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Component: PEP — Gateway

Design-stage

Phase 5, "Not started" as of this writing (docs/phases/phase-5-gateway-boundary-stepup-coldstart.md). No agentic-auth-gateway binary exists in this codebase. The diagram below is the designed flow, drawn as the sidecar's logic centralized behind one shared proxy.

What it is (designed): a shared central proxy — the same decide → exchange → forward logic as the sidecar, at one choke point serving many agents instead of one sidecar per agent process.

What it does (designed): identical decision path to the sidecar, with a shared decision cache and horizontal scaling; must fail closed on its own unavailability.

Why "must fail closed" is called out explicitly for this component and not just implied: a gateway is a single choke point for a whole fleet, unlike a per-process sidecar. A silent pass-through here has a far larger blast radius than one sidecar failing open, so Phase 5's design makes this a hard requirement rather than an implementation detail left to whoever builds it.