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]>
Adds Core-owned identity contracts, a Core-owned Better Auth database schema
(ekklesia_core_user/session/account/verification), a first-class Core-owned
migration source that coexists with module-owned migrations under the exact
existing migration system, and an explicit Better Auth construction boundary.
No authentication endpoint or sign-in UI is exposed yet (ADR 0010).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]>
