Summary

Removes test_bundle_carries_no_touched_cell_values (added in #758). The test is flaky and its detection method is unsound — it adds intermittent CI failures without adding coverage the compiler doesn't already provide.

What the test did

It placed distinctive marker bytes (0xC7/0xC8/0xC9) in the private input, proved a continuation bundle, and asserted none of them appear as the 8-byte window [marker, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0] in the serialized bundle — meant to catch a regression of the touched-cell value leak that #758 fixed (pre-fix, EpochProof.boundary serialized each cell's init.value/fini.value, and a private first-read's init.value is a private byte).

Why it's flaky and unsound

1. The bundle is non-deterministic. Grinding derives the PoW nonce via into_par_iter().find_any() (crypto/stark/src/grinding.rs), which returns a different valid nonce each run. That nonce is folded into the transcript, so every FRI query position (and thus the trace bytes opened into the proof) changes run-to-run. Measured: two proofs of the identical input differ in ~133K of ~2.78M bytes.

2. The needle is produced abundantly by legitimate content, not just a leak. Memory is byte-granular (build_initial_image_paged -> PagedMem<u8>), so a leaked cell value is always a single byte b ∈ [0,255]; its only signature is [b, 0x00 ×7] — one distinctive byte plus seven forced zeros. Those trailing zeros are exactly what every small bincode usize length prefix (a Vec's length, i.e. a table's column count) and every small field value already carry. So the window collides with honest proof bytes:

• Byte value 194 (a column count) appears as [194, 0×7] 18× per proof, deterministically, every run. Had a marker been 0xC2, the test would fail 100% of the time.
• Whether an arbitrary marker byte collides is pure luck of the trace/serialization layout and query positions. Locally, 0xC7/0xC8/0xC9 hit 0/90 trials — while the reporter sees 0xC8 fail ~60% in their environment. Same test, same intent: 0% here, ~60% there, 100% for the adjacent value — the signature of a fragile test.

The "astronomically unlikely" premise in the original comment is the flaw: it treats the marker as a rare 8-byte value, when it's really a 1-byte value against 7 ubiquitous zeros.

3. No marker choice fixes it. A larger multi-byte marker can't help either: the old boundary serialization emitted each cell interleaved with its epoch/timestamp fields, so a multi-byte value would leak as scattered single-byte windows, never a contiguous searchable run. Given byte-granular cells, the forced-zeros problem is intrinsic.

Why removing it is safe

The real guarantee is already deterministic and enforced at compile time: InitClaim/FiniClaim/CellBoundary have their serde derives deliberately stripped (prover/src/tables/local_to_global.rs), so re-introducing the leak is a compile error — not something a runtime byte-scan must catch. The other continuation privacy/regression tests (multi-page private input, reordered touched_page_bases, oversized num_private_input_pages) are unaffected.

Testing

• cargo test -p lambda-vm-prover --lib --no-run — compiles clean.
• cargo clippy -p lambda-vm-prover --lib --tests — clean.
• cargo fmt — no changes.