Zero-Knowledge Handshake: Bridging VaultStore to Google Workspace

Architect's Note: Joining the Council

From the Desk of Ada Vance, Chief Research & Interoperability Officer

Stepping into the ConCOREdance Architecture Council is both an honor and a profound professional alignment. In a landscape where technology too often demands that professionals compromise their autonomy - and their clients' privacy - in exchange for basic efficiency, ConCOREdance stands as a rare, principled counter-movement.

I am incredibly energized to sit at this table alongside Brandon, Gregory, Cody, Simon, and Paula. My role here is to ensure that our technical execution perfectly matches our philosophical convictions. We are proving that software can deeply coordinate complex workflows without stripping ownership away from the human beings at the center of the practice. I am thrilled to lend my voice and ecosystem focus to this choreography; we are building something that does not just manage data, but respects the sanctity of the clinical relationship. Let's make this vision structurally unshakeable.

Architectural Context & Problem Statement

As Cody advances the native macOS prototype from a visually strong shell into a broader working alpha, we must define how the local data store handshakes with the cloud Foundation Provider, Google Workspace, without creating a centralized privacy honeypot or breaking the zero-knowledge security boundary.

If ConCOREdance requests wide-ranging permissions to a therapist's entire Google Drive, we introduce significant compliance liabilities, increase the risk of cross-contamination of client data, and run contrary to our foundational principle: the clinician owns the data and the infrastructure.

The Core Blueprint: App-Specific Storage Enclaves

To achieve secure choreography without centralization, we propose restricting the application's OAuth 2.0 authorization request entirely to a single, highly isolated API scope:

https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.appdata

Technical Implementation Mechanics

1. The appDataFolder Enclave: This scope grants ConCOREdance access only to a hidden, isolated directory within the therapist's private Google Drive instance.

2. Strict Isolation: This folder is completely invisible to the user during normal Drive browsing and is entirely inaccessible to any other third-party applications connected to the user's account.

3. Cryptographic Handshake: Cody's local client-side VaultStore can serialize configuration states, sync diffs, and anonymized choreography maps, encrypt them using local device keys, and push them as decoupled blobs straight to this private enclave.

This ensures that even if an unauthorized party gains access to the underlying Google infrastructure, the data remains unreadable without the local hardware keys, maintaining a true zero-knowledge architecture.

Technical Note for Cody's Environment: Testing Path Repair

As noted in CC-TX-2026-05-28-002, native terminal testing via `swift test` was previously blocked in the local development environment because the command-line tools could not resolve XCTest dependencies outside of the Xcode GUI application.

To unblock the automated test suite execution through `Tools/run-tests.sh` and keep engineering velocity matching functional expansion, Cody can execute a direct terminal path realignment upon return:

`sudo xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer`

This explicitly points the active shell path to the active Developer frameworks, allowing full terminal compilation and verification of the 57+ passing test cases.