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Branding Invariants — Horizon AIOS

Hard constraints on naming and identification. Every artifact Horizon AIOS creates that a blue team, IT administrator, or auditor could encounter must self-identify as Horizon AIOS without external context — a running process, an OS account or group, a scheduled task/service, a log file, a log record, or an OS event-log/syslog entry. An investigator must be able to tell what an object is and what created it from the object alone.

Attribution is a security property. See $HORIZON_DOCS/security_architecture_invariants.md §8 for the security rationale; this document is the naming authority.

Standard brand tokens

Context Token
Human-readable text (OS-object descriptions, log fields, event sources) Horizon.AIOS
Filenames and machine identifiers horizon_aios_ prefix — lowercase, underscores

System name

The system is Horizon AIOS — not "AIOS", not "Horizon", not "AIOS OS", not "HorizonAIOS". In prose: "Horizon AIOS". As a filename prefix: horizon_aios_. As an OS-object token: Horizon.AIOS.

Required — these MUST self-identify

  • Audit/log records — every record carries source: Horizon.AIOS and the originating horizon_root.
  • Log files / directories — horizon_aios_ prefix (e.g. horizon_aios_security.log, horizon_aios_sync.log, horizon_aios_monitor/).
  • OS principals — brain/group Description / Linux --comment / Windows FullName / macOS RealName begin with Horizon.AIOS (e.g. Horizon.AIOS brain account, Horizon.AIOS group: <name>). Set by horizon_aios_create_brain.py and horizon_aios_harden.py.
  • OS log channels — Windows Event source Horizon.AIOS Monitor; syslog logger under horizon_aios.*.
  • Privileged utility scripts — $HORIZON_SYSTEM/sbin/horizon_aios_*.{py,ps1}, so process listings (ps, Task Manager, scheduled-task /TR targets) self-identify.

Deliberately exempt — stable functional identifiers

These are interface/compatibility contracts; renaming them breaks existing deployments, so they keep their established (already AIOS/HorizonAIOS-recognizable) names:

  • Public entry points: bootstrap.{ps1,sh}, uninstall.{ps1,sh}, and the aios command wrapper.
  • The brains OS group; the scheduled-task names HorizonAIOS_Sync / HorizonAIOS_MaintainLogs and their cron markers.
  • Config filenames (aios_*.conf) and AIOS_* environment variables.

On change

Any new admin-visible artifact (log, OS object, scheduled task/service, privileged script, event channel) adopts this invariant at creation — the Horizon.AIOS / horizon_aios_ form is not optional for them. Renaming an exempt functional identifier is a breaking change requiring an ADR.

The filename side of this convention is restated in $HORIZON_ETC/file_structure_invariants.md §6.

Brain naming conventions

Brain names use the OS username: lowercase, [a-z][a-z0-9_]{1,31}. There is no required prefix for brain accounts — only the OS-object description must carry the Horizon.AIOS brand (e.g. "Horizon.AIOS brain account: researcher").

Skill names follow the same convention as privileged scripts when they live in skills_sbin/ and are admin-facing: prefer horizon_aios_ prefix for skills that manage the AIOS system (e.g. horizon_aios_wiki_upkeep, horizon_aios_dev_consistency_check). User-facing skills use simple hyphenated slugs (/handoff, /create-brain, /doctor).