Issue 042 — nothing gives a node an account for a registry

Found by deleting the lab's registry and giving the machines a real path out:
public images fetched, the operator's own could not be fetched at all. There is
no provision for a registry credential, no manifest field, and no step in
enrolment that establishes one.

It applies to the mesh's own store too, which today asks for nothing — a
decision that has never been written down as one, and so reads as an absence.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF

04-ISSUES/042-nothing-gives-a-node-an-account-for-a-registry/00-report.md

@@ -0,0 +1,64 @@
+---
+status: open
+opened: 2026-09-11
+located-in: []
+fixed-by:
+amended-design:
+---
+
+# 042 — Nothing gives a node an account for a registry
+
+## Symptom
+
+A module names an image in a registry that requires authentication. The machine cannot fetch it:
+
+```
+pull access denied … authorization failed: no basic auth credentials
+```
+
+Nothing in the mesh delivers a registry credential to a node. There is no provision for it, no
+field in a manifest for it, and no step in enrolment that establishes one.
+
+Observed when the lab's own image registry was deleted and machines were given a real path to the
+internet for the first time. Public images fetched normally; the operator's own — in their own
+registry — could not be fetched at all.
+
+## Why this matters
+
+**Delivery ends at a node pulling an image, and this is the last step of it.** The whole design
+from source to artifact to machine assumes the final fetch succeeds. It succeeded until now for
+one reason: everything was either public, or came from a registry the harness ran with no
+authentication at all.
+
+**And it applies to the mesh's own store, not only to somebody else's.** The registry the mesh runs
+is reached over the private network and today asks for nothing. That is a decision — *anything that
+can reach it can read every artifact the mesh holds, and push to it if pushing is open* — but it
+has never been written down as one. It reads as an absence, which is the kind of thing that stays
+true by accident until it is exploited.
+
+**The mesh already knows how to do this.** A provision grants a consumer a credential, minted by
+the mesh, sealed to the machine, with the plaintext discarded. An account on a registry is exactly
+that shape: the artifact store is already a provision, and a node that must pull from it is already
+a consumer of it. What is missing is not a mechanism but the recognition that pulling is a use of
+the store, not a thing that happens beneath it.
+
+**It is also a bootstrap question**, which is where it will bite first: the machine that installs a
+mesh pulls the control plane's image before the mesh exists to grant anything
+([ADR 0067](../../02-DECISIONS/0067-genesis-is-a-pivot.md)). Whatever the answer is, it has to
+survive a moment when there is nobody to ask.
+
+## Open questions
+
+- **Should the ability to pull be granted like anything else** — the store mints a per-node account,
+  seals it to the machine, and the host writes whatever the runtime reads? That would make a node's
+  reach into the artifact store follow the same rules as its reach into a database.
+- **What should the mesh's own registry require?** If the answer is "nothing, inside the private
+  network", that is defensible and must be *recorded* as the decision it is, with what it assumes
+  about who is on that network.
+- **What authenticates a push?** Reading and writing are not the same grant, and a builder that may
+  publish is a much stronger thing than a node that may fetch.
+- **What does an operator's own external registry do here?** It is not the mesh's to grant accounts
+  on. Is the credential operator-supplied, like any other secret the mesh cannot invent — and if so,
+  which module owns it, given that every module pulling from there needs it?
+- **How does any of this work before the mesh exists?** The bootstrap fetches images with no mesh to
+  grant a credential, so the first pull is either public, anonymous, or carried.