tegwick
afd9be5aa9
secrets-engine probed the Service DNS name handed over in FLEX-WP-0021-T05 and found it resolves, from the workstation, to an unrelated public host. Reproduced here: search ad.binect.de answers wildcard, so flex-auth-secrets-engine.flex-auth.svc.cluster.local and this-service-does-not-exist.flex-auth.svc.cluster.local both resolve to 80.158.43.29, while the trailing-dot FQDN correctly fails. A bare Service name in a handover is not merely unreachable from there, it is a live misdirection, and the handover was ours. Had a deployment pointed at it, the CheckRequest body would have gone to that host: subject, tenant, lane and resource ids, stage, field names, purpose, plus the caller's bearer token. Trailing-dot FQDN and "in-cluster only" now replace the bare name in the example README, SCOPE.md, and the T05 note. Their real question was how the response channel is authenticated, and they declined to answer it locally because choosing a transport control for our service is not a consumer's call. Right boundary, so the answer is recorded here as FLEX-DEC-2026-010: it is not authenticated. Pins serve plain HTTP, the envelope carries no signature, and a responder that knows the package id and version can return a well-formed allow that passes every check a consumer performs. The part worth stating in the contract is that the digests do not help and look like they do. Every input to request_digest, policy_package_digest and registry_snapshot_digest is either sent by the caller or published in this repo, so a forger reproduces all three exactly. They establish integrity of the binding, never authenticity of the source — and publishing more digests makes a forged envelope look more authenticated, not less. For secrets-engine specifically: fail-closed protects against a PDP that is absent, not against one that lies. An unreachable PDP denies; a lying PDP allows. Third instance of one seam in three decisions. 008: a tenant carried into the digest and never compared — visible, not enforced. 009: a caller authenticated and never recorded — enforced, not visible. 010: a record verifiable and unauthentic — checkable, but not evidence. One nuance that changes the operator recommendation: kubectl port-forward does authenticate the responder, transitively — no DNS name, one named pod, API-server TLS. That is the exact reverse of the caller direction, where it bypasses the NetworkPolicy. Independent properties pointing opposite ways, so neither can be summarised as "the network protects it". FLEX-WP-0024 carries signing; key custody routes through warden/OpenBao rather than minting a key here. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014aQMM1dPXaPiXVn6DwwtLd Assistant: claude-code Assistant-Model: opus Assistant-Process: 715613@bnt-lap001 Assistant-Session: fabd95c1-4c9e-4080-8849-8707ae025f80 |
||
|---|---|---|
| .. | ||
| replay | ||
| check_request_allow_destroy_dual_control.json | ||
| check_request_allow_rotate.json | ||
| check_request_deny_destroy_without_claim.json | ||
| check_request_deny_revoke_not_an_action.json | ||
| check_request_deny_unknown_subject.json | ||
| check_request_deny_wrong_tenant.json | ||
| policy_fixtures.yaml | ||
| policy_package.md | ||
| protected_system_manifest.yaml | ||
| README.md | ||
| registry_snapshot.json | ||
| subject_manifest.yaml | ||
secrets-engine example
Policy package, manifests, and fixtures for secrets-engine's gated
catalog-lane operations. Opened by FLEX-DEC-2026-005, carried by
FLEX-WP-0021.
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
policy_package.md |
secrets-engine.catalog-lane.lifecycle v2, allow_ttl: 15m |
protected_system_manifest.yaml |
the secret-catalog-lane resource type and twelve actions |
subject_manifest.yaml |
the single secrets-engine service identity |
registry_snapshot.json |
loadable snapshot combining both manifests |
policy_fixtures.yaml |
32 fixtures — 11 allows, dual control both ways, and every denial branch |
check_request_*.json |
standalone requests for POST /v1/check |
The action vocabulary is secrets-engine's, delivered under
FLEX-WP-0021-T01 and recorded in
../../docs/secrets-engine-action-vocabulary.md.
Read that before changing any action string here.
Verify
go run ./cmd/flex-auth validate -kind policy -file examples/secrets-engine/policy_package.md
go run ./cmd/flex-auth load-registry -file examples/secrets-engine/registry_snapshot.json
28 Rego tests and 32 fixtures.
Deployed, and the version to pin
FLEX-WP-0021-T04 deployed the flex-auth-secrets-engine pin on 2026-09-06:
Service: http://flex-auth-secrets-engine.flex-auth.svc.cluster.local.:8080
^ trailing dot, required
Package: secrets-engine.catalog-lane.lifecycle
Version: v2
callerAuth.mode: warn (not enforced caller authentication)
The trailing dot is not cosmetic, and this address is in-cluster only.
secrets-engine reported and flex-auth reproduced that on the workstation a
bare *.svc.cluster.local name resolves through search ad.binect.de to one
unrelated public host — a name for a service that does not exist resolves to the
same address, which proves it is suffix expansion rather than a record. The
trailing-dot form correctly fails to resolve instead. A bare Service name in a
handover is therefore not merely unreachable from a workstation, it is a live
misdirection. See ../../docs/operator-caller-access-path.md.
Ingress admits namespace secrets-engine with pod label
app.kubernetes.io/name=secrets-engine and default-denies everything else. A
workstation CLI process is not that, and Service DNS is not workstation
connectivity — an operator-run consumer needs a decided access path before it
can call this pin at all (FLEX-WP-0021-T04's three shapes).
Pin _VERSION to v2, never v1. v1 is deployed and superseded: it had
no tenant rule and allowed a foreign tenant. See the correction section in
policy_package.md. The pin still serves v1 until the redeploy lands, which
is why the version is stated here rather than left to be read off the running
service.
SECRETS_ENGINE_AUTHORIZATION_POLICY_PACKAGE / _VERSION remain fallback-free
and fail-closed by design; nothing here changes that.