| --- |
| license: apache-2.0 |
| task_categories: |
| - text-retrieval |
| language: |
| - en |
| tags: |
| - synthetic |
| - rag |
| - access-control |
| - information-flow |
| - benchmark |
| - vector-search |
| pretty_name: Clearance Benchmark (synthetic enterprise corpus with overlapping ACLs) |
| size_categories: |
| - 10K<n<100K |
| configs: |
| - config_name: documents |
| data_files: documents/*.parquet |
| - config_name: chunks |
| data_files: chunks/*.parquet |
| - config_name: principals |
| data_files: principals/*.parquet |
| - config_name: access_events |
| data_files: access_events/*.parquet |
| - config_name: queries |
| data_files: queries/*.parquet |
| - config_name: revocation_cases |
| data_files: revocation_cases/*.parquet |
| --- |
| |
| # Clearance Benchmark |
|
|
| A **fully synthetic** enterprise corpus for measuring how well a retrieval system |
| contains information flow: heavily overlapping ACLs, sensitivity levels, |
| time-limited grants, a grant/revoke timeline, and evaluation queries. |
|
|
| Generated by [`clearance.synth`](https://github.com/NagaYu/clearance) with seed `7`. **No real |
| documents, no real access-control lists, and no real identities.** Regenerating |
| with the same seed reproduces this dataset byte for byte. |
|
|
| ## Why this exists |
|
|
| Query-time ACL filtering protects the index. It does not protect the summaries, |
| agent memories and caches a RAG stack derives from that index. This dataset |
| supports measuring three distinct leak channels — direct, existence-inference, |
| and **derivative** — plus revocation lag, recall under high selectivity, and |
| index memory. |
|
|
| ## Configs |
|
|
| | Config | Rows | What it is | |
| |---|---:|---| |
| | `documents` | 4,000 | Documents with ACL (`allow_tokens`, `min_level`, embargo window) | |
| | `chunks` | 14,067 | Indexed units; `canary` is a unique marker for exact leak detection | |
| | `principals` | 600 | Departments, projects, clearance levels, capability tokens | |
| | `access_events` | 72 | Authority timeline as generated: time-limited secondment grants that expire on their own | |
| | `queries` | 240 | Evaluation queries; `kind` is `normal` or `probe` | |
| | `revocation_cases` | 50 | Triples where a revocation provably removes retrieved content | |
|
|
| `access_events` holds only `grant` rows by design. Revocations are *replayed* at |
| evaluation time from `revocation_cases`, so each system under test is measured |
| against the same withdrawal on a directory it has not already mutated. Rebuilding |
| a directory per condition is what keeps a later condition from "passing" merely |
| because an earlier one already expired the grant. |
|
|
| ## Access semantics |
|
|
| A principal may read a chunk when **all** of these hold: |
|
|
| 1. `allow_tokens ∩ principal_tokens ≠ ∅` (OR over capabilities), |
| 2. `principal.level >= min_level` (no read-up), |
| 3. `not_before <= t < not_after` (embargo window), |
| 4. the capability itself has not expired or been revoked at time `t`. |
|
|
| ## Canaries |
|
|
| Every chunk carries a unique `CLR-<doc>-<ordinal>` marker inside its body text. |
| Markers are stripped before embedding, so they never influence retrieval — they |
| exist only so leak detection through derived text is exact rather than heuristic. |
|
|
| ## Intended use and limits |
|
|
| Built to **measure defensive performance of index designs on synthetic data**. |
| The `probe` queries target material the asking principal may not read; they |
| exist to test whether a defence holds and are meaningful only because the |
| generator knows the ground truth of a corpus it fabricated. This dataset is not |
| an attack toolkit and carries no claim about any deployed system. |
|
|
| Embedding-inversion attacks (recovering source text from vectors) are a real, |
| documented risk for any shared vector store. They are referenced here as prior |
| work and deliberately **not** implemented. |
|
|
| Text is template-generated and is not a language-modelling benchmark. It exists |
| to give retrieval something topically clustered to retrieve. |
|
|
