tegwick 97762a4be0 RISK-F-0001: flex-auth authenticates no caller on the decision surface

First finding, and it establishes the record format by being one. Kept minimal
on purpose - inventing a schema before there is a second finding to test it
against would be designing in the dark.

The substance: POST /v1/check and /v1/batch_check authenticate no caller, so
any workload with network reach can assert any subject and any tenant and
receive an authoritative allow from the estate's authorization oracle.
Self-reported by flex-auth during their Tenancy Posture review, and their own
note says they did not know they were carrying it.

Severity, disclosure and escalation are left unset. Per INTENT this repo owns
those and the reporter does not, and filling them in as the routing party would
collapse the separation on the first record.

Two things stated rather than assumed. Exposure depends on whether a
default-deny NetworkPolicy fronts the service; flex-auth did not say, and I did
not check, because that would be reporting on a system I do not own. And the
disclosure question is genuinely live here - build mode is public-by-default,
this is a live authorization bypass, and the controlled-disclosure mechanism
this repo anticipates does not exist yet, so the choice today is publish or
hold with nothing in between.

Three related defects from the same review round are recorded as visible but
not filed, since filing them was not asked for. All four were found by repos
reading their own code against a ladder within a day of each other, and none
was found by monitoring - which is itself a fact worth carrying into triage.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-08-17 22:51:31 +02:00

4.6 KiB

Raw Blame History

id	type	title	status	reported_by	reported_via	routed_by	date_reported	system	environment	fix_owner	fix_tracking	severity	disclosure	escalation
RISK-F-0001	finding	flex-auth /v1/check authenticates no caller	open	flex-auth	rapp-postgres	rapp-postgres	2026-08-17	flex-auth	production	flex-auth	FLEX-WP-0015-T02	unset	unset	unset

RISK-F-0001 — flex-auth authenticates no caller on the decision surface

What is true

POST /v1/check and POST /v1/batch_check authenticate no caller. Any workload with network reach to the ClusterIP Service can assert any subject and any tenant and receive an authoritative allow.

flex-auth is the estate's authorization oracle. Every service that delegates a decision to it is relying on an answer that anyone able to reach the pod can obtain for any identity they care to name.

Self-reported by flex-auth as A0 on their own inbound surface, in their Tenancy Posture review. Their words: "flex-auth is the estate's authorization oracle and it trusts its callers completely."

How it was found

Not by a probe, an incident, or an alert. By flex-auth assessing themselves against the Tenancy Posture A ladder during a review they were asked to do — and their own note says they did not know they were carrying it.

That provenance matters for triage: nothing was watching for this, and nothing would have found it. It has presumably been true for as long as the endpoint has existed.

Exposure, as far as the reporter stated it

The Service is ClusterIP, so reach requires a workload inside the cluster.
No claim was made that network policy restricts which workloads can reach it, and this record does not assume one. If a default-deny NetworkPolicy fronts the service, that materially changes the exposure and should be verified rather than inferred — flex-auth did not state it either way, and I have not checked, because doing so would be reporting on a system I do not own.

What makes it worse than a single service's defect

A false allow from this endpoint is not confined to flex-auth. It is the answer other services act on. tenant-engine separately reports that its own mutations are authorized by flex-auth and that direct authority over its rows would mean "privilege escalation across NetKingdom rather than data tampering confined to one store". The same reasoning applies to a forged allow.

Owner and state

flex-auth owns the fix and has tracked it as FLEX-WP-0015-T02, to ship through the staged-promotion path rather than a direct apply. They classify it as the only urgent item of their five follow-ups. Nothing is asked of them by this record beyond what they have already committed to.

What this repo is asked to decide

Severity. Not the reporter's to set.
Disclosure. Build mode is currently public-by-default, and this is precisely the class of finding where that stops being obviously right — a live authorization bypass in the service every other service trusts. The controlled-disclosure scheme this repo anticipates does not exist yet, so the choice today is publish or hold, with no mechanism between them.
Escalation. Whether this reaches the operator personally. The candidate triggers in INTENT include "anything exposing real tenant data" — this exposes the decision that governs access to it, which may or may not be the same thing, and that judgement is this repo's.

Three further defects surfaced from the same review round. They are recorded here so they are visible, not filed as findings, because filing them was not asked for:

tenant-engine — events() returns the entire event log unfiltered. A live cross-tenant read at E2.
audit-core — read path applies no tenant filter; a credential with may_read can read any tenant's events. Bounded by deployment (may_read: false on the production sender) and not by code. Tracked AUDIT-WP-0008-T04.
apps-pg (railiance-platform) — no backup configured at all: no barmanObjectStore, no retention policy, BestEffort QoS. R0 there means no recovery, not merely no erasure policy.

All four were found the same way, by repos reading their own code against a ladder, within a day of each other. That is a fact about the estate's observability worth carrying into triage: four live defects, none found by monitoring.

4.6 KiB Raw Blame History