feat: give display devices their own paired identity
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ADR 0033 gave Ekklesia a display host and ADR 0034 gave it a login page.
Together, the only way to light a television in a foyer was to sign a
human being into it and leave that session running on a screen anyone can
walk up to: a person's credentials on a wall, a person's session as the
thing signage depends on, and the display going dark when they are
revoked or their session simply expires.

A screen is not a person. Ekklesia now recognizes three principal classes
— anonymous, authenticated human, and managed device — and a device is a
first-class principal with its own credential and its own explicit
permissions. It has no email, no password, and no row in the identity
tables, and it satisfies the `authenticated` baseline never, so every
route that settles for "somebody is signed in" stays closed to it.

Device permissions live in their own table because
ekklesia_core_grant.user_id is a non-null foreign key into the user table
and making it polymorphic would rewrite the platform's central
authorization record to serve one narrow case. That is a schema decision,
not a second decision point: the evaluator gained one branch, so a device
is allowed or denied by the same function, with the same deny-by-default,
as anyone else — with no owner path it could reach and no baseline that
stands in for a grant.

The six-digit code is not the credential. It is printed across a screen in
a public hallway, so it is treated as public: it identifies a request to
an administrator and is worth nothing alone. Collecting the credential
also requires a 256-bit claim secret held only in the requesting browser's
HttpOnly cookie, and approving requires the restricted core.devices.manage
permission. Without that split, reading a code off a wall would hand over
the screen's identity.

The permission a pairing asks for is read from the module's validated
display declaration, never from the request, so a browser cannot ask to be
granted core.devices.manage or another module's permission. Approval
grants exactly that one permission.

Credentials are stored only as SHA-256; the raw value exists in the
Set-Cookie that issues it and the device's own cookie jar, and is never
logged, returned in JSON, or placed in a URL. The cookie is HttpOnly, so
the module display code running in that same page cannot read it.
Revocation is a server-side column checked on every principal resolution,
and re-pairing mints a new identity so an old credential can never come
back. State transitions are conditional updates, so one code cannot be
approved twice or claimed into two credentials under a race.

/api/v1/principal still reports a device as anonymous: it is what the
Dashboard uses to decide whether a person is signed in. Displays read
their viewer from the descriptor instead, which already performed the
authorization — so displays are descriptor-first while the Dashboard stays
principal-first, and neither infers an identity by elimination.

Proven end to end against real PostgreSQL and real HTTP: an unpaired
screen shows a code, an owner approves it, the device opens the display
descriptor and a realtime stream, and revocation closes both while the
device still holds its cookie. An already-open SSE stream is bounded by
realtime's existing five-minute reconnect rather than closed instantly,
and that bound is documented rather than called immediate.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
This commit is contained in:
ekklesia
2026-08-23 23:41:03 -05:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 3ce4fe03fe
commit 80189c8ae2
52 changed files with 5065 additions and 113 deletions
+24
View File
@@ -351,6 +351,30 @@ password arriving on standard input and never in `argv`, `--password` refused, a
`DATABASE_URL`, and an unmigrated database refused rather than silently migrated — with assertions
that neither stdout nor stderr contains the password or the connection string.
A further suite (`apps/api/tests/device-pairing.integration.ts`, same harness) proves display device
pairing end to end against real PostgreSQL and the real HTTP transport
([ADR 0036](../architecture/decisions/0036-managed-device-identity-and-pairing.md)). None of it is
mocked: a screen with no identity is refused the descriptor but served the page it needs, asks to be
paired, and receives a code; a real platform owner — created by the Pass 1B bootstrap and signed in
through the real login transport — looks the code up and approves it by name; the screen collects its
credential from a real `Set-Cookie` and then opens the real display descriptor and a real realtime
stream; and the owner revokes it, after which both fail while the device still holds its cookie.
The suite also pins the properties that make the design safe rather than merely working: that the
raw credential appears nowhere in the database or in any response body, that the permission is taken
from the display declaration and not from a request that tried to name `core.devices.manage`, that
someone who knows only the code (an onlooker reading a television) is issued nothing, that anonymous
callers, a paired device, and a cross-origin administrator are all refused approval, that one code
cannot be approved twice or claimed into two credentials under a race, that re-pairing produces a
fresh identity while the old credential stays dead, and that a browser holding both a human session
and a device cookie remains a person.
Device authority itself is proven without a database in `core/tests/authorization-device.test.ts`,
which is mostly a list of things a device must *not* acquire: authority from being a principal, from
an `authenticated` baseline, from platform ownership, or from a user grant. Its ports are wired to
answer "yes" to every human question, so any accidental fall-through into a human path would flip
those assertions.
### Which kind of timing proof lives where
Pass 4 introduced several deadlines, and their tests deliberately differ in kind: