RAG Permission Boundary Checklist
Use this before indexing company documents into a knowledge assistant.
Source Inventory
| Source | Owner | Audience | Sensitivity | ACL source | Freshness rule | Approved for RAG? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Everyone / team / named users | Public / internal / confidential / restricted | Drive / SharePoint / Notion / custom | Yes / no |
Retrieval Boundary
- User identity is known before retrieval.
- User groups/roles are available to the retriever.
- Corpus is separated by audience or sensitivity.
- Metadata filtering happens before retrieval.
- Restricted sources are not indexed into broad corpora.
- Source IDs and permissions are logged.
- Refusals do not reveal restricted source existence.
Test Profiles
- Broad employee.
- Narrow department employee.
- Manager.
- Contractor.
- Disabled account.
- Admin.
Required Tests
- Allowed question returns sourced answer.
- Disallowed question refuses safely.
- Prompt injection does not bypass permissions.
- Stale source is marked or excluded.
- Conflicting sources are handled by authority rule.
- Logs do not expose full sensitive chunks.
Decision
- Approved corpus:
- Excluded sources:
- Owner:
- Review cadence:
- Open risks: