Group-creator authority under Jazz alpha.53 policy negation limits

Date: 2026-07-17
Reviewed dependency: jazz-tools@2.0.0-alpha.53
Decision: document permanent creator authority; grant direct creator delete; revisit on upgrade

Problem

The groupAccess template gives a group's creator $createdBy update authority on the group row so they can insert the first admin membership (membership management derives from group-update via allowedTo.update("groupId")). That authority never lapses: a creator who is later demoted or removed by other admins can restore their own admin membership at any time. Separately, a failed first-admin insert used to strand an undeletable orphan group, because rollback deletion required the admin membership that had just failed to insert.

The intended fix was a bootstrap window: creator authority over the group row holds only while the group has no admin membership. That requires a negated existence condition — "no admin membership row exists for this group".

Exact alpha.53 engine behavior

The policy IR (schema.js PolicyExpr) declares { type: "Not", expr }, the permissions compiler passes raw IR through, and schema-permissions.js serializes Not for the wasm core. The core, however, silently drops Not around existence conditions. Probed against createPolicyTestApp with a two-table group/members app, rule under test on allowDelete:

Probe	Expected	alpha.53 result
Not(True) / Not(False)	deny/allow	correct
Not(Cmp column = literal)	deny	correct
Exists(...) / ExistsRel(...) (pos + neg ctrl)	—	correct
Not(Exists(...)), no matching rows	allow	denied
Not(ExistsRel(...)), matching row present	deny	allowed
And(True, Not(ExistsRel(...))), row present	deny	allowed
LEFT-join + IsNull anti-join via ExistsRel	allow	denied (join not null-extended)

Not over Exists/ExistsRel evaluates as if the Not were absent — a silent wrong-direction result, not an error. The RelExpr LEFT-join anti-join alternative does not produce null-extended rows in policy evaluation, so absence-of-rows is not expressible at all in this engine.

Decision

• Creator authority over the group row stays permanent and becomes a documented trust property of the template: the creator can always update the group and therefore always restore their own admin membership. Products that need creator-proof handover cannot get it from this template on this engine.
• The creator additionally receives direct allowDelete on their own group rows. This grants no new authority — a creator can already self-bootstrap an admin membership and delete transitively — and it lets createGroup roll back cleanly when the first-admin insert fails, removing the orphan-group failure mode.
• An engine canary test (access_security_test.ts, "engine canary") asserts the broken behavior: a Not(ExistsRel(...)) delete guard that a correct engine would deny. When a jazz-tools upgrade fixes negation, the canary fails, signalling that the bootstrap-window design in this record should replace permanent creator authority: allowUpdate/allowDelete = anyOf([isAdmin, allOf([$createdBy, Not(Exists(admin membership))])]), which also preserves creator recovery of admin-less groups.

Trust and fallback

• The template's authority model is: fixed roles for members, plus a permanent creator superseat. The sharing UI and docs state this; it must not be presented as revocable admin membership.
• Upstream: the dropped-negation behavior is a jazz-tools core issue worth reporting; until then, no lofi policy may rely on Not around Exists/ExistsRel.

Evidence sources

• Probe suite output recorded in this record's table (2026-07-17, Deno harness createPolicyTestApp, pinned npm cache for jazz-tools@2.0.0-alpha.53).
• dist/permissions/index.js (raw IR pass-through), dist/schema-permissions.js (Not serialization), dist/ir.d.ts (PolicyExprV2.Not, RelExpr).