QODIQA: Implementation Conformance Checklist

Purpose & Scope

This document is a normative operational instrument for verifying conformance to the QODIQA Core Standard for Deterministic Runtime Consent Enforcement. It reduces each control point of the 68-Point Enforcement Framework to a single, binary-verifiable condition and organizes those conditions across three conformance profiles: CORE-MIN, CORE-VER, and CORE-ENT. This checklist does not replace the QODIQA Conformance Test Suite; it makes the Test Suite operationally accessible by providing implementors with a structured self-assessment instrument prior to formal certification.

Section 1

#How to Use This Checklist

Each row in the checklist tables below represents one control point (CP) drawn from the QODIQA 68-Point Enforcement Framework. For each control point, a Verifiable Condition is stated as a binary proposition: it is either satisfied or not satisfied. No partial credit applies at the control-point level.

The three rightmost columns indicate applicability per profile. A filled indicator () means the control point is mandatory for that profile. An open indicator () means the control point is recommended but not required. A dash (N/A) means the control point does not apply to that profile.

The rightmost column provides a tick box for manual verification during self-assessment. During formal certification, this column is replaced by the Test Suite result record.

Mandatory for profile Recommended, not required N/A: Not applicable Self-assessment tick

Conformance Rule

A system achieves conformance to a profile if and only if every mandatory control point for that profile is satisfied. Failure of any single mandatory control point constitutes non-conformance, regardless of the total number of satisfied conditions.

Section 2

#Profile Overview

QODIQA defines three conformance profiles corresponding to distinct operational contexts and risk postures. Each profile is cumulative: CORE-VER includes all mandatory conditions of CORE-MIN, and CORE-ENT includes all mandatory conditions of CORE-VER.

Table 1: Conformance Profile Summary

Profile	Intended Deployment Context	Mandatory CPs	Cumulative
CORE-MIN	Single-tenant systems, internal tooling, early-stage production deployments with bounded scope and manual oversight.	24	Baseline
CORE-VER	Multi-service architectures, regulated environments, systems subject to external audit or contractual accountability requirements.	44	MIN + 20
CORE-ENT	Enterprise-scale deployments, multi-tenant platforms, critical infrastructure, and systems requiring formal certification under QODIQA governance.	68	VER + 24

CORE-MIN · 24 CP CORE-VER · 44 CP CORE-ENT · 68 CP

Section 3

#CORE-MIN Conformance Checklist

Applicable to: single-tenant systems, internal tooling, and early-stage production deployments. All 24 control points below are mandatory for CORE-MIN conformance.

Domain 1: Intent Declaration

ID	CP Ref	Verifiable Condition
CL-01	CP-01	Every AI action request is accompanied by a declared intent field that explicitly identifies the action type before execution begins.
CL-02	CP-02	Every request contains a declared purpose field specifying the operational reason for the requested action.
CL-03	CP-03	Every request identifies the data subjects and data categories involved at declaration time, not inferred post hoc.
CL-04	CP-04	The system rejects any request in which the intent field is absent, empty, or malformed, without attempting inference or substitution.
CL-05	CP-05	Request contracts are closed at submission and cannot be modified during evaluation.

Domain 2: Consent State Resolution

ID	CP Ref	Verifiable Condition
CL-06	CP-09	Consent state is resolved explicitly as a discrete value (granted / denied / expired / revoked) before any policy logic is applied.
CL-07	CP-10	Each consent record is scope-bound: it specifies a defined purpose, data category, and acting entity for which it is valid.
CL-08	CP-11	Each consent record carries an explicit validity period; the system treats records without a validity period as invalid.
CL-09	CP-12	Revocation of consent takes effect before the next evaluation cycle; there is no execution window during which revoked consent is treated as valid.
CL-10	CP-13	The system does not infer, assume, or inherit consent across purposes, data categories, or acting entities.

Domain 3: Policy Evaluation

ID	CP Ref	Verifiable Condition
CL-11	CP-17	Policies declare required conditions; they do not perform consent resolution and do not access mutable runtime state during evaluation.
CL-12	CP-18	Each policy version is immutable after publication; changes are introduced only through explicit versioning with a new policy identifier.
CL-13	CP-19	The evaluation context is frozen at the moment of evaluation; no policy condition can read state that changes during evaluation.
CL-14	CP-20	Every evaluation produces exactly one of three outcomes: ALLOW, DENY, or ALLOW-WITH-RESTRICTIONS. No outcome outside this set is produced.

Domain 4: Decision Artifacts

ID	CP Ref	Verifiable Condition
CL-15	CP-24	Every enforcement decision produces a persistent decision artifact that records the outcome, the policy version applied, the consent state resolved, and the timestamp of evaluation.
CL-16	CP-25	Decision artifacts are immutable after creation; no post-evaluation process can alter a stored artifact.
CL-17	CP-26	Decision artifacts are retained for a minimum period sufficient to satisfy all applicable audit, regulatory, and contractual obligations in the deployment context.

Domain 5: Fail-Closed Behavior

ID	CP Ref	Verifiable Condition
CL-18	CP-30	In any failure condition (missing input, unavailable consent store, policy resolution error), the system produces DENY rather than a default-allow or best-effort outcome.
CL-19	CP-31	Fail-closed behavior is unconditional and cannot be overridden by configuration, environment flag, or caller-supplied parameter.
CL-20	CP-32	Every DENY outcome produced under a failure condition is recorded with a distinct failure reason code differentiating it from a policy-determined DENY.
CL-21	CP-33	The enforcement layer does not expose internal error details to the calling system; failure responses carry a structured status code only.
CL-22	CP-34	Enforcement latency under failure conditions does not exceed the threshold defined for normal-path evaluation in the deployment specification.
CL-23	CP-35	Downstream systems cannot distinguish a failure-induced DENY from a policy-determined DENY based on the enforcement response alone.
CL-24	CP-36	The system is demonstrably isolated from the execution path it governs: a failure within the enforcement layer does not cause uncontrolled execution of the rejected action.

CORE-MIN total: 24 mandatory control points. All 24 must be satisfied for CORE-MIN conformance. CORE-VER and CORE-ENT inherit all 24 mandatory conditions above and add the conditions defined in Sections 4 and 5 respectively.

Section 4

#CORE-VER Conformance Checklist

CORE-VER inherits all 24 CORE-MIN conditions. The 20 control points below are additional mandatory requirements for CORE-VER conformance. Applicable to: multi-service architectures, regulated environments, and systems subject to external audit.

Domain 6: Determinism Guarantees

ID	CP Ref	Verifiable Condition	MIN
CL-25	CP-37	Given identical inputs (request contract, policy version, consent state, evaluation timestamp), the enforcement engine always produces the identical decision outcome.	N/A
CL-26	CP-38	The evaluation engine contains no non-deterministic components: no probabilistic sampling, no randomized tie-breaking, and no time-dependent branching outside the declared evaluation timestamp.	N/A
CL-27	CP-39	The determinism property is verifiable through a documented test procedure that can be executed by a third-party auditor without access to internal system components.	N/A
CL-28	CP-40	The system maintains a determinism boundary log that records any condition under which the determinism guarantee could not be upheld, including the reason and the resulting DENY outcome.	N/A

Domain 7: Replay Invariance & Audit

ID	CP Ref	Verifiable Condition	MIN
CL-29	CP-41	Any past decision can be replayed against the original frozen evaluation context and yields the identical outcome as the original evaluation.	N/A
CL-30	CP-42	The system provides an independent replay interface that does not require the production enforcement path to be active during audit operations.	N/A
CL-31	CP-43	Audit query results are reproducible: the same audit query against the same artifact set always returns the same result.	N/A
CL-32	CP-44	All decision artifacts contributing to a specific audit finding are traceable to their originating request without requiring reconstruction or inference.	N/A
CL-33	CP-45	Audit access is governed by access controls that are independent of the enforcement path and cannot be modified by entities whose actions are subject to audit.	N/A

Domain 8: Cryptographic Integrity

ID	CP Ref	Verifiable Condition	MIN
CL-34	CP-48	Each decision artifact carries a cryptographic digest (SHA-256 minimum) computed over the full artifact content at the time of creation.
CL-35	CP-49	Policy documents are stored with a cryptographic digest; any discrepancy between stored and computed digest causes immediate rejection of the policy.
CL-36	CP-50	The cryptographic integrity of all stored artifacts can be verified independently using only publicly documented algorithms and artifact contents.	N/A
CL-37	CP-51	Consent records are cryptographically bound to the identity of the issuing authority; the binding is verifiable without access to the enforcement layer.	N/A

Domain 9: Latency & Performance Controls

ID	CP Ref	Verifiable Condition	MIN
CL-38	CP-54	Enforcement latency (measured from request receipt to decision emission) is bounded by a documented Service Level Objective (SLO) enforced at the p99 percentile.	N/A
CL-39	CP-55	SLO breaches are logged with sufficient detail (timestamp, duration, failure reason) to support root-cause analysis without relying on memory or inference.	N/A
CL-40	CP-56	The enforcement layer imposes a hard timeout on consent resolution; if resolution does not complete within the declared timeout, a fail-closed DENY is issued.	N/A
CL-41	CP-57	Consent resolution and policy evaluation execute on independent processing paths and do not share mutable runtime resources that could introduce timing dependencies.	N/A
CL-42	CP-58	Enforcement throughput can be demonstrated to meet production load requirements without degrading below the declared latency SLO, as evidenced by documented load test results.	N/A
CL-43	CP-59	Latency measurements are produced by a monitoring component that is independent of the enforcement path and cannot be influenced by enforcement layer failures.	N/A
CL-44	CP-60	The system provides a documented capacity ceiling: a maximum request rate above which enforcement behavior is undefined, and a mechanism to reject requests that exceed this ceiling before enforcement is attempted.	N/A

CORE-VER total: 44 mandatory control points (24 inherited from CORE-MIN + 20 additional). All 44 must be satisfied for CORE-VER conformance.

Section 5

#CORE-ENT Conformance Checklist

CORE-ENT inherits all 44 CORE-VER conditions. The 24 control points below are additional mandatory requirements for CORE-ENT conformance. Applicable to: enterprise-scale, multi-tenant, and critical infrastructure deployments.

Domain 10: Governance Integration

ID	CP Ref	Verifiable Condition	MIN	VER
CL-45	CP-61	The enforcement layer is integrated with the organization's formal governance structure: policy changes require an authorized approval workflow before taking effect in production.	N/A	N/A
CL-46	CP-62	The governance approval workflow produces a signed approval record that is stored as a prerequisite artifact linked to the policy version it authorized.	N/A	N/A
CL-47	CP-63	A designated governance authority is named and accountable for all policy decisions within the QODIQA deployment; this authority is recorded in the governance charter artifact.	N/A	N/A
CL-48	CP-64	Governance audit reports are produced on a defined periodic schedule and are delivered to the designated governance authority without requiring manual data assembly.	N/A	N/A
CL-49	CP-65	The system exposes a governance API that allows the designated governance authority to query aggregate enforcement statistics, policy utilization, and exception rates without accessing individual decision artifacts.	N/A	N/A

Domain 11: Multi-Tenant Isolation

ID	CP Ref	Verifiable Condition	MIN	VER
CL-50	CP-66	Consent records, policy sets, and decision artifacts are partitioned by tenant identifier; no evaluation can access data belonging to a different tenant.	N/A	N/A
CL-51	CP-67	Tenant isolation is enforced at the storage layer, not solely at the application layer; a direct storage query cannot return cross-tenant data regardless of the query origin.	N/A	N/A
CL-52	CP-68	An isolation boundary test demonstrating the absence of cross-tenant data access is executed and recorded as part of each release validation cycle.	N/A	N/A
CL-53	CP-69	Audit logs are partitioned by tenant; a tenant-scoped auditor role cannot access log entries belonging to another tenant.	N/A	N/A
CL-54	CP-70	Resource consumption (processing time, storage quota, throughput) is bounded per tenant; one tenant's load cannot degrade enforcement latency for another tenant beyond the declared SLO.	N/A	N/A

Domain 12: Delegation & Escalation

ID	CP Ref	Verifiable Condition	MIN	VER
CL-55	CP-71	Consent delegation is represented as an explicit, signed delegation record identifying the delegating authority, the delegated entity, the scope of delegation, and its validity period.	N/A	N/A
CL-56	CP-72	Delegated consent cannot exceed the scope of the original grant; any delegation that attempts to expand scope is rejected at evaluation time.	N/A	N/A
CL-57	CP-73	The full delegation chain is resolved and recorded in the decision artifact for every evaluation that relies on delegated consent.	N/A	N/A
CL-58	CP-74	The system provides a defined escalation path for enforcement decisions that require human review; escalated decisions are not executed until the review is complete and the outcome is recorded.	N/A	N/A
CL-59	CP-75	Escalation outcomes are stored as first-class decision artifacts and are subject to the same immutability, integrity, and retention requirements as automated enforcement decisions.	N/A	N/A

Domain 13: Operational Resilience & Continuity

ID	CP Ref	Verifiable Condition	MIN	VER
CL-60	CP-76	The enforcement layer is deployed with redundancy such that the failure of a single component does not cause unavailability of the enforcement service; redundancy topology is documented.	N/A	N/A
CL-61	CP-77	Failover between redundant components does not produce a window during which enforcement decisions are bypassed; fail-closed semantics apply throughout all failover transitions.	N/A	N/A
CL-62	CP-78	A documented disaster recovery procedure exists, has been tested within the past 12 months, and demonstrates restoration of full enforcement capability within a declared Recovery Time Objective (RTO).	N/A	N/A
CL-63	CP-79	Decision artifact storage is replicated to a geographically separate location; the recovery of artifacts from the replica is demonstrably sufficient to reconstruct the complete enforcement history.	N/A	N/A
CL-64	CP-80	The system's operational health is continuously monitored by a component independent of the enforcement layer; health state changes trigger alerts that do not require manual detection.	N/A	N/A
CL-65	CP-81	Change management for the enforcement layer follows a documented procedure that includes impact assessment, staged rollout, rollback capability, and mandatory post-deployment verification of enforcement correctness.	N/A	N/A
CL-66	CP-82	An annual third-party security assessment of the enforcement layer is conducted; findings are tracked to resolution and evidence of resolution is stored as governance artifacts.	N/A	N/A
CL-67	CP-83	The enforcement layer exposes a machine-readable status endpoint that allows downstream systems to detect enforcement unavailability and activate fail-closed behavior independently.	N/A	N/A
CL-68	CP-84	Capacity planning for the enforcement layer is reviewed at least quarterly and produces a documented forecast of headroom relative to projected request volumes for the next operational period.	N/A	N/A

CORE-ENT total: 68 mandatory control points (44 inherited from CORE-VER + 24 additional). All 68 must be satisfied for CORE-ENT conformance.

Section 6

#Scoring and Conformance Determination

Conformance is binary at the profile level. A system either satisfies all mandatory control points for a given profile or it does not. There is no partial conformance designation, no weighted scoring, and no grace period for mandatory conditions. This design is intentional: partial conformance creates ambiguity about which properties can be relied upon by downstream systems, consumers, and auditors.

Conformance Thresholds by Profile

All mandatory CPs must be satisfied. Recommended (open circle) conditions do not affect conformance status but are recorded in the self-assessment record.

CORE-MIN 24 / 24 All mandatory CPs satisfied

CORE-VER 44 / 44 All MIN + VER CPs satisfied

CORE-ENT 68 / 68 All VER + ENT CPs satisfied

Self-Assessment Procedure

Before initiating formal certification under the QODIQA Certification Framework, implementors should complete this checklist as a self-assessment instrument. For each control point relevant to the target profile, tick the verification box only when the condition is demonstrably satisfied: not when it is planned, partially implemented, or approximated.

Any unsatisfied mandatory condition should be recorded in an implementation gap register that identifies the control point, the nature of the gap, the responsible team, and a target remediation date. The gap register is a prerequisite artifact for formal certification submission.

Important: Self-Assessment Limitation

This checklist is a preparatory instrument. Self-assessment results do not constitute conformance certification. Formal QODIQA conformance is established only through the QODIQA Conformance Test Suite administered by an accredited evaluation body under the QODIQA Certification Framework.

Gap Classification

When a mandatory control point is not satisfied, classify the gap by severity to prioritize remediation effort:

Table 2: Gap Severity Classification

Severity	Definition	Certification Impact
BLOCKING	The condition is entirely unimplemented or the implementation explicitly violates the stated requirement.	Non-conformance. Cannot certify.
MARGINAL	The condition is partially implemented; a specific, bounded capability is missing or the implementation deviates in a limited way.	Non-conformance. Remediation required.
EVIDENCE	The condition is implemented but supporting evidence or documentation is insufficient to demonstrate compliance to an external auditor.	Non-conformance. Documentation required.

Document Status

#Document Status and Corpus Alignment

This document is a normative operational instrument within the QODIQA specification corpus. It derives its control points from the QODIQA 68-Point Enforcement Framework and is intended to be used in conjunction with the QODIQA Conformance Test Suite. It does not supersede or modify any normative requirement in the Core Standard or the 68-Point Framework.

This checklist is designed as an implementation-facing complement to the following related specifications:

QODIQA: Core Standard for Deterministic Runtime Consent Enforcement
QODIQA: 68-Point Enforcement Framework for Deterministic Runtime Consent Enforcement
QODIQA: Conformance Test Suite Specification for Deterministic Runtime Consent Enforcement
QODIQA: Certification Framework for Deterministic Runtime Consent Enforcement
QODIQA: Reference Architecture for Deterministic Runtime Consent Enforcement
QODIQA: Security and Cryptographic Profile for Runtime Consent Enforcement
QODIQA: Consent as Infrastructure for Artificial Intelligence Technical Whitepaper

Version 1.0 represents the initial normative release of this document as part of the QODIQA standard corpus.

For strategic inquiries, architectural discussions, or partnership exploration:

Bogdan Duțescu

contact@qodiqa.com

www.qodiqa.com

Document Identifier QODIQA-CL-2026-001

Title Implementation Conformance Checklist

Subtitle Normative Binary Verification Instrument for CORE-MIN, CORE-VER, and CORE-ENT Profiles

Publication Date 2026

Version 1.0

Document Type Normative Operational Instrument

Document Status Normative

Governing Authority QODIQA Governance Charter

Derives From QODIQA 68-Point Enforcement Framework · Core Standard v1.0

Integrity Notice Document integrity may be verified using the official SHA-256 checksum distributed with the QODIQA specification corpus.