TestRejections built a "wrong" key by replacing a valid one's last character
with X. Keys are base62, so one in sixty-two already ends in X and the wrong
key was the right one, which authenticated and failed the assertion.
It passed locally all day and failed in CI, which is how long a flake of that
shape takes to look like a real bug — long enough that the instinct on seeing
it is to go looking in the authenticator.
The replacement is now chosen to differ from what it replaces, with a test on
the helper itself: a mutation that can return its input turns the test it
serves into one that quietly checks nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Pasting the gateway's address into a browser returned 404, which looks like a
broken endpoint rather than one that tells you how to use it.
Two pages, and the split between them is a security boundary rather than a
layout choice. The landing page is served without a key — it has to be,
because the person reading it is the one who does not have one yet — so it
contains no data at all: it says how to connect, not what is here. Model names
stay behind /v1/models. It reconstructs the address from the forwarded headers
so the copy-pasteable example names the address the client actually used
rather than the internal one; those headers are reflected into displayed text
and never used for a decision.
The dashboard shows nodes, models, replicas, placement failures and usage, and
lives on the admin listener only. That listener is loopback-bound and also
serves pprof, which can dump the process heap — where API keys sit in
plaintext — so reaching the page from elsewhere is an SSH tunnel's job. It is
read-only: anything that mints a credential stays in `llmgw keys`, where it
needs a shell rather than a browser session this project has no way to
authenticate.
Mounting the landing page uncovered a hole in the exemption list. An entry
ending in "/" was a prefix rule, and "/" ends in "/", so exempting the landing
page would have exempted every path there is — authentication still installed,
still logging, and letting the whole API through. "/" is now exact, with a
test enumerating what must and must not be exempt.
Server-rendered templates and one stylesheet, embedded. The single-binary goal
rules out a JavaScript toolchain and nothing on either page needs one.
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>