Ekklesia/docs/development/security.md

Security model and deployment trust boundaries

The one canonical statement of what Ekklesia's boundaries actually protect against today, and what they do not. Read it before installing a module, exposing the API, or reasoning about any other document's guarantees.

Related: ADR 0006 (compiled module runtime), ADR 0016 (module database access), ADR 0020 (module routing/lifecycle and migration execution), ADR 0032 (native module realtime), ADR 0033 (authenticated display hosting), and Module development.

Installed modules are trusted compiled backend code

Installing a module is equivalent to deploying trusted server code. It is not equivalent to installing a browser extension, a plugin from a marketplace, or anything else with a security boundary around it. There is no such boundary here.

A module's dist/server entrypoint is imported into, and runs arbitrary JavaScript inside, the apps/api process. Within the operating-system account that process runs as, a module can:

• read and write any file the account can reach, including .env, TLS material, and the source tree;
• read process.env, process.argv, and any other process state;
• open outbound network connections and bind listeners;
• import any installed dependency, including ones Ekklesia never intended it to use;
• monkey-patch Core's own exports, Node built-ins, globalThis, or another module's objects;
• keep running work after its lifecycle hooks return.

It also shares the API's single PostgreSQL role and connection pool. ModuleDatabase.execute accepts arbitrary SQL, so a module has exactly the database authority the API has — every table in the database, including ekklesia_core_user, ekklesia_core_grant, ekklesia_core_platform_owner, ekklesia_core_platform_owner_bootstrap, ekklesia_core_authorization_audit, and every other module's tables.

What the module-facing mechanisms actually are

These are correctness and coordination boundaries. Every one of them assumes the module is cooperative. None of them constrains a module that is not:

Mechanism	What it actually provides
ekklesia_* table prefixes and schema discovery	Ownership clarity and collision avoidance between cooperating modules
TypeScript types, branded ids, contracts	Compile-time correctness; erased at runtime
ekklesia.module.json manifest and manifestVersion	Declared compatibility and dependency ordering
Permission declarations and the composed registry	Which permissions this module's own routes may name, checked when Core mounts them
Route validation, overlap rejection, body limits	Deterministic, unambiguous HTTP routing and request bounds
Scoped realtime channels, publishers, and subscriptions	Correct module-local state wiring, permission enforcement, and finite fanout — not process isolation
Display declaration, permission, and exact publication record	Correct role selection and normal authorization for an eligible/running module — not browser isolation
Object.freeze on contexts and services	Prevents accidental mutation; a module can still reach the underlying objects
The ModuleDatabase facade	A typed, ergonomic surface — not a privilege reduction, since execute is arbitrary SQL
Capability registry	Explicit inter-module wiring, not access control
Bounded stop/rollback deadlines (ADR 0020)	The platform stops waiting; module code is not cancelled or terminated

There is no process, container, VM, seccomp/syscall, filesystem, network, PostgreSQL role, schema-permission, table-ACL, row-level-security, tenant, or resource sandbox between a module and Core. A module is not isolated from Core, from other modules, or from the host.

ADR 0021 lets a module declare its own UI entrypoint. That changes nothing about the authority described above. A module that ships UI is exactly as trusted as one that does not: its server entrypoint still runs in the API process with that authority, and declaring entrypoints.ui neither adds nor implies any isolation.

Module UI is trusted browser code, in the host's own realm

ADR 0022 decides the browser-side model that ADR 0021 deliberately left open. Module UI runs in the same browser JavaScript realm as the host shell: no iframe, no sandbox, no cross-origin isolation, no capability confinement. A module's UI can reach the host page, the DOM, window, and any global the browser exposes, exactly like any other script the application loads.

That is a deliberate choice for a first-party, trusted-module platform, and it is consistent rather than lax: a module whose server code already runs in the API process with the API's full PostgreSQL authority is not meaningfully constrained by sandboxing its browser half. Do not describe module UI as sandboxed, isolated, or confined — none of those are true, and no mechanism in this repository implements them.

The contract does leave room for a future sandboxed tier without a redesign: mount(container, context) passes an element and a plain-data context rather than shared object graphs, so a host could implement it against an isolated realm. Nothing does today.

Loading a module UI executes trusted code in the host page

@ekklesia/module-ui-host dynamically imports a module's compiled artifact from a URL and mounts it (ADR 0024). Once imported, that artifact is ordinary same-realm JavaScript: it can reach the DOM, window, and anything else the page can. The loader is not a sandbox. It validates that the artifact is the module the host expected — the right id, the right version, a well-formed default export — and refuses to mount anything else, but that is an integrity check against a stale or mismatched bundle. It is not a judgement about whether a module is safe, and it must never be described as one.

The publication side carries the real obligation, and it now exists (ADR 0025). It honours the rule this section demanded of it: the existence of an artifact on disk is not what makes it servable. A module is publishable only if it is in the validated set the API accepted at startup and its manifest declares entrypoints.ui.

Publishing a module UI artifact exposes one file, not a directory

GET /api/v1/module-ui/<module-id>/<version> serves an installed module's compiled UI artifact. Both segments are lookup keys, not path components: they are matched against a registry Core built from discovered modules, and only an exact match causes the canonical path discovery already resolved and containment-checked to be read. No request value is composed into a filesystem path and the route declares no wildcard segment, so traversal, encoded separators, sibling bundle chunks, package-root files (package.json, .env), and source maps are unreachable — not filtered out, but with no code path that could reach them. @ekklesia/module-ui-build emits a real .map next to every artifact, and it is deliberately not served: the manifest declares the entrypoint and nothing else, and a source map embeds sourcesContent.

The server never executes what it publishes. The route reads bytes and writes bytes — no import, no evaluation, no transformation — so a module UI whose top level throws is served like any other, and ADR 0021's rule that discovery never runs entrypoints.ui is unchanged.

The route requires no authentication, and that is a decision with a stated cost. Retrieving the artifact confers no authority: the bundle carries no credential, the host (not the artifact) supplies the principal and permissions at mount time, and every module API remains behind requirePermission. Requiring a session would also break cross-origin dynamic import(), which sends no cookie. The cost is that an anonymous caller who already knows a module id and its exact installed version can download that module's UI bundle, and thereby learn the module is installed. That is information disclosure, not authority. Unknown module, no declared UI, and wrong version return one identical 404, so the route is not an enumeration oracle — but an operator who needs the bundle itself confidential must keep the API off untrusted networks, exactly as the deployment assumptions below already require.

Trust in a published artifact rests on discovery-time validation plus a request-time read of that exact path. There is no signing, hashing, or provenance verification — Ekklesia has none to verify against — so publication is not evidence that a module is safe. Only installed, reviewed modules may be published or mounted. A module UI that mounts has gained no privilege it did not already have — its server half already runs in the API process with the API's database authority — and server APIs remain the sole authority for authorization regardless of what a browser loaded.

The browser host mounts module UI; it grants nothing

Ekklesia's shell (surfaces/shell) discovers installed module UIs through the resolved GET /api/v1/dashboard/navigation view and mounts each embedded host-neutral descriptor with the generic loader (ADR 0026). Three properties are security-relevant.

The inventory is authenticated, deliberately. Module UI bytes are anonymous because fetching compiled code confers no authority, and that route is carefully not an enumeration oracle. The inventory is that enumeration — it lists which module products an installation runs — so it requires core.modules.ui.read (baseline authenticated): any signed-in user, and nobody else. It carries no filesystem path, package root, or entrypoint.

Permission hints are computed by the server and remain hints. For each listed module the API evaluates that module's own declared permissions against the caller using Core's one authorization evaluator, and returns only the granted ids — never a default of true, never inferred from a client-side role, and never another module's or Core's authorization state. Every module route stays enforced by requirePermission regardless; the test suite proves it by having a UI that was told "denied" call its API anyway and still receive 403.

The host executes trusted module code in its own page and does not pretend otherwise. The loader performs a same-origin dynamic import() — no eval, no new Function, no blob: URL — and the shell owns the container, the loading state, and every error, so a failing module costs its own panel rather than the shell. None of that is containment: once imported, a module UI is ordinary same-realm JavaScript, exactly as described above.

Dashboard authentication stays outside module code

ADR 0034 makes the Dashboard surface — not a module — the owner of login, logout, and session-transition UX. Principal resolution still precedes every protected navigation request and module mount. The public module UI context remains moduleId, scoped API, narrow principal, permission hints, and realtime; it receives no credential, cookie, token, auth endpoint, or sign-out callback.

The browser posts email/password to Better Auth's existing /api/auth/sign-in/email endpoint with credentials included. Better Auth establishes the HttpOnly cookie, but its native success JSON also contains a redundant session token and user object. apps/api therefore normalizes any body-bearing successful 2xx on that exact route to fixed {"ok":true} while preserving the status and Set-Cookie; browser application JavaScript never receives the token and must resolve /api/v1/principal before authenticated rendering. The richer token-bearing native paths /api/auth/get-session, /api/auth/list-sessions, /api/auth/update-session, and /api/auth/change-password are deliberately unavailable behind the same sanitized 404 as an unsupported route. The last path is denied even though password/account management is out of scope: the pinned endpoint may return a new raw session token when revoking other sessions. The form clears the submitted password, suppresses duplicate attempts, uses fixed error messages, and does not log credentials, raw responses, or caught exceptions.

Sign-out calls /api/auth/sign-out and then re-resolves the principal; hiding the shell alone is never treated as invalidation. Leaving authenticated state removes the active module frame, so its existing unmount closes API/realtime work without a module-specific auth event. A 401 from the platform-owned bootstrap contract maps directly to unauthenticated; a platform navigation 403 receives a principal recheck for the principal/navigation expiry race. Module responses are not host session authority: either module 401 or 403 triggers one deduplicated principal revalidation, while the module retains the original response. Only anonymous unmounts the module and shows login; authenticated preserves the session and mounted module. A stale response from an already-unmounted frame is ignored, and network/server failures do not fabricate logout.

The flow remains at the current Dashboard URL and accepts no callback/return target, so this pass adds no open-redirect input. It exposes no signup or recovery link: production signup is prohibited and no email delivery/recovery system exists. The existing cookie stays host-only; exact trusted origins, credentialed CORS, and explicitly enabled Better Auth origin/CSRF checks remain the boundary. Broadening the cookie to a parent domain or inventing a Dashboard hostname would be a separate deployment and threat-model decision.

A display page is authorized; its artifact bytes are not authority

Manifest version 6 binds a display artifact to one permission declared by the same module (ADR 0033). The declaration rejects a public baseline: the current display host requires an ordinary authenticated cookie principal, and public/device identity is not approximated with an anonymous exception. Both the stable /display/<module-id> page and /api/v1/module-displays/<module-id> descriptor evaluate that exact permission through the normal Core evaluator. Client permission hints remain presentation only.

The versioned display artifact is anonymous code just like primary UI code. It is served only from the frozen eligible/running publication registry, by exact module identity and version, and never falls back to primary UI or opens the module directory. Fetching it grants no module HTTP, realtime, storage, or data authority. Disabled and dependency-blocked modules receive no page, descriptor, or artifact route; this is operational exposure control, not sandboxing.

The full-viewport host is a separate same-realm surface, not an iframe or containment boundary. It uses normal cookie authorization, the same scoped API/realtime context, and opaque signed object URLs without logging, proxying, extending, or re-signing them. It does not invoke the browser Fullscreen API. Display inventory, device credentials, public principals, variants, and targeting are deferred rather than silently granted.

Dashboard arrangement is not an access control

Dashboard groups and placements are presentation configuration (ADR 0027). Organizing the Dashboard requires the platform permission core.dashboard.navigation.manage (baseline restricted), and holding it grants no module authority whatsoever: moving a module into a folder changes one presentation row, and every module route stays enforced against its own declared permission exactly as before. Nothing in the navigation configuration is read by discovery, dependency resolution, module startup, or the authorization evaluator.

Navigation is also not a way to hide anything. A module absent from a viewer's navigation is a rendering decision, never a restriction — server authorization remains the only thing that decides what a request may do. Reading navigation requires the same core.modules.ui.read the module UI inventory requires, so it discloses the same installed-module enumeration and nothing more; it carries no filesystem path, package root, or manifest internal.

Disabling a module is an operational control, not a security boundary

A module can be turned off, and that decision survives restarts (ADR 0028): a disabled module is never imported, so its code never runs, it mounts no routes, registers no capabilities, and publishes no UI. That is a real and useful operational property — it is how an operator recovers from a module that misbehaves or breaks startup.

It is not containment. The module's compiled code is still on disk, still trusted, and still carries every authority listed above the moment anything starts it. Enablement is a row in ekklesia_core_module_state; it constrains the platform's own composition, not the module. Anyone who can put a module package on this filesystem, or who holds the database or operating-system access to change that row, decides what runs. Nothing about disabling a module sandboxes, isolates, or reduces the privileges of a module that is enabled.

Changing enablement requires core.modules.lifecycle.manage (baseline restricted) and — for the mutation — an exact trusted Origin and a bounded body. Reading is gated by the same permission because the lifecycle view is the only place a disabled module, a blocked module, and the required-dependency edges between them are visible; core.modules.ui.read deliberately exposes only the mountable set. Neither response carries a filesystem path, package name, manifest path, entrypoint, caught error, or stack — only module ids, capability ids, and fixed reason codes.

Holding the lifecycle permission grants no authority inside any module: every module route stays enforced against that module's own declared permission, and a disabled module's permissions remain registered and grantable precisely so that an enable/disable cycle changes nothing about who holds what.

Ekklesia does not store module secrets, and does not pretend to

A module declares a secret configuration key; the deployment supplies its value, and Ekklesia never persists it (ADR 0029).

This is a deliberate limit, not an oversight. There is no encryption at rest in this repository and no key management — no cipher, no KMS, no keyring. Storing credentials in a PostgreSQL column because one is easy to add would be worse than not offering the feature, and calling such a column a "secret store" would be worse still.

What that buys, structurally rather than by discipline:

• a secret declaration has no default field, so a checked-in default credential is unrepresentable;
• the resolver never reads a secret from storage, so a row planted directly in the database by someone with database access is ignored rather than used;
• the HTTP view has no value field for a secret, so a secret is absent from responses by construction, not filtered by a branch someone could later delete;
• the write API refuses a secret key outright (CONFIGURATION_SECRET_NOT_WRITABLE);
• Doctor prints keys and reasons, never values.

A module reaches its own secrets through config.getSecret("key") and nothing else. There is no getEnv, no arbitrary variable lookup, and no cross-module accessor: the secret source is asked for a module id and a key that module's own manifest declares, so a module cannot read DATABASE_URL, the identity signing secret, or another module's credential.

What this does not claim. A module is still trusted code in the API process (see above), so a malicious module could read process.env directly and obtain anything the process can. Scoped secret delivery is a correctness and portability boundary, exactly like every other module-facing mechanism here — not a sandbox. What it does guarantee is that Ekklesia itself never writes a credential to disk, never serves one over HTTP, and never prints one in diagnostics.

Module configuration is operator input, and is treated as such

Ordinary configuration values are persisted, and are validated against the declaring module's own manifest before anything reads them. A stored value that does not satisfy its declaration blocks the module rather than being coerced, truncated, or silently replaced by a default.

Configuration keys are data, never SQL identifiers — there is no dynamic SQL in this domain — and are rejected unless they match a closed lower-camelCase grammar that also excludes reserved object property names (__proto__, constructor, prototype, ...). Core additionally never indexes a plain object with a module-supplied key; every lookup goes through a Map. Store errors never carry the offending value, because an operator-entered value may be a credential that ended up in the wrong field.

Reading or changing configuration requires core.modules.configuration.manage (baseline restricted), separately from core.modules.lifecycle.manage. Mutations require an exact trusted Origin and a bounded body, like every other Core mutation. Module UI receives no configuration at all in this phase.

Object storage is scoped by binding, and modules never hold credentials

A module declares a logical bucket; the host resolves it to a physical bucket on an S3-compatible service and hands the module a facade scoped to exactly that (ADR 0030).

What that gives, structurally rather than by discipline:

• No credential reaches a module. The endpoint, region, access key, and secret key live in the host's validated configuration and reach Core's provider only. ModuleStorage has no accessor that could return any of them, and none appears in any error, diagnostic, or API response.
• No module can open another module's bucket. The facade closes over exactly the bindings that module's manifest declared. Knowing another module's bucket name, module id, or physical bucket name buys nothing, because none of those is an input to anything — an undeclared name is simply not a key in the map.
• No module chooses a physical bucket or an endpoint. Both come from host configuration and the deterministic binding, never from module input, so a module cannot aim the platform's S3 client at a server of its choosing.
• Two modules declaring the same logical name are isolated. Physical names are derived from module id and bucket id with a separator that cannot occur inside either, plus a digest over the full identity — so assets in two modules is two namespaces, not one.
• Object keys cannot escape a bucket, because the bucket never comes from the key.
• Nothing deletes a bucket. There is no such operation to call, so disabling or removing a module cannot take data with it.
• Provider errors are translated, never forwarded. No endpoint, request id, bucket name, or XML body survives into a ModuleStorageError a module might log or return.

Endpoints must be absolute http/https, must not embed credentials, and must use https in production — the same standard the database transport holds. Credentials are never persisted in PostgreSQL and never routed through module configuration, which has no encryption at rest to offer them (ADR 0029).

What this does not claim. A module is still trusted code in the API process, so a malicious module could read process.env directly and obtain the provider credentials that way. Scoped storage is a correctness and portability boundary like every other module-facing mechanism here — not a sandbox. What it does guarantee is that Ekklesia never hands a module another module's data, never gives module UI or a browser a credential, and never prints one in diagnostics.

Delivery URLs are bearer capabilities, and are treated as secrets

A module can ask a bucket for a temporary URL that lets a browser fetch one object directly (ADR 0031). Whoever holds that URL can read that object until it expires, with no further check of who they are.

• Authorization happens before issuance, not inside the URL. A module's route authorizes the request and only then asks for a URL. The storage contract has no notion of a principal and offers no hook that would let it make a permission decision; it bounds reach, not who.
• Lifetimes are bounded and cannot be waived. One minute at the shortest, six hours at the longest, fifteen minutes by default. Out-of-range requests are refused rather than clamped, so "expires forever" is unreachable rather than merely discouraged.
• One object, one bucket. The signature covers the URL's own path, so editing the key or the bucket in a delivery URL yields a rejection rather than a different object — including another module's object.
• Never logged, never printed. A complete delivery URL is treated exactly like a token: it is not logged, and Doctor never prints one. Where a URL must be identified in a log, identify it by module id, logical bucket id, key, and expiry — never by its query parameters.
• Reads only. There are no signed write or delete URLs. Uploads go through a module route where the module can validate what it accepts.
• Never canonical state. Modules persist logical object keys and generate URLs on demand. A stored URL is a stored credential with an expiry date in it.

What a browser sees. A delivery URL reveals the storage origin, the physical bucket name, the object key, and signing parameters. Physical bucket names are implementation metadata, not secrets — nothing is authorized by knowing one, since the bucket is not publicly readable and a tampered URL is rejected. The guarantee is that module code cannot reach those details, not that a browser cannot see the URL it is fetching.

Buckets stay private. Direct delivery deliberately does not work by making buckets anonymous; an unsigned request for the same object is refused, and an integration test asserts it so that a future change cannot "fix" delivery by opening a bucket up.

Realtime is permission-gated state delivery, not a trust boundary

A module may declare a local realtime channel protected by one of its own manifest permissions. Core closes both the server publisher and browser subscription over that module id: neither API accepts a caller-supplied module namespace, global topic, wildcard, broker address, origin, URL, permission, or credential. This prevents accidental cross-module wiring by a cooperating module. It does not sandbox hostile installed code; trusted same-process backend code could bypass the facade, and trusted same-realm UI could call browser globals directly.

Ekklesia's SSE endpoint resolves the ordinary session cookie and evaluates the channel's fixed permission before allocating a subscriber. There is no query-string token and no second realtime authentication path. A stream is closed after five minutes so native EventSource reconnects and session, grant-expiry, revocation, and baseline policy are evaluated again; authorization is not continuously queried between those boundaries. Disabled and dependency-blocked modules have no stream route at all. Public or device/display identity remains deliberately unsolved, so no channel is made anonymous merely to support a future kiosk.

Fanout is finite: 16 channels per module, 100 subscribers per channel, 64 KiB of validated serialized JSON per publication, one latest snapshot per channel, and one coalescing pending slot per client. A slow browser cannot block a publisher or create an unbounded queue. The endpoint rejects implicit HEAD before allocation, disconnect/cancel closes its Core subscription, and server shutdown closes streams before finite HTTP drain. Each scoped publisher becomes inert immediately before its own module's stop hook.

Core never adds configuration, secret values, database values, storage credentials, or delivery URLs to a realtime document. It transports only what trusted module code explicitly publishes. A module must therefore treat realtime like any other authorized response: include only data every principal holding the channel permission may receive. If it intentionally includes a signed delivery URL, that URL remains a bearer capability and is forwarded byte-for-byte; fixed transport errors never reflect payloads, URLs, permissions, runtime exceptions, paths, or stacks.

Client-side permission checks are not a security boundary

A host may tell a module UI what permissions it believes the viewer holds (ModuleUiPermissions.has), so the UI can hide an action or disable a control. This is presentation only. Server-side authorization remains the sole authority: every module route is enforced by requirePermission against the composed platform permission registry, and that enforcement neither knows nor cares what a browser decided. Hiding a control is a usability improvement, never an access control. Treat any claim that a UI check protects anything as a bug.

What this platform must not claim

Ekklesia today has none of the following, and no document, README, or marketing surface may imply otherwise:

• module signing, provenance attestation, or verified publishers;
• a marketplace, registry, or review process for third-party modules;
• sandboxed or hot-installed modules;
• per-module database roles, schemas, or credentials;
• tenant isolation;
• runtime resource limits (CPU, memory, file descriptors, connections) per module.

Operator rule

Only install modules whose source, provenance, and build output you have reviewed and whose authors you trust with your production server and database. Treat a module the way you would treat a direct commit to apps/api: read the code, verify what artifact was built from it, pin it, and re-review on upgrade. Do not install a module because a manifest looks well-formed — every validation Ekklesia performs on a manifest is satisfied trivially by hostile code.

Installing, removing, or editing a module requires an API restart; there is no hot install path, and none should be added while this model holds.

What would have to change before accepting untrusted modules

Accepting third-party modules that have not been reviewed is an architectural change, not a configuration change. At minimum it would require:

• process or container isolation per module, with the API as a supervisor;
• capability-based RPC across that boundary instead of in-process object passing;
• a separate PostgreSQL role and schema per module, with no shared superuser-equivalent pool;
• restricted filesystem and network access per module;
• CPU/memory/connection limits and enforced timeouts that can actually terminate work;
• signed, verifiable module provenance and a defined review/revocation process.

Until that exists, the trusted-code model above is the security model.

Current deployment state

As of this branch, Ekklesia is not deployed. There is no production API instance, no reverse proxy, no public listener, and no deployment automation of any kind in this repository — no deploy script, no CI deployment step, no container publish, no orchestration manifest. No .env has ever been committed; only .env.example.

Two production defaults are relevant but are not by themselves a deployment guarantee:

• apps/api defaults its listen address to loopback (127.0.0.1), so it is not reachable off-host unless an operator explicitly changes it;
• production configuration refuses to enable public signup at all (PUBLIC_SIGNUP_UNSUPPORTED_IN_PRODUCTION).

A loopback default is not a firewall, and a config default is not a verified boundary.

Launch checklist — each item must be proven against the real deployment before public exposure

Until every one of these is verified on the actual hosts, the deployment is not launch-ready. None of them can be satisfied by reading this repository.

This checklist gates a public launch. It does not gate development: Surfaces, modules, and Core work all proceed against the local development infrastructure while every item below is still outstanding.

1. The reverse proxy serves the built Dashboard assets and /api on the intended origin, or an explicitly split origin is covered by the exact trusted-origin/CORS configuration. The repository currently supplies neither deployment.
2. The origin port is unreachable from the public Internet.
3. The origin port is also unreachable from any untrusted network/VLAN — only the intended private proxy path connects. Security must not depend on an unpublished DNS name or origin IP.
4. The proxy overwrites (never appends to, never passes through) the client-IP header Ekklesia is configured to trust.
5. Rotating a caller-supplied Forwarded, X-Forwarded-For, CF-Connecting-IP, X-Real-IP, or the platform's own internal sanitized header cannot rotate the authentication rate-limit bucket.
6. The actual immediate proxy peer is in Ekklesia's explicit trusted-proxy set, and an untrusted direct peer's forwarded header is ignored.
7. Proxy logs do not record cookies, authorization values, request bodies, or raw forwarding chains.
8. PostgreSQL is reachable only from the API host, over TLS, with the certificate and hostname verification Ekklesia already requires.
9. The deployed login/logout flow preserves the host-only HttpOnly cookie, returns fixed {"ok":true} rather than a token on successful sign-in, keeps the four token-bearing native session/password paths unavailable, and accepts no external/protocol-relative post-login destination.
10. The installation has a supported, audited way to create its first production identity before consuming the single-use platform-owner bootstrap. This repository does not provide that way yet.

The initial-owner command is trusted local tooling

A fresh installation needs a first administrator, and public registration is disabled everywhere and prohibited in production. pnpm identity:create-initial-owner fills that gap (ADR 0035). What makes it safe is where it can be invoked, not a weaker policy:

• It is not reachable from a browser. No /signup, /register, or /setup route, no unauthenticated bootstrap endpoint, no temporary setup route, and no setup token. It serves no HTTP route and nothing in apps/api imports it. Its authority is already having the database credentials.
• Public signup stays disabled. The command constructs its own in-process identity instance rather than relaxing the server's posture. A test asserts that a freshly bootstrapped deployment still refuses POST /api/auth/sign-up/email.
• The password never lands anywhere durable. Prompted invisibly or read from standard input; --password is refused rather than ignored, because an argument is visible in shell history and in the process list. No environment variable is read for it and none is in .env.example, so it cannot become permanent deployment configuration. It is never printed, logged, or placed in an error.
• It writes no password hash of its own. Hashing, salting, normalization, and the 8–128 bound are the identity system's, applied through the same sign-up path a browser uses — so a CLI-created account can never diverge from a browser-created one.
• It cannot become a standing superuser factory. Ownership bootstrap is permanently single-use and this command consumes the same sentinel; there is no --force, reset, or override. A second run creates no owner, changes no password, and creates no stray identity.
• It never takes over an account. An existing usable identity is adopted — granted ownership with its password untouched — and reported as an adoption. A password reset is never performed. An identity that has no password at all is refused rather than made an owner nobody can sign in as, which would consume the single use and leave the installation unusable.
• Races cannot mint two owners. Whole invocations are serialized by an advisory lock, on top of the grant's own locked, single-use transaction.
• Errors stay sanitized. No SQL, connection string, driver detail, Better Auth response body, or cause reaches the operator's terminal — only a stable code and a message describing what is still true of the installation.

It deliberately does not solve creating additional users or owners. That is user administration, which does not exist yet.

A display device is a principal, not a person and not a shortcut

An unattended screen has its own identity, paired by an administrator and revocable by one (ADR 0036). What makes that safe is what it is not allowed to be:

• Not a user. No device row exists in the identity tables and no device has an email or a password. A device satisfies the authenticated baseline never, so every route that settles for "somebody is signed in" stays closed to a television.
• Not a bypass. Device authority is decided by the same createAuthorizationEvaluator as everyone else's, with the same deny-by-default. There is no device branch that returns allowed before consulting an explicit permission, and no device is ever a platform owner.
• Not broadly granted. Approval grants exactly the one display permission the host derived from the module's own validated display declaration. A browser cannot ask for a permission of its choosing, and a device paired for one display has no authority over another.
• Not a Dashboard login. /api/v1/principal reports a device as anonymous, and the shell tests for === "authenticated" rather than "not anonymous". A device cookie cannot open the Dashboard.
• Not the pairing code. The six-digit code is displayed on a wall and is treated as public. It identifies a request to an administrator; it never yields a credential. Collecting the credential additionally requires the HttpOnly claim cookie only the requesting browser holds, so reading a code off a screen is worth nothing.
• Not stored in a usable form. The server keeps SHA-256 of the credential. The raw value exists only in the Set-Cookie that issues it and in the device's own cookie jar; it is never logged, put in a query string, returned in JSON, or written to localStorage. The cookie is HttpOnly, so the module display code running in that very page cannot read it.
• Not revocable only at the browser. Revocation is a server-side column checked on every principal resolution. A revoked screen keeps its cookie and stops working; re-pairing creates a new identity, so an old credential can never be reactivated.

Approval, listing, and revocation require the restricted core.devices.manage permission and an exact trusted Origin, exactly like every other Core mutation. A device cannot approve a pairing — including its own.

Bounded, not instantaneous. A revoked device fails its next request and its next realtime connection immediately, but an already-open SSE stream is not torn down at that moment: realtime's five-minute forced reconnect is the upper bound on how long a just-revoked screen can keep receiving a channel. That window is stated rather than described as instant.

Outbound email is host-owned, and cannot be turned into a relay

Ekklesia sends transactional email through a host-configured SMTP transport (ADR 0037). What keeps it from becoming a liability:

• No feature can choose a sender. A message has no from field at all; the sender is host configuration. Feature-chosen senders are an impersonation primitive and a deliverability catastrophe at the same time.
• No HTTP route can send. There is deliberately no POST /api/v1/send-email and no route that touches the mail provider — an authenticated relay endpoint is an open relay with extra steps. A test asserts no route file even imports the mail module.
• No module can send. ModuleRuntimeServices carries no mail service, and a test asserts the module SDKs have no way to. Browser code has none either: the SMTP dependency exists only in Core, which a surface cannot import.
• Header injection is refused, not repaired. Control characters in addresses, display names, subjects, and reply-to values are rejected. The first implementation trimmed before checking and silently accepted a trailing carriage return; a test caught it and the check now runs on the raw value.
• Bounded everything. Recipients (10), subject (200), text (64 KiB), HTML (256 KiB), and connection, greeting, and socket timeouts are all explicit. A silent server returns a structured error rather than hanging a request.
• No downgrade. Security modes are named (implicit-tls, starttls, plaintext) rather than inferred from a boolean and a port. starttls requires the upgrade, so a server that stops offering it — or an attacker who strips it — fails the send instead of continuing in the clear. Production refuses plaintext. Certificate verification is always on and there is no setting that disables it.
• The password is a deployment secret. Never in PostgreSQL, never in module configuration, never in an API response, never in Doctor output, never in an error, and no value in .env.example.
• Nothing is logged. The transport logs nothing at all. Transactional mail carries verification and reset links, which are exactly the credentials those flows depend on.
• No blind retry. One bounded attempt. A failure after the message data has been sent is ambiguous, and retrying it would send someone several copies of the same reset email.

Deliverability — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and the relay's own authorization policy — is a deployment responsibility this repository cannot verify, and Doctor says so rather than implying a successful connection means mail arrives.

Rate limiting is per-process today

Better Auth's authentication rate limiter is in-memory and per API process. That is acceptable only while both of the following hold, which is the current state:

• production public signup is disabled (and cannot be enabled — see above); and
• exactly one API instance serves traffic.

If either changes — public signup is enabled, or a second instance is added — a durable shared or edge rate limiter becomes mandatory, and it must be proven that its counters are shared across instances, survive process restart, and cannot be re-bucketed by a spoofed client-IP header. Ekklesia does not ship one. Do not describe the current limiter as distributed throttling. Its production sign-in/sign-up-prefixed rule is three attempts per ten seconds, and the server-owned client address prevents a spoofed forwarding header from selecting a fresh bucket. Those facts still do not make counters durable across restart or sufficient across replicas; the public Dashboard login must be assessed with the actual edge/proxy controls before launch.

Continuous integration boundary

CI runs on self-hosted Gitea Actions runners. The inventoried server is Gitea 1.24.2, and that version determines which parts of the workflow are real guarantees and which are not.

The current operating rule: trusted code only

This CI installation is a trusted-code-only boundary. Only code controlled and reviewed by trusted repository collaborators may execute on the self-hosted runner. An unknown or untrusted pull request must not execute on it automatically — a maintainer reviews the diff, including any change to the workflow itself, before it runs.

This is an operating rule, not an enforced technical control, and it is the reason the rest of this section is safe today. Everything below describes what the repository can and cannot prove about that runner; none of it is a substitute for the rule.

What is true of the repository today

These are properties of files in this repository, enforced by the action or the package manager, independent of server version:

• every action reference is pinned by a full immutable commit SHA;
• dependencies install with pnpm install --frozen-lockfile;
• there is no pull_request_target workflow;
• no repository, organization, or instance secret is referenced anywhere in the workflow;
• every checkout step sets persist-credentials: false;
• the workflow declares permissions: contents: read.

What persist-credentials: false actually proves

It proves exactly one thing: actions/checkout does not write its credential into .git/config, so a later step in the same job cannot read or reuse it from there.

It does not remove the short-lived GITEA_TOKEN from the job environment, and it does not reduce that token's server-side authority. A step that wants the token can still read it.

What Gitea 1.24 ignores — so the branch cannot claim it

Per the official comparison for this version (https://docs.gitea.com/1.24/usage/actions/comparison), Gitea 1.24's unsupported workflow syntax includes permissions and jobs.<job_id>.permissions, concurrency, and jobs.<job_id>.timeout-minutes. On this server those declarations are inert. Therefore:

• The workflow's permissions: contents: read does not restrict the job token. This branch cannot claim the GITEA_TOKEN is read-only, because nothing in workflow YAML makes it so on 1.24. Job-token permission controls, repository/owner defaults, and server-side maximum-permission clamping arrive in the 1.26 feature line (https://docs.gitea.com/1.26/usage/actions/token-permissions).
• concurrency and timeout-minutes are not bounded-execution guarantees here. Cancellation, timeout, and teardown must be enforced by a trusted provisioner and reaper outside the workflow.

The declarations are kept deliberately: they are already correct for a supported Gitea release and for GitHub Actions, and keeping them means the upgrade does not require re-deriving the intent. They are documented as ignored, not removed.

Runner topology is not verified

The runner topology is not verified in this repository and is not documented here as though it were. A pull request can edit runs-on and select any runner label its repository can reach, so a workflow file cannot be the boundary. Whether untrusted pull-request jobs execute on a disposable guest, and whether any runner reachable from this repository holds deployment authority or a host Docker socket, must be established against the actual Gitea instance and runner hosts. Until that evidence exists, treat pull-request CI as executing with whatever authority the runner host actually grants.

Requirements before executing untrusted contributions

These five items are the prerequisites for relaxing the trusted-code-only rule above — that is, for letting code this project has not reviewed execute on this Gitea installation. They are backlog requirements for that specific future capability. They do not block Phase 6 Surface work, and they are not conditions on merging trusted, reviewed work.

None of them can be satisfied by editing this repository; each requires access to the Gitea server and runner hosts, and each must be proven there.

1. Upgrade Gitea to a reviewed supported release with job-token permission controls — at least the 1.26 feature line. Select the actual release during infrastructure work, after backup and compatibility review; do not pin a version from this document.
2. Configure repository and owner defaults, and the server-side maximum permission, so workflow code cannot request more than read-only repository access.
3. Prove against the real server that the job's GITEA_TOKEN cannot push code, create or update releases, packages, issues, or pull requests, change Actions configuration, or reach another private repository.
4. Enforce job timeout, cancellation, concurrency, and teardown in the trusted provisioner/reaper rather than relying on the ignored workflow keys above.
5. Complete a disposable-guest runner isolation proof: one throwaway guest per job, torn down by a trusted reaper outside workflow YAML, holding no deployment credential, registration token, or reusable key.

Moving future public contribution workflows to a service that provides isolated hosted runners — for example GitHub — is an accepted alternative to satisfying items 1–5 on this installation.