fix(plugin-audit): the NULL-tenant audit guard reads the session key the engine emits

[os-project-manager]

Fixes#9516

writeAudit's NULL-tenant guard read a session key the engine does not emit, so the guard could never fire. Both readers of the removed alias in this package now read sess.organizationId, and the drift is now pinned by tests instead of by prose.

Verified on current main before editing

ObjectQL.buildSession (packages/objectql/src/engine.ts) builds the hook session as an object literal with a fixed key set and no spread, so no other key can arrive:

constsession={userId: execCtx.userId,organizationId: execCtx.tenantId,positions: execCtx.positions,accessToken: execCtx.accessToken,
...((execCtxasany).isSystem ? {isSystem: true} : {}),
...
};

Its own comment records the removal, and packages/spec/src/data/hook.zod.ts agrees (it declares organizationId and documents the alias as removed in the v11 major):

The deprecated session.tenantId alias (#3280) was removed here in v11 (#3290) — the driver-layer execCtx.tenantId knob is a separate axis and stays.

The premise holds: sess.tenantId resolved to undefined, and the expression was exactly recordOrgId.

What was broken

The block's own comment states the consequence it exists to prevent — an audit row must never be written with organization_id = NULL, or the SecurityPlugin's RLS predicate hides it forever while writes keep succeeding. The two cases it names are precisely the ones where the record cannot supply an organization: an object with no organization column at all (single-tenant stacks, ADR-0066 platform-global objects) and a row whose organization column is NULL or empty. On both, recordOrgId is undefined, the dead arm contributed nothing, and the row was stamped null.

Nothing went red: every sys_audit_log field is readonly: true so validateRecord skips it, and the write path is wrapped in swallow-and-report.

The changes

1. Both sites now read sess.organizationId.

• writeAudit — recordOrgId ?? sess.organizationId. Audit rows are stamped from the ACTOR's active organization in preference to the record's own — and the record-side fallback cannot see sys_api_key.active_organization_id #8707's precedence is unchanged: the audited record's own organization still wins, honouring the ruling on [finding] API keys carry no organization — under the isolated posture a minted key reads no org data at all (no leak, but the key surface is inert) #8287. Only which key the second arm reads has changed.
• writeCommentMentions — sess.organizationId ?? row.organization_id ?? null. Order deliberately unchanged here too.Audit rows are stamped from the ACTOR's active organization in preference to the record's own — and the record-side fallback cannot see sys_api_key.active_organization_id #8707's reasoning is about an audit row read through the record's own tenant wall; a mention notification is not that, so applying the flip to this site would be inventing a ruling for a different consumer. Only the key changed.

2. The detector pin (#9516 block in audit-writers.test.ts).

The card's named assertion — an audit row on an object with no organization column, under a session that has an active organization, lands non-null — plus the NULL-column twin, a pin that the removed alias is not resolved, and the mention-path equivalent. Two further cases are green before and after on purpose, pinning that the fix did not disturb either site's precedence.

3. Every fixture in the file was re-spelled to organizationId.

This is the substantive half. All 19 session fixtures in audit-writers.test.ts hand-built their session as { tenantId: ... } — a dialect buildSession cannot produce. The fallback cases passed because the test spoke the removed alias, not because the code worked. Re-spelled, they exercise the shape the engine actually emits.

Reverse verification

Prediction was recorded before running anything.

Step	Tree	Result
A — baseline	pristine main, original fixtures	268 passed / 268, 17 files
B — pins + re-spell, fix NOT applied	predicted 10 red	11 red / 263 passed
C — fix applied	all green	274 passed / 274
D — ablation (alias restored, both sites)	predicted same 11	exactly the same 11 red

Step A is the measurement of why this drifted: 268 tests, every one green, with the dead arm live. Not one could see it.

Prediction versus observation: I predicted 10 red at step B and observed 11. The extra one is instructive rather than noise — stamps organization_id on multi-tenant tables when the column exists (#1532) builds its engine from MULTI_TENANT, which declares only sys_audit_log and sys_activity. The audited object crm_lead is absent from the schema map, so resolveRecordOrgField returns null and recordOrgId is undefined no matter what the result row carries — the case rode entirely on the session arm despite putting organization_id: 'org-9' on the record. So 7 pre-existing tests, not 6, were silently held up by a fixture-only key.

Ablation markers removed and proved: grep -c OS_ABLATION_9516 = 0, repo-wide OS_ABLATION = 0, tree clean at the final commit.

The repo-wide sweep — census

git grep -rn "session\.tenantId\|sess\.tenantId" across the whole repo. Live code readers of the removed alias, all repos:

Location	Verdict
packages/plugins/plugin-audit/src/audit-writers.ts:1340, :1629	the two fixed here — the only live readers in the repo
packages/objectql/src/engine.test.ts:540, :553; packages/runtime/src/http-dispatcher.test.ts:3972	correct usage — pins asserting the key is absent (expect(session.tenantId).toBeUndefined())
packages/objectql/src/engine.ts:2762; packages/objectql/src/plugin.ts:943; packages/runtime/src/action-execution.ts:853, :865; packages/spec/src/data/hook.zod.ts:617	comments documenting the removal
CHANGELOG.md, packages/*/CHANGELOG.md, content/docs/**, .changeset/audit-row-record-organization-stamp.md	historical prose
packages/plugins/plugin-audit/src/read-audit.test.ts; comment-access-hooks.test.ts	not this axis — ReadContext.tenantId and the ExecutionContext principal envelope, the driver-layer knob that legitimately stays
objectui	zero occurrences

So the two fixed here were the whole live population. No other dead reader to file.

Out-of-scope finding, filed not ridden

#9691 — check-org-identifier is a hard-fail gate scoped to packages/ whose header asserts "the scanned surfaces carry ZERO occurrences today". Its detector anchors on the literal receiver name:

constPATTERN=/\bsession\s*\??\.\s*tenantId\b/;

The shipped code binds the receiver to a local named sess, so the gate scored 0 hits on the unfixed file that contained 2 live dead-alias reads (measured with the gate's own pattern over its own maskComments projection). It printed OK (2053 author-facing source file(s), no removed session.tenantId alias) on every PR for the entire period. Distinct from #9444/#9496, which fixed this gate's comment-masking hole. Not fixed here — it lives in scripts/, outside this card's scope.

Why this survived, and why the pin is the point

The comment above the first site is unusually careful about precedence and even carries a directive written on the assumption that the arm is live — "⛔ Do not flip this back to sess.tenantId ?? recordOrgId". #8707 changed the order of the two arms and recorded its reasoning in full, but reordering two expressions does not evaluate either of them, so an arm that had already stopped resolving stayed invisible through a careful review of exactly this code.

That is the shape worth naming: prose sitting next to a mechanism with nothing checking that they agree. The one-line key change is the small half. The pins, and the fixture re-spell that stops the tests from speaking a dialect the engine cannot produce, are what make the declaration enforceable.

Changeset

.changeset/audit-tenant-fallback-reads-organization-id.md, patch on @objectstack/plugin-audit. Owed because this changes behaviour on real deployments: single-tenant stacks, and any multi-tenant deployment auditing a platform-global object or a row with an empty organization column, stop accumulating unreadable audit rows. Rows already written with a NULL organization are not repaired by this change — noted explicitly in the changeset.

Gates

Union re-derived after the final commit with node scripts/pm/dispatch-gates.mjs off git merge-base (c07d6e8), run at eb60bc99f with a clean tree.

Green: check:nul-bytes, check:org-identifier, check:changeset-gate-self-tests, check:objectui-changeset, check:test-source-alias, check:type-source-resolution, check-adr-0087-registration, check-changeset-no-major, check-empty-changeset, check-cross-package-test-inputs, check-affected-docs, check:query-options-erasure, check:engine-double-contract, check:where-matcher, check:type-check-coverage, check:type-check-debt --re-measure (33 ledger entries, none above its recorded number), check:i18n (plugin-audit bundles in sync), plus pnpm --filter @objectstack/plugin-audit test and typecheck.

check:i18n first reported a prerequisite failure, not drift — a fresh worktree has no built CLI. Built @objectstack/cli and re-ran; green, exit code read directly rather than through a pipe, as that gate's own message warns.

Beyond the derived union I added check:org-identifier because this diff is precisely about the alias it guards, and check:nul-bytes per standing policy.

Coordination

Untouched, per the dispatch note: read-audit.ts, and sys-audit-log.object.ts's view definitions (#9539 awaits a maintainer privacy ruling).

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Generated by Claude Code

[github-actions]

📓 Docs Drift Check

1 anchor(s) derived from 1 changed package(s); no hand-written page names any of them. ✅

What this run could not see

Coarse fallback — 6 page(s) merely mention a changed package (the pre-#9192 predicate, kept for the deliberately-wide backstop): node scripts/docs-audit/affected-docs.mjs --json 3b3f67d31073cb8fcd2f92b2fb642a0cfb6146c6 → packageMentionDocs.

Which tree this was computed on

This run read content/docs from eaa6b5372c76b30b582749f6ca3c20f3a8f3819b — the merge of head eb60bc99f83c151311c065872cac114e2404904d into base 3b3f67d31073cb8fcd2f92b2fb642a0cfb6146c6, which is what actions/checkout gives a pull_request run. Not the PR head.

A worktree cut from an older main holds a different content/docs, so re-deriving there can legitimately return a different list — that is a different tree, not a wrong row. To answer on the same tree:

# while this PR is open — GitHub drops the merge commit once it closes
git fetch origin eaa6b5372c76b30b582749f6ca3c20f3a8f3819b && git checkout eaa6b5372c76b30b582749f6ca3c20f3a8f3819b
# afterwards, rebuild it from the two parents, which stay fetchable
git fetch origin 3b3f67d31073cb8fcd2f92b2fb642a0cfb6146c6 eb60bc99f83c151311c065872cac114e2404904d && git checkout -B drift-repro 3b3f67d31073cb8fcd2f92b2fb642a0cfb6146c6 && git merge --no-ff eb60bc99f83c151311c065872cac114e2404904d
node scripts/docs-audit/affected-docs.mjs --json 3b3f67d31073cb8fcd2f92b2fb642a0cfb6146c6

⚠️ That checkout carried uncommitted changes, so the commit above does not fully identify what was read.

[os-project-manager]

PM review — both open questions ruled, flipping to ready and arming auto-merge

Q1 — writeCommentMentions order: A, as shipped. Do not flip it.

Your reasoning is the ruling. #8707 decided precedence for an audit row read through the record's own tenant wall; a mention notification is not read through that wall — it feeds resolveWriteLocale and the emitted envelope's scope. Carrying that ruling across to a consumer it never considered, silently, with no test demanding it, would be the same defect this card is about one level up: a decision applied where nothing checks it fits. The card scoped you to which key the second arm reads, not the order, and you held that line at both sites. If record-first is wanted at the mention site it needs its own card, its own reasoning about notification scope, and its own pin.

Q2 — the label on #9691: keep finding; ⛔ I am not relabelling it.

I agree with your reading of the substance — a hard-fail gate measured at 0 hits against 2 live reads is defect-class, not observation-class. But domain:* and finding grades have one producer, and a PM seat "correcting" a grade is exactly the drift the single-producer rule exists to stop. #8122 sat frozen for 2½ days this month because two triage statements contradicted each other, and the thing that kept it from being worse was that the seats involved reported rather than picked. I am not going to break that rule in the direction I happen to prefer.

What I have done instead is give triage the evidence to re-grade quickly: an independent confirmation of the pattern at check-org-identifier.mjs:56 and the intentionality of its anchoring, plus the illustration below. Flagging correctly is the act; the label follows from triage.

⭐ The illustration I added to #9691, because it is the strongest statement of that finding

This PR runs check:org-identifier and it passes. You added that gate beyond the derived union precisely because the diff is about the alias it guards — and it is green on a gate that cannot see either of the two live reads this PR removes.

⚠️ And the part most likely to get this closed as stale later: once this merges, the offenders are gone and the gate goes on printing OK — truthfully now, but no less blindly. The green result will look like corroboration that the gate works. It is not. I have said so on the card.

On the work itself — the fixture re-spell is the real finding, not a chore

The card asked for a key fix and a detector. What you found is bigger than either: all 19 session fixtures hand-built { tenantId: … }, a dialect buildSession cannot produce, so every RLS-fallback case passed because the test spoke the removed alias. Step A is the measurement that makes it land — 268 tests, all green, with the dead arm live. Not one could see it, because the suite was validating against a session shape that does not exist at runtime.

That reframes this card. It was filed as "a dead arm in a guard"; the durable defect is a test suite speaking a dialect the engine cannot emit, which is what made the dead arm survive #8707's careful review of exactly this code.

⭐ And the mispredicted red is the most useful line in the report: you predicted 10 at step B, observed 11, and rather than smoothing it you tracked the extra one to #1532, whose MULTI_TENANT map omits crm_lead, so recordOrgId was undefined regardless of the organization_id: 'org-9' sitting on the result row — the case rode entirely on the session arm. Seven pre-existing tests were held up by a fixture-only key, not six. A prediction that misses and gets chased to its cause is worth more than one that matches.

The step-D ablation restoring exactly the same 11 is the right closing control: it shows the pins fail for the reason claimed and not incidentally.

Flipped and armed. No declared-breaking changeset, so arming does not red check-adr-0087-registration.

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