v2.6.0 — Operation Hardened-Hive: HiveMindFirewall, chain of command, scripted red team; La Ruche vault

Season 11 opens with the owner's hardening brief implemented and measured.

• hivemind.security.hivemind_firewall (PR #132): principals are keyed hashes (HMAC-SHA256 of the identity) with Ed25519 keys; delegation certificates only to strictly lower roles, rooted at the owner and re-walked on every order; orders are signed, sequenced, nonce-protected and bound to a hash-chained ledger head; any free text is scanned by deterministic rules PI-01..PI-07 (encoded payloads decoded and re-scanned) and quarantined as data; the decision is a pure state machine where anything undefined is QUARANTINED; executed actions use an allow-listed argv under rlimits inside bubblewrap or are BLOCKED. Text never carries authority; a model can only propose.
• Scripted red team over 59 pre-registered vectors: the first run blocked 47 of 49 attacks and found two real defects, both fixed; the second run blocked 49 of 49 with 0 false positives and both controls passing (artifacts/security/firewall_pentest_report.json).
• Gatekeeper: report-only injection scan of PR text; GitHub signature verification recorded per commit; HIVEMIND_GATE_REQUIRE_SIGNED=1 holds unsigned owner-attributed commits (PRs #125, #128, #133 hardened the gate along the way; main requires a pull request and enforces admins).
• Roadmap §3.9 "Operation Hardened-Hive": tasks HM-S11-01..08, pen-test campaigns HM-S11-PT-1..3; design in docs/SECURITY_HARDENING_PHASE.md; SECURITY.md §5.
• Also in this release: paper v3.7.2 (Lean gate 128/128, two lemmas flagged), the T4 branch review, and the coordinator's La Ruche MoE vault / HiveMind@home work (PR #131).

Known gap stated plainly: commit e-mail is a claim, not proof; signed commits from the owner's key (HM-S11-04) are the next step.