Fission

ADR 0003: Fail-closed loader for unsupported or ambiguous binaries

Status: Accepted
Last verified: 2026-05-02

Context

Silent best-effort decoding invites misleading decompilation artifacts—especially across PE variants, packed blobs, and incomplete opinions.

Decision

When the loader cannot establish minimal trustworthy facts needed by downstream lifting (regions, entry semantics, integrity checks configured by policy), fail closed with explicit errors or guarded fallback modes rather than emitting speculative IR.

Consequences

• UX surfaces error strings/diagnostics operators can action (fission_cli inventory paths).
• Benchmark automation may record loader failures distinctly from NIR failures (docs/QUALITY_METRICS.md).
• Tests should encode negative cases (crates/fission-loader/).

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