Upgrades and Security Boundaries
Fluent’s architecture is designed to evolve runtime behavior without treating every runtime change as a full protocol rewrite.
That flexibility exists, but only within strict authority boundaries.
Runtime upgrade control plane
At architecture level, upgrades follow a privileged path:
- governance-authorized caller triggers upgrade flow,
- runtime artifact validation/translation checks are applied,
- host-enforced upgrade path updates target runtime code,
- change is visible as consensus-relevant runtime behavior.
Both contract-level permissions and host-level path restrictions are required.
Why host enforcement is mandatory
Contract checks alone are insufficient for protocol safety.
Host-side enforcement prevents:
- unauthorized runtime replacement,
- invalid upgrade payload application,
- static-context bypasses,
- upgrade path misuse by ordinary execution calls.
Core security boundaries to preserve
From current Fluentbase security docs, these boundaries are the most architecture-critical:
- routing integrity (runtime resolution cannot drift),
- interruption integrity (call ID / resume correctness),
- static-context immutability for mutating operations,
- bounds-before-allocation for untrusted lengths,
- deterministic syscall semantics,
- strict upgrade authority boundaries.
Typical failure classes
Most critical failures in this architecture are not ordinary business-logic bugs; they are boundary violations, for example:
- cross-runtime metadata mutation bypass,
- interruption context confusion,
- inconsistent gas/fuel settlement,
- malformed envelope decode leading to wrong side-effect commits,
- weakly constrained upgrade entry points.
Operational posture
Because runtime updates are consensus-sensitive:
- release process must be deterministic,
- upgrade artifacts and hashes must be auditable,
- network rollout must be coordinated,
- post-upgrade checks must validate expected routing and execution behavior.
In short: Fluent supports runtime evolution, but treats upgrade machinery as high-trust critical infrastructure.