaper for the surrounding Evidence-Gated Agentic Development thesis, and the verified-delivery report for what this system already publishes about itself.

The Core profile (id core, L1)

In flight. Source: vendor/egaf/catalog/profiles/core.yaml, pin 0.0.0-dev+98d08ef.

Core is L1. It is the ratchet target: hard on both structural controls and numeric thresholds, each threshold cited. The operator ruled that bar does not move for Koinessa — complexity at most 15 per function and 100 per file, duplication at most 2 percent, 100 percent statement and branch coverage of the whole codebase, mutation score at least 80 percent per changed source file. Coverage-ignore pragmas count as uncovered. An EXCEPTION never satisfies a mandated L1 control; it only suppresses the alert and is listed under "Accepted without proof".

Frameworks Core carries (the union every other profile inherits): SSDF v1.1, NIST SP 800-218A, SLSA v1.2, in-toto v1, NIST SP 800-207, NIST AI RMF 1.0, NIST AI 600-1, ISO/IEC 5055, ISO/IEC 25010, ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119, WCAG 2.2, OpenTelemetry, and DORA practices.

Applicability defaults to agentic projects that have releases and deploys. A project that genuinely uses no coding agents sets agentic: false in its own profile; the absent-means-applies default on ui, firmware, services, and data_store is left alone so a generic baseline never silently narrows what a specific adopter's controls apply to.

Retention is 12 months. That number is a floor for a project under no specific regulatory regime. It sits below every sourced financial and health minimum in the catalog's regulated profiles. A project under a specific regime extends one of those profiles instead of raising this number in place.

own_test_runners is required and non-empty at L1. Core ships vitest as a placeholder that every adopter must replace with its own runner before relying on the profile. A tool listed there can never back an independent-tool verdict for the TST family. Producer independence is a field, not a claim in prose.

since_commit starts as a 40-zero sentinel. Traceability controls (TRC-01 through TRC-03) are not evaluated over history until the adopter sets that field to the commit its own EGAF evaluation began at. Commits before that cutover are exempt.

Core is what you run if you want the bar and have not yet picked a regulated or safety-critical overlay. The OSS Maintainer profile is Core plus open-source supply-chain identity. The L2 and L3 pages in this series are Core plus a regime.

What this page does not claim

EGAF conformance is a per-commit statement a project makes about itself with evidence attached. It does not confer a certification, a SLSA level, or an authorization to operate. Citing a framework in a profile is a crosswalk, not a state the adopter has reached. Planned items carry no dates.

This article is one of ten in a series. Each page keeps the same mechanics and changes the profile.

• Core (L1)
• OSS Maintainer (L1)
• Financial (L2)
• Health (L2)
• Defense (L2)
• Public Sector (L2)
• AI-Regulated (L2)
• Aerospace (L3)
• Automotive (L3)
• Industrial (L3)

The rest of the engineering blog covers the verification loop that EGAF sits on. The Koinessa home page states the product position.