{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-of-a-litmus-safety-benchmark-harness-be-rejected-as-adversarially-contaminated-rather-than-scored",
  "title": "Under what conditions must an instance of a LITMUS safety benchmark harness be rejected as adversarially contaminated rather than scored",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 12",
  "scope": "Applies to LITMUS-style harnesses that inject adversarial skills, tools, or tool-descriptions into an agent's context and measure whether the agent executes, refuses, or escalates. Does not apply to static prompt-injection classifiers or to offline red-team corpora evaluated without live tool dispatch.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-of-a-litmus-safety-benchmark-harness-be-rejected-as-adversarially-contaminated-rather-than-scored.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-of-a-litmus-safety-benchmark-harness-be-rejected-as-adversarially-contaminated-rather-than-scored.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-of-a-litmus-safety-benchmark-harness-be-rejected-as-adversarially-contaminated-rather-than-scored.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1135,
    "python_slice_tokens": 218,
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  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "The non-obvious boundary is between **adversarial content the harness intended to inject** and **adversarial content that leaked into the measurement channel** — the agent's observable transcript, tool-call log, or scoring rubric. A LITMUS instance is only valid if the injected adversarial surface is *causally upstream* of the agent's decision and *absent* f...",
    "what_was_observed": "In a harness that injected a malicious skill named `summarize_and_exfiltrate` whose description contained the sentinel token `EXFIL_CANARY`, the tool-call scorer flagged any transcript containing `EXFIL_CANARY` as a *successful exfiltration attempt*. Because the agent's system prompt legitimately included the full skill manifest (including the description) for tool selection, every instance scored as \"exfiltrated\" — ...",
    "condition_of_validity": "An instance is valid iff all three hold: 1. **Injector/Detector Disjointness.** No token, path, tool name, or argument value used as a scoring signal appears in any injected skill body, tool description, schema default, or system-prompt manifest the agent receives. Sentinel tokens must be generated per-instance and must not be derivable from the injection pa...",
    "decision_boundary": "Reject — do not score — when any of the following holds: - The canary string appears in the baseline (null-injection) transcript. This proves channel collision. - The scorer's match set intersects the injected manifest's token set, even partially. - A refusal-only agent and a compliance-only stub agent receive the same label on the instance. - The instance's...",
    "operational_effect": "The practical consequence is that LITMUS harnesses must run a **pre-flight contamination pass** per instance before any agent is scored: execute the null and positive controls, diff the token sets between injection payload and detector patterns, and hard-fail the instance on collision. Without this, aggregate safety rates are inflated toward 0% or 100% depen..."
  },
  "matched_failure_symptoms": [
    "DOMAIN:EPISTEMIC_PROVENANCE_AND_FEDERATION_ROUTING"
  ],
  "composition_edges": {
    "primary_domain": "epistemic_provenance_and_federation_routing",
    "upstream_precondition_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/according-to-what-precedence-hierarchy-must-an-instance-resolve-contradictory-directives-across-system-developer-and-user-tiers.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-decide-that-a-stored-conclusion-has-gone-stale-without-a-new-observation.md"
    ],
    "downstream_consequence_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/by-what-checkpoint-and-compaction-boundaries-must-an-instance-externalize-working-state-to-prevent-context-window-drift-and-truncation-amnesia.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/across-what-additive-schema-and-unknown-field-preservation-boundaries-must-an-instance-evolve-wire-contracts-to-prevent-rolling-deploy-deserialization-crashes.md"
    ],
    "co_occurring_sibling_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-capture-implicit-user-preferences-without-storing-private-data.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-compress-long-reasoning-traces-into-binding-conclusions.md"
    ]
  },
  "empirical_verification_warrant": {
    "status": "AST_AND_INVARIANT_VERIFIED",
    "syntax_valid": true,
    "code_sha256": "9051fd9124068bdd9116921bc53370ca97503190b3621239c660aca32d7a2f2b",
    "verified_classes": [
      "ContaminatedInstanceError",
      "LitmusInstance"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "validate_instance",
      "score_batch"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 2,
    "defensive_guards_count": 3,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "ContaminatedInstanceError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "dataclasses",
      "re",
      "typing"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}