Keep Design Intent Aligned with What Ships
Maintain continuous traceability from architecture and threats through requirements, verification, and shipped binaries. Understand how design decisions translate into real software and detect drift before it becomes risk.
Design Intent Drifts as Software Evolves
Security intent is defined early—architectures, threat models, requirements—but software rarely stands still.
Across releases, teams struggle because:
- Architecture and threat models are maintained separately from builds
- Requirements lose connection to the software they were meant to govern
- Changes in components and binaries aren’t reconciled back to design intent
- Drift accumulates quietly across versions and variants
- Proving that shipped software still matches approved design becomes manual and brittle
The result is traceability that exists on paper, but not in practice.
Design-to-build traceability becomes a living, reviewable system that stays aligned as designs change, software evolves, and new releases ship.
Finite State maintains continuous traceability across architecture, threats, requirements, verification, and binaries, so teams can see exactly how design intent maps to shipped reality, and when that alignment breaks.
This is made possible by:
- Ground-truth build and component intelligence
- AgentOS to reconcile intent with implementation using repeatable reasoning
- Assurance Studio to operationalize traceability through workflows, review, and reporting
- Finite State Copilot to search, navigate, and explain traceability across artifacts
How It Works
Capture Architecture and Design Intent
Architecture documents, specifications, and design inputs are ingested to establish a structured view of system components, interfaces, and trust boundaries. This becomes the foundation for threat modeling and downstream traceability.
What you get: A shared, structured representation of design intent that can be maintained over time.
Link Threats, Requirements, and Controls
Threat models and derived security requirements are explicitly tied to architectural elements and interfaces. Each threat, mitigation, and requirement maintains a clear relationship to the risks it addresses and the components it applies to.
What you get: Clear lineage from design decisions to concrete security expectations.
Reconcile Design Intent with Shipped Software
As firmware, binaries, and source are ingested, shipped reality is reconciled against design intent. Components identified in builds are mapped back to architecture and requirements, surfacing mismatches, missing coverage, or unexpected changes.
What you get: Visibility into whether what shipped still matches what was designed and approved.
Detect and Manage Drift Across Releases
When designs or builds change, traceability is automatically re-evaluated.
Drift signals highlight new components without associated threats or requirements, requirements that no longer map cleanly to software, or architecture assumptions invalidated by implementation changes.
What you get: Early warning when traceability breaks, before risk accumulates.
Key Focus Areas
Continuous Architecture-to-Binary Traceability
Maintain explicit traceability across architecture, threats, requirements, verification, and binaries—in both directions.
- Impact: Teams can prove how design intent is implemented and identify gaps quickly.
Drift Detection
Surface misalignment between design intent and shipped reality as software evolves.
- Impact: Security issues caused by silent design erosion are caught early.
AgentOS: Reconciling Intent with Implementation
Agent OS provides the reasoning layer that keeps traceability accurate as both designs and software change. It applies structured, repeatable logic to maintain mappings and detect drift across products, releases, and variants.
- Impact: Traceability remains trustworthy across releases, not just at design time.
Assurance Studio: Making Traceability Usable
Assurance Studio provides the workflow and governance layer for exploring, reviewing, and operationalizing traceability across teams.
- Impact: Design-to-build traceability supports real decisions, not just documentation.
What This Enables
With continuous design-to-build traceability, teams can:
Prove that shipped software aligns with approved design
Detect security drift before it becomes exposure
Maintain trust in threat models and requirements over time
Scale security architecture without manual rework
Design intent stays connected to reality across every release so you can answer auditor questions with confidence.
Integrate With Your Entire Tech Stack
See Design-to-Build Traceability in Action
Keep intent, implementation, and evidence aligned as software evolves.