risk-nexus/findings/RISK-F-0002-ops-warden-sign-ungated.md

id	type	title	status	reported_by	reported_via	routed_by	date_reported	system	environment	fix_owner	fix_tracking	related	severity	disclosure	escalation
RISK-F-0002	finding	ops-warden signs SSH certificates with no authorization decision, and its unblock is now unsafe	open	ops-warden	ops-warden	ops-warden	2026-08-18	ops-warden	production	ops-warden	WARDEN-WP-0007 (gate shipped, disabled) / FLEX-WP-0007 (runtime deploy)	RISK-F-0001	unset	unset	unset

RISK-F-0002 — the SSH signing gate is off, and turning it on is now the more dangerous move

What is true

ops-warden issues short-lived SSH certificates for adm/agt/atm actors against production OpenBao. It ships a pre-sign authorization gate that asks flex-auth whether a given actor may sign. That gate is disabled in production and has been since it shipped.

Verifiable in this estate's own files:

• ops-warden/examples/warden.production.example.yaml:22 — policy.enabled: false
• ops-warden/src/warden/policy.py:33 — if not cfg.enabled: return None

Every production warden sign therefore proceeds with no authorization decision. What still constrains it: the actor must exist in inventory.yaml, TTL is enforced per actor type (adm 48h, agt 24h, atm 8h), the caller must hold a scoped VAULT_TOKEN, and every issuance is logged. What does not constrain it: any per-request judgement about whether this actor should be getting this certificate right now. Possession of the signing token is the whole authorization model.

This is a known, deliberate state, not a discovery. It is filed because "deliberate and known" is exactly the condition that stops being tracked once the person who decided it stops looking — and because the reason it is still true has just changed.

Why this is filed now rather than in June

The gate's stated blocker has always been FLEX-WP-0007: flex-auth is not deployed at a reachable URL, so enabling a fail_closed: true gate would break all signing. That is a availability blocker, and it is boring.

RISK-F-0001 changes the shape of it. The production config points the gate at:

flex_auth_url: http://flex-auth.flex-auth.svc.cluster.local:8080

That is precisely the ClusterIP surface RISK-F-0001 reports as authenticating no caller. So the sequencing is no longer "enable it once flex-auth is up". It is:

Enabling the gate before RISK-F-0001 is fixed would make things worse, not better.

Today, an unauthorized signing attempt is unauthorized and unrecorded as such. With the gate on and the oracle forgeable, an attacker who can reach the ClusterIP can obtain a genuine allow and the signature log will carry a policy_decision_id attesting that the issuance was authorized. The gate would convert an absent control into a false attestation — and the audit trail, which currently makes no claim, would start making one that is wrong.

An authorization check that can be forged is worse than no authorization check, because only one of the two lies in the record afterwards.

What ops-warden is doing about it

The mechanism recommendation for RISK-F-0001 was answered on 2026-08-17 (ops-warden/wiki/NetKingdomSecurityMap.md, "Service-to-service caller authentication"): projected, audience-scoped Kubernetes ServiceAccount tokens verified by TokenReview, with the caller's asserted system bound to the authenticated ServiceAccount. ops-warden implements the calling side and has committed to a warn-only rollout on flex-auth's schedule.

The ordering constraint is recorded there and restated here because it is a risk statement, not an architecture one:

flex-auth warn-only -> ops-warden gate presents its SA token -> logs clean
                    -> flex-auth fail-closed -> ops-warden policy.enabled: true

policy.enabled must not flip anywhere while /v1/check answers unauthenticated callers. Nothing else is asked of flex-auth by this record.

What this repo is asked to decide

1. Severity. Note the two states are not equally bad and the register should probably say which it is scoring: the gate being off (a missing control, honestly represented) versus the gate being turned on prematurely (a present control that lies). The second is the one worth a severity.
2. Whether this is one finding or a dependency on RISK-F-0001. It is filed separately because the fix owner differs and because the "off" state has its own standing regardless of how RISK-F-0001 resolves. If this repo would rather carry it as a consequence of RISK-F-0001 than as a peer, that is a reasonable call and ops-warden will not re-file it.
3. Escalation. ops-warden does not think this needs the operator: it is known, owned, and its dangerous failure mode is a sequencing error that is now written down in both repos. Recorded so the judgement is this repo's and not assumed.

The general point, offered for the register's design

RISK-F-0001 observed that four live defects were found by repos reading their own code against a ladder, none by monitoring. This finding is a fifth, found the same way — by reading an answer we had just given and noticing it changed the risk of a decision we had already made and filed away as merely blocked.

The estate's habit of recording a blocker once and not revisiting it is the thing to watch. A blocker is a claim about the world at a date. RISK-F-0001 invalidated this one in a day, and nothing would have re-checked it.