Feature Specification: Audit & Compliance

1. Overview & Vision

Audit & Compliance is the platform's immutable memory. It captures all security-sensitive events and administrative changes across the entire platform, providing a tamper-proof trail for compliance auditing, troubleshooting, and forensics.

2. Personas & Stakeholders

Persona	Goal
Security Officer	Review access patterns and investigate security incidents.
Org Admin	Audit changes made by other admins (e.g., member removal).
System Admin	Monitor platform-wide configuration changes and health.

3. User Stories

• As a security officer, I want to see every IP address that attempted to log in as an Admin last night.
• As an admin, I want to know who deleted a mission-critical project folder.

4. Functional Requirements (FR)

• REQ-AUD-001: Centralized logging of all "Write" and "Delete" operations.
• REQ-AUD-002: Capturing of actor metadata (User ID, IP, User-Agent).
• REQ-AUD-003: In-app audit log viewer with advanced filtering.
• REQ-AUD-004: Data export (CSV/JSON) for external compliance reports.

5. Non-Functional Requirements (NFR)

• Immutability: Audit records MUST NOT be deletable or modifiable, even by admins.
• Persistence: 1-year default retention for all audit data.
• Performance: Logging overhead must be < 5ms per operation.

6. Business Logic & Rules

• Event Schema: Every event includes timestamp, actor, action, resource, status, and payload_diff.
• Severity Levels: INFO (Config change), WARNING (Failed login), CRITICAL (Permission escalation).
• Auto-archiving: Logs older than 365 days are moved to cold storage (S3).

7. User Interface (UI/UX)

• "Audit Trail" table with chronological sorting.
• Detail view for individual events showing "Before" vs "After" snapshots.
• Quick filters for "Critical Only" and specific modules.

8. Information Architecture

• Located under "Organization Settings -> Security" in the Shell.
• Platform-wide logs accessible via the System Admin portal.

9. Data Model & Persistence

• Table: audit_log (Optimized for append-only performance).
• Storage: PostgreSQL for active logs; S3 for archives.

10. API & Service Layer

• GET /api/admin/audit
• POST /internal/audit-event (S2S only)

11. Integration Patterns

• Logging Middleware: Automatically captures controller actions in the backend.
• Cross-Service Bus: Satellite apps send events to the Shell Audit Service via Connect/gRPC.

12. Security & Permissions

• Only Security Officer or Owner roles can view audit logs.
• Audit service itself runs in a strictly isolated security context.

13. Error Handling & Resilience

• Fail-safe: If the audit service is down, mission-critical write operations MUST fail (Zero-trust).
• Buffer: Local in-memory buffer for high-frequency logs.

14. Performance & Scalability

• Optimized indexing on timestamp and organization_id.
• Support for millions of events per organization.

15. Globalization & i18n

• Event descriptions are standardized and localized.

16. Accessibility (a11y)

• High-contrast log viewer for better readability.

17. Observability & Analytics

• Anomaly detection (e.g., "Sudden spike in failed logins").
• Top actors and most modified resources analytics.

18. Testing & Quality

• Integration tests ensuring that DELETE operations are always logged.
• Penetration testing to verify log immutability.

19. Constraints & Assumptions

• Assumes satellite apps implement the audit middleware or explicitly call the audit API.

20. Future Enhancements

• Real-time SIEM integration (e.g., Splunk, Datadog).
• Webhook alerts for critical security events.