CTRL005 · Rate limiting not observed on a high-impact-capability loop

A loop contains a high-impact-capability call site with no rate-limiter or backoff construct observed within that loop.

• Dimension: operational control (assurance area 8: technical controls).
• Severity: low (review) · Gates: never.
• Kind: AST proximity signal. Cadence: one per agent candidate.

Detection

Fires when, for an agent candidate (confidence ≥ medium), an AST loop node (for/while/comprehension) contains a call site matching a high-impact capability (payment_access, database_write, shell_execution, code_execution, email_send, messaging, source_control, cloud_resource_access, filesystem_write) — and no rate-limiter or backoff construct is observed within that same loop's text:

• Rate-limiter libraries (reused from CTRL003): slowapi, flask-limiter,

express-rate-limit, rate-limiter-flexible, @ratelimit, bottleneck, hand-rolled token_bucket/RateLimiter.

• Backoff/sleep constructs: time.sleep, await asyncio.sleep,

setTimeout, backoff, tenacity.

This is a proximity signal scoped to the loop's own text, not the whole file — a limiter guarding a different loop does not silently satisfy this one.

Vulnerable → remediated

# FLAGGED — unbounded refund loop, no limiter or backoff anywhere in it
for order in orders:
    stripe.Refund.create(payment_intent=order.id, amount=order.amount)

# NOT FLAGGED — backoff observed within the loop
for order in orders:
    time.sleep(1)
    stripe.Refund.create(payment_intent=order.id, amount=order.amount)

Suppress: # stoa: ignore[CTRL005] reason