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hyperhive/swarm-nats-auth
Repository files (latest commit first)
Filename Latest commit message Latest commit date
atlas e974194e3a swarm: let an agent publish its own icon
The auth callout grants an agent that presents its own queue credential
one more subject, `$KV.agent-icons.<agent>`: its own key in the
agent-icons bucket and no other. The hive's shared agent client is
granted none of the bucket, since every agent on a hive presents it.

hive-agent writes `/etc/hyperhive/icon.svg`, the file its `GET /icon`
serves, to that key once per start, as a JetStream publish straight to
the subject (what `kv::Store::put` sends, minus the bucket lookup), so
the one subject is the whole grant. No icon deletes the key. A failed
write, including one that arrives before the bucket exists, is retried
with backoff until acked. An agent connected with the hive's shared
client publishes nothing.

swarm-controller creates the bucket as soon as its queue connection is
up, instead of on the first icon read, so an agent's write does not
wait for someone to look.

Measured against a local nats-server with a user allowed publish on
`$KV.agent-icons.atlas` only: the write to its own key is stored and
readable, a write to `$KV.agent-icons.argus` is refused (the ack times
out), the DEL marker makes the key read as absent, and a write before
the bucket exists fails with "no responders".
2026-09-28 13:47:37 +02:00
..
src swarm: let an agent publish its own icon 2026-09-28 13:47:37 +02:00
Cargo.toml swarm-nats-auth: verify an agent's own token against the store 2026-09-28 08:24:52 +02:00
README.md treefmt: apply prettier 2026-09-02 15:25:07 +02:00

swarm-nats-auth

The auth-callout responder for the swarm's NATS queue — the half that lets the server say yes.

nix/host-modules/swarm-nats.nix configures nats-server with an auth_callout block. That block with no responder is the fail-closed state, and it is the measured one rather than the obvious one: on the pinned nats-server, both authorization { } and authorization { users: [] } answer PONG to an anonymous client, while an auth_callout block sets auth_required and refuses every client no responder has approved. So the module ships the final config from the start and this crate only adds the ability to approve. No interim hole is ever opened.

Why a crate and not more config

The reply is a signed NATS user JWT. Signing needs the account nkey seed and the JWT framing, which is program work — which is why the container and its config landed first and this arrived separately, rather than the pair being one change.

The invariant that is easy to break

⛔ issuer_account must be absent from the issued user token. It is an operator-mode field. The module renders server-config mode (accounts { AUTH, APP }, no operator), where its mere presence makes the server refuse the client — Error non operator mode account "AUTH": attempted to use issuer_account — while the responder cheerfully reports granted=true. The account is named by the claims' aud instead.

nats_jwt::Token::new_user always sets it, so reaching for that constructor reintroduces the bug. nats-jwt is a dev-dependency: it cannot express aud on either token, and its role here is as the encoder's test oracle, not part of the path that runs.

Rules the code follows

  • A denial is a signed response carrying an error, never silence. The server cannot tell an absent responder from a refusing one, so staying quiet turns every rejection into a timeout and hides an outage inside what looks like ordinary denials.
  • Anything that is not an explicit {"active": true} denies — including an introspection call that could not be made. The failure modes of an HTTP call are exactly the conditions under which an attacker would most like this to fall open.
  • Every credential is a path, never a value. A value in nix config lands in the world-readable store; a value in argv is readable via /proc/<pid>/cmdline, which is 0444. Paths are not secrets, so passing them as flags is fine.
  • The introspection timeout is pinned below the server's authorization. timeout, with a test asserting the relation — a responder that answers after the server gave up is indistinguishable from one that never answered.

What the tests do and do not cover

Unit tests cover the JWT framing, including byte-equality against nats-jwt on the one shape that crate models. They are not sufficient on their own: this crate's shape is decided by a server that parses what it emits, so the change was also driven against a real nats-server — every refusal repeated with the responder live, because a responder that says yes to everyone passes "a client can connect" perfectly. That harness lives outside this repo; the PR that added this crate links it.

⚠️ Its introspection endpoint is a stub. Those runs prove this crate's own behaviour and nothing about the real authelia integration, which needs a deployment.