What and why

Found during an engineering audit of the engine (finding F1).

BeanCore.decide() step 3 read and wrote the flow activity stamp in a single
_FlowTable.touch(), so the write happened before the expiry verdict and applied to the drop
path too. The packet rejected with reason nat therefore stamped its own flow as active and
brought the mapping straight back.

Measured before the fix (timeout 5 s, one outbound packet at t=0, inbound only afterwards):

t= 0.0 out -> pass
t=10.0 in  -> DROP
t=11.0 in  -> pass     <- the dropped packet reopened the mapping
t=12.0 in  -> pass
t=13.0 in  -> pass
t=20.0 in  -> DROP

So the direction lost roughly one packet per timeout and otherwise kept working, with nothing
outbound involved. This impairment exists to answer "does the application notice its mapping is
gone and send something to re-open it" - and in that shape the test could not fail: an app with no
keep-alive passed it. After the fix every inbound packet stays dropped until an outbound packet
re-opens the mapping, which is what a real NAT does.

How

• core.py: split into get() plus a set() placed after the verdict, so the drop path skips
  the write. Same cost - touch() was a get plus this same write. Measured 160 ns/op both ways
  at 200k iterations, difference below the noise floor, so the packet hot path does not regress.
• core.py: _FlowTable.touch() had exactly one caller and is removed with it.
• core.py: the comment now bounds the blackhole with measurements instead of a general claim.
  The drop path returns above the _prune() call, so it never rotates anything itself: with this
  flow alone the blackhole was still holding at t=200; with one other flow driving _prune it
  reopened at t=30, the first rotation. That is the flow table's documented safe direction (it
  can lose an impairment, never invent one) and is a separate matter from the resurrection fixed
  here.

For the reviewer

• The new test was verified by mutation, not assumed. Restoring the old write-before-verdict
  order turns it red with drops=[True, False, False, False] - the exact symptom above.
• Both existing NAT tests pass unchanged (test_nat_expiry, test_nat_outbound_refreshes).
  Neither of them pinned the buggy behaviour, which is why it survived; that gap is what the new
  test closes.
• No behaviour change when nat_timeout is left at its default of 0 (off).
• No public contract touched: no CLI flag, exit code, NDJSON field or on-disk format changes.

Checklist

• python -m pytest tests passes locally (670 tests, 0 failures, elevated shell). python smoke_gui.py passes.
• New behaviour has tests (tests/test_core.py::test_a_dropped_packet_does_not_revive_an_expired_nat_mapping).
• UI text goes through i18n keys, with both lang/en.json and lang/pl.json updated - not applicable, no UI strings in this change.
• User-facing changes noted in CHANGELOG.md; technical ones and new tests in CHANGELOG-INTERNAL.md, under [Unreleased].
• Commits follow Conventional Commits (type(scope): summary).
• No version bump - the owner closes a version via VERSION.txt.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code