the notify sidecar stops trusting whoever reaches it

to send one message to four accounts an hour ago i found the sidecar's
ephemeral port and POSTed to it directly, once per user, with no
authentication of any kind. that worked, which was the problem: the same
door was open to anything else on the machine, including a commander with
a shell.

two changes.

POST /api/notify/broadcast, owner only via `ownerOnly` on the permission —
the supported way to say one thing to everyone. teams will narrow it later;
today the choice is everyone or one person.

and the sidecar now requires a secret on everything under /_officer/. it
is generated per boot, held in memory, announced to the platform over the
registration socket beside the port, and never written to disk.

X-Officer-User could not carry this on its own, and my first attempt got
that wrong: it says WHO is asking, and a caller on loopback can write it
itself. only the secret says the PLATFORM is asking. so the check covers
the whole /_officer/ surface rather than just the send route — /_officer/
devices takes the same header to decide whose phones are listed and
deleted.

what it bounds, honestly: a MEMBER's commander runs as its own Linux user
and cannot read this process, so for every account but the owner's this is
kernel-enforced. the owner's own commander runs as the owner, same as the
platform, and is not bounded by this and cannot be — the same reason
`execution` permissions are never grantable. the owner's decision, and
this is a real improvement rather than a boundary.

`bun run notify:test` posts to that port and will now be refused. it is a
developer CLI on a box where the platform is running; left to fail loudly
rather than given a way in.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Officer-Session: 656f5c85-e49a-4f1f-b9f3-042a04b4d043
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-24 16:29:48 +00:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent de633f8697
commit cb2dcfa4cc
7 changed files with 151 additions and 10 deletions
+8
View File
@@ -219,6 +219,14 @@ const CORE_REGISTRY: Permission[] = [
// nothing, so a read-level member could list their phones but not register or delete one — the exact
// opposite of the line above. Invisible in testing because the owner bypasses every check.
personal: ['/_officer/devices', '/_officer/subscriptions'],
/*
Broadcast is the one part of a core permission that is not the caller's own.
Everything else here acts on the account asking — its devices, its notifications — which is what
made `core` right. Sending to EVERY account is administration, so it needs the owner even though
the permission around it is not deniable.
*/
ownerOnly: ['/broadcast'],
},
// `vpn` (POST /api/vpn/enroll) was here until 2026-08-14 — the one member-grantable piece of headscale,
// minting a pre-auth key bound to the caller. Deleted because it had no caller anywhere: the standalone