5 Commits

Include renames

Author	SHA1	Message	Date
bvandeusen	abe01da5f7	compose: say which of the three deployment shapes you're in ... The operator asked why `THOUGHTSYNC_BIND` isn't just defaulted to the safe value. Fair question, and the answer exposed that my own advice was incomplete: I told them to set it to 127.0.0.1 without asking where their proxy runs, and for a proxy inside Docker that is the wrong fix. There are three shapes, not two: 1. **LAN, no proxy** — the default. Binds every interface so a phone and a desktop can reach the server. This is why the default is NOT the locked-down value: a server reachable only from the machine it runs on isn't hardened, it's broken, and that is the primary documented use of this app. 2. **Proxy in Docker** — delete the `ports:` block entirely. The proxy reaches the app over the compose network; publishing a host port is a second, unauthenticated way in that bypasses whatever the proxy does about TLS. Safer than 127.0.0.1, because there is no host port to reach even from the host. 3. **Proxy on the host** — `THOUGHTSYNC_BIND=127.0.0.1`. The compose file now spells out all three where the decision is made, and `docs/public-hosting.md` item 4 asks where your proxy runs before telling you what to do, plus how to check: `curl http://<lan-ip>:5000/api/health` from another machine should NOT answer once you're proxied. No default changed. Changing it would silently break every LAN install on the next `docker compose pull` — the phone would just stop syncing, with nothing saying why.	2026-08-23 15:30:01 -04:00
bvandeusen	09b5f874b6	Security values move into the Settings UI ... Operator: *"proxy hops defaults to 1 and should be in the settings UI not in the envs, we need the security values to be in the UI."* Overrules the call I made yesterday, and rule 25 is on your side — I argued deployment-topology, but the operator has to be able to SEE what protects them, and reading a container's environment is not seeing. Six new settings in a **Security** group: trusted proxy hops (default 1), the per-account and per-address sign-in limits with their shared window, and the sign-up limit with its own. `THOUGHTSYNC_TRUSTED_PROXY_HOPS` is gone; the rate limits are no longer hardcoded constants. **The hard part was keeping the throttle cheap.** It consults these BEFORE opening a database connection — deliberately, because a refused attempt is meant to cost nothing, and the hop count is needed to know who is even asking. A query per attempt would undo both. So there is a small cache seeded from the registry defaults (the app works with no database at all, which is what the DB-free unit lane relies on), loaded at boot, and refreshed on every settings save — the same live-update contract `session_ttl_days` already had. `SlidingWindow` now takes its limit and window as SUPPLIERS rather than values, so a saved number applies to the next attempt instead of the next deploy. **Bounds are rejected, not clamped.** A hop count of 99 would trust anything a caller sent; a sign-in limit of 0 would lock every account out permanently. Both now fail validation with a message naming the range, and the number input carries min/max so the browser objects first. Silently storing a different number than the one typed is how somebody ends up believing a protection is set to something it is not. `MAX_BUCKETS` stays a constant on purpose: it protects the limiter from itself rather than the app from a caller, and there is no operator judgment to apply. Two integration tests, because the whole point is the round trip: a dangerous value refused, a legitimate one reaching the cache the throttle reads and persisting; and every Security row reaching the admin payload with bounds and a description that explains itself.	2026-08-23 15:24:15 -04:00
bvandeusen	a85c53ba2c	Trust proxy headers by hop count, and log every credential event ... Operator, before exposing the instance: *"I'd expect that we should have a proxy hops setting for how many proxy hops we should trust a shared real-ip at… and is there any session logging."* Neither existed, and the first one was a real hole. **The address was forgeable.** `client_address()` read the LEFTMOST `X-Forwarded-For` entry — nominally "the original client", and precisely the one a caller controls, because anything they send arrives before what proxies append. So `curl -H "X-Forwarded-For: 1.2.3.4"`, rotated per request, minted a fresh rate-limit bucket every time. Concretely: stuffing ONE account stayed limited (the account key is unforgeable and that is why it exists), but spraying MANY accounts from one source was not — each account got its own budget, and the per-address cap meant to bound the total was defeated by a header. On a LAN that is nothing. It is not nothing on a public host. Now it counts in from the RIGHT by `THOUGHTSYNC_TRUSTED_PROXY_HOPS`, default 1. Each hop appends what it saw, so the rightmost entries are the ones our own infrastructure wrote and a forged prefix lands to the left of them where it can never be selected — proven for the honest, forged, padded, CDN and shorter-than-configured cases. 0 ignores the header entirely; 2 is Cloudflare in front of a proxy. Too high is the dangerous direction, so a header shorter than configured falls back to the socket address rather than reaching further left. `X-Forwarded-Proto` had the same bug and now shares the same rule. Both live in a new `proxy.py` rather than being written twice — two places holding one decision is how issue 2183 happened, and this is the same decision. Env rather than the Settings UI, against rule 25's usual pull: it is deployment topology rather than preference, and the limiter consults it BEFORE opening a database connection, which is the entire point of checking a throttle before doing expensive work. Easy to move if that reads wrong. **And there was no logging at all** — `auth.py` had no logger, and the only record of anything was `device_tokens.last_used_at`. Sign-ins, failures, throttle trips, new accounts and device-token issuance now all log, with the attempted email and the trusted address. Deliberately including the email: it is the operator's own server, and "somebody failed a login" without saying against which account is not actionable. `basicConfig` at INFO in `create_app`, because hypercorn configures its own loggers and leaves the root at WARNING — without it every line above would have gone nowhere, which is a worse failure than not writing them. This is the app log, not an audit table. Not queryable, not retained past log rotation. The table is task 2939; this is what makes the next few days observable.	2026-08-23 15:12:14 -04:00
bvandeusen	2141a0ac45	Registration closes itself once the instance has an owner ... Operator: *"registration should be open only for the first user and they get granted admin privileges. then registration is closed."* The old shape had a window in it. The first account was always allowed and became admin; every account after that was gated by `allow_registration` — which defaulted to ON. So the door stayed open between "my account exists" and "I remembered to turn it off in Settings", and on a public host that gap is the entire exposure: it starts the moment DNS resolves and lasts until someone remembers. Now the door shuts as a CONSEQUENCE of the admin account existing, in the same transaction that creates it. Not "defaults closed" — that would still need the first person to get in somehow. There is no window to remember, because there is no window. Re-opening it is a deliberate act in Settings → Access: turn it on, have the person register, turn it off. Crude, and it is the only mechanism there is — **there is no invite system**, not even a stub. That is real work (a token table, admin create/revoke, a redemption flow, expiry) and is filed as later work rather than smuggled into a release. An integration test covers it, because it is the interaction between two writes in one transaction: first register → 201 and `is_admin: true`; the setting is then false; a second register → 403; re-open deliberately and a third → 201, not admin. **This does not retroactively close an instance that already has users.** The close fires on first-account creation, so a server whose admin predates this keeps whatever the setting was — which was on. `docs/public-hosting.md` now says so explicitly, and step 1 of the checklist is "check" rather than "do" for exactly that reason.	2026-08-23 14:18:58 -04:00
bvandeusen	b6152ec18b	server: harden the surfaces a public deployment leaves exposed ... On a LAN the login form is reachable by people you already trust. Exposed, it is reachable by everyone, and nothing in front of it was counting. Three credential routes — /login, /register and /device-login — now throttle. Every attempt is counted against BOTH the account and the calling address, and either can refuse it. The account key is the one that matters and the one that cannot be forged: it stops stuffing against a known email no matter how many addresses the attempts arrive from. The address key bounds one source spraying many accounts, and is best-effort by nature — behind a proxy it comes from X-Forwarded-For, which a caller can set to anything if the app is exposed directly. That is exactly why it isn't the only key. The check runs BEFORE the password is verified, which is the other half of what this protects. bcrypt is deliberately slow; an unauthenticated caller who can trigger it without limit has a CPU exhaustion primitive as well as a guessing one. Sliding rather than fixed windows, because a fixed one lets twice the limit through across a boundary. Bucket count is capped so a rotating forged header can't turn the limiter into the exhaustion it prevents. A sign-in against an email with no account now spends a real bcrypt against a throwaway hash first. Without it "no such account" returned in microseconds while a wrong password took ~100ms, which is a reliable oracle for which emails are registered here. Every response carries a CSP with script-src 'self', object-src 'none' and frame-ancestors 'none', plus nosniff, a referrer policy and a permissions policy. The app has no inline and no third-party scripts, so this concedes nothing; the exceptions are honest — inline STYLE (Vue writes it itself for v-show and the FLIP), and remote images (a link preview renders the og:image of an arbitrary host, over either scheme, since a LAN install is served over http). HSTS only where the request already arrived over TLS, and scoped to the one host: no includeSubDomains, no preload, neither of which is this app's to commit. X-Forwarded-Proto detection moved into one `_is_https()` — the session cookie's Secure flag and HSTS are the same question, and answering it twice is how the two drift apart. docs/public-hosting.md is the rest of it: the four things only the operator can do (close registration, terminate TLS and forward the scheme, stop publishing the app port, back up the attachment volume as well as the database), and an honest list of what the app does NOT have — no email verification, no password reset, no second factor, no per-user quota, no audit log. Those aren't blockers for an instance whose accounts are people you know. They're the reason not to leave signups open to strangers.	2026-08-21 22:01:37 -04:00