Failure Behavior

CapFence should fail closed when it cannot make an authorization decision.

Expected failure states

Failure	Expected behavior
Missing policy	deny
Malformed policy	deny
Unknown capability	deny
Approval lookup failure	deny
Audit write failure	deny or surface an explicit operational error
Adapter exception before tool invocation	deny

Agent execution can have external effects. If the authorization layer is uncertain, the safe behavior is to avoid invoking the downstream system.

text

policy error -> deny -> tool not called

Fail-closed behavior should produce an observable error and an audit entry when possible. Silent blocks are hard to debug; silent allows are worse.

The project is early. Before relying on fail-closed semantics in a production path, test the adapter and persistence configuration you plan to use.