Every key needed an operator with a shell. This adds the login system that
made that necessary, which is the thing I argued against building until it was
asked for — so it is built as if it will be attacked, because a public login
form is.
Signing up produces an account that can do nothing. Approval is what makes it
work and stays on the CLI: having a shell on the control plane is what makes
someone an administrator, and that is a smaller thing to get right than roles
and an admin UI that mints credentials.
The details that matter:
Passwords are argon2id, where a slow hash is correct — the input is chosen by
a human and has a dictionary, which is the opposite of an API key. Both kinds
of authentication now live in this codebase and they are in separate packages
so neither set of assumptions leaks into the other. Length is the only rule:
composition rules push people towards Password1! and cost more entropy than
they buy.
Signup never says whether an address already has an account, and sign-in
answers the same way for a wrong password and a missing account — verifying
against a dummy hash when there is no user, so a stopwatch cannot enumerate
accounts. Account state is checked after the password, not before, so guessing
an address reveals nothing about it. Guessing is bounded per address rather
than per IP: an attacker has many addresses to come from and one to guess
against, and limiting by IP locks out an office behind one NAT.
Sessions are server-side, so signing out and suspending take effect
immediately rather than whenever a token expires; suspension is checked in the
same query that resolves the session, because a second round trip is a check
somebody eventually forgets. Every state-changing form carries a CSRF token
verified against a hash in the session — a cookie authenticates the browser,
not the page that asked.
Key ownership is enforced in the UPDATE rather than by reading first, so a
guessed key id from another account changes nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Until now anything that could reach the client port could use every model in
the catalog. A key now resolves to an identity, and that identity decides what
it may do.
Authentication wraps the whole mux rather than checking inside each handler,
so adding a route cannot add an unauthenticated one by omission. Health stays
open, because a load balancer has no key and a health check that needs one
reports the gateway down.
Nothing on the request path reads the database. A key is resolved once and
answered from memory until the entry expires; rejections are cached too, so a
client looping with a bad key cannot turn into a database read per request.
The price is that a revocation takes up to cache_ttl to take effect, which is
the trade stated in the configuration next to the knob. A store failure is
not an authentication answer: it is never cached as one and returns 503, not
401 — sending someone hunting for a key problem that does not exist wastes the
one thing an incident is short of. A revoked key is refused with the same
message as an unknown one, because saying otherwise confirms the key was real.
With auth on the band comes from the key and the band header is ignored. The
header was trusted only while there was nothing to consult, and it let any
client promote itself into the top priority band. Tenant fairness within a
band is now per key rather than per session, so one caller cannot take a band
by opening many sessions.
Allowlists are decided per model, not per string: a model's canonical name and
every alias name the same thing, so either form works in an allowlist and no
alias can reach a model that was not allowed. The first version of that test
passed without the resolution being there at all, which is why it now checks
all four combinations.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Comments, doc comments, test names, error and log messages, CLI help, README,
Makefile, CI step names and the design document are now all in English.
No behaviour changes; the full suite passes under the race detector.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
ilkerandClaude Opus 5