Fortifying Core Services: Implementing ABA Scopes to Secure Revenue Attribution Pipelines

Abstract

The dominant paradigm in high-throughput distributed systems prioritizes infrastructural resilience over the semantic integrity of the data payload, leaving critical processes like revenue attribution vulnerable to systemic ambiguity. This vulnerability stems from a foundational bifurcation in both the literature and practice, which has separated infrastructure engineering from abstract security policy and language-level verification, resulting in API contracts that are merely descriptive suggestions rather than enforceable covenants. To bridge this chasm, this study introduces and evaluates the Annotation-Based Authentication (ABA) Scopes framework, a methodological corrective that embeds policy directly into core services as compliable artifacts. Implemented within a production environment of mission-critical Scala services, this approach precipitated a fundamental shift in data integrity, reducing unattributed revenue events by over 98% while incurring negligible performance overhead. The findings demonstrate that transforming the API contract from a static document into a machine-enforced, runtime-verified component imposes necessary socio-technical clarity, shifting the security posture from post-hoc forensic analysis to intrinsic, preventive verification. Ultimately, this work argues for a return to foundational design-by-contract principles, proposing a generalizable model for building provably trustworthy systems not by fortifying external perimeters, but by instantiating data whose integrity is an immutable, verifiable property from its point of origin.