---
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.