Evidence controls
Every answer rests on registered material with a traceable origin. Sources are registered, versioned and validated; provenance travels with the claim; suspect material is quarantined; and fact is kept visibly separate from inference.
Why evidence quality matters
In cybersecurity, most bad conclusions are evidence failures rather than reasoning failures: a stale export, an unverified claim, a control asserted but never tested. Black Atlas is designed to answer only within the evidence and permissions it has, and no artefact is presented as fact without explicit provenance.
Controls
Material becomes evidence only after registration. Registration records who owns the source, what it is permitted to be used for, and which scope it belongs to.
Every input carries its origin, age and confidence. Those attributes are not discarded when the material is summarised; a conclusion inherits the weakest evidence beneath it.
Citations are checked against the registered material rather than accepted as generated text. A citation that does not resolve is treated as a defect, not a formatting detail.
Sources move through a lifecycle: registered, current, superseded, expired. An answer can be tied to the version of the material that produced it, so it stays replayable later.
Suspect, unverified or potentially compromised material is held out of retrieval instead of being quietly down-weighted, so it cannot leak into an answer through aggregation.
Claims are marked known, inferred, simulated or unknown. Inference is allowed and useful; presenting inference as fact is not.
Next
Registration and provenance decide what may enter an answer. Contradiction handling decides what happens when two registered sources say different things.
