Conformance
Independent hosts should fail, deny, and prove behavior the same way.
Conformance turns CHP from a convention into an ecosystem contract: implementers can prove that manifests, invocations, lifecycle rules, policy checks, errors, evidence, and replay behave predictably.
Manifest validity
Reject malformed descriptors, duplicate identifiers, invalid versions, and capability references that cannot be resolved safely.
Version compatibility
Fail closed when protocol or capability versions are unsupported, ambiguous, or incompatible with the caller.
Invocation safety
Validate subject identity, payload shape, target host, mode support, lifecycle state, and capability availability before execution.
Permission checks
Return structured denials for missing entitlements, policy blocks, revoked grants, and actions requiring human review.
Structured errors
Use machine-readable codes and details for malformed inputs, unavailable hosts, timeouts, and host failures.
Evidence and replay
Emit ordered evidence for every execution attempt and make replay by correlation ID predictable.
Test shape
A useful suite covers the whole lifecycle.
Public protocol tests should cover success paths and protocol failures equally. The negative cases are what make independent implementations safe to call.
01
Accept
Known-good manifests, compatible versions, authorized invocations, and replayable successful executions.
02
Reject
Malformed inputs, mismatched frames, unknown hosts, unavailable capabilities, and unsupported versions.
03
Deny
Permission failures, policy blocks, disabled capabilities, and lifecycle violations.
04
Observe
Structured logs, evidence events, correlation IDs, timing, and trace export hooks.
Use the suite as a public trust signal.
Host providers can publish conformance results alongside their manifests so agents and applications know which protocol guarantees are implemented.