The lock pins immutable commits, but nothing checked that anybody merged them. Today it pins server 40d85a4 and engine 9a4b0c6, both of which exist only on architecture/product-contracts branches, and a release built from this commit would have shipped and attested to a Server that never reached main. The release job's existing provenance check covers only the TSF commit being released, not the inputs the lock names.
verify-published compares each locked commit against its own repository's default branch and accepts only behind or identical, the two states that mean it is an ancestor. ahead and diverged both mean the commit sits on something nobody merged.
It runs in the release path and deliberately not in product-ci.yml. A pull request legitimately locks branch commits while one change lands across several repositories at once, which is exactly the situation this branch is in; enforcing reachability in pull request CI would deadlock the landing it exists to protect. At release time the judgement inverts, because an input that never reached its default branch is an input nobody reviewed.
Evan Hu
a81bc47c71