Black-Box Infrastructure
Definition
A component of a settlement system whose behavior cannot be examined, whose dependencies cannot be enumerated, or whose failure modes cannot be mapped — and which therefore cannot be assessed. A Black-Box Infrastructure is not necessarily defective; it is unassessable, which for purposes of an Operational Readiness Assessment is functionally equivalent.
Notes
Inspectability is a precondition of assurance. A component that produces correct outputs from inputs no one has specified, against logic no one has reviewed, with dependencies no one has documented, may operate adequately for years. The Operational Readiness Assessment makes no determination on it. It is excluded from the Trust Fabric because no one — including its operator — can demonstrate the conditions under which it will continue to behave as it has.
The black box may be a closed-source oracle, an undocumented bridge, a custodian whose internal controls are not made available for examination, or a chain whose governance process operates outside any disclosed framework. The remedy is not to reject the component categorically; it is to require that whatever is required to make it assessable be supplied, or that the component be excluded from the Infrastructure Trust Boundary.
See also
Operational Suitability · Infrastructure Trust Boundary · Deterministic Behavior · Chain-Level Dependency
References
- ↩ Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, FFIEC Information Technology Examination Handbook — Architecture, Infrastructure, and Operations Booklet (June 2021). occ.gov
- ↩ Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, FDIC, and OCC, Interagency Guidance on Third-Party Relationships: Risk Management (June 6, 2023). federalreserve.gov