Files
lmxopcua/docs
Joseph Doherty 00aa486677 feat(security): enforce node ACLs on read, browse and subscribe (#520 stage 6)
Completes data-plane enforcement behind Security:Acl:Enabled. Read (every
attribute, not just Value), Browse, TranslateBrowsePath, CreateMonitoredItems,
SubscribeToEvents and SetMonitoringMode now consult scoped NodeAcl grants.
With the flag off nothing changes.

Four things went beyond the stage as written, each because leaving it out
would have made the feature look like it worked:

- Browse needed ancestor visibility. The trie inherits downward, and a client
  reaches a deep node by browsing the nodes above it, so without this every
  grant narrower than the cluster was authored, shipped and unreachable. It is
  a separate non-inheriting marker, NOT a synthesized Browse grant on each
  ancestor: the additive downward walk would carry such a grant from Plant onto
  Plant/Siemens/dev9 and every other sibling subtree. Pinned by a test that
  goes through the evaluator — probing the trie helper directly passes against
  the broken design, because a sibling is absent from the trie either way.

- Revocation had to reach LIVE subscriptions. Every other operation re-asks per
  request; a subscription is authorized once and then streams, and streaming is
  how machine consumers actually read this server — so stopping only the
  re-asking operations would have made revocation close to cosmetic.
  IDataPlaneAuthoritySource gained a Changed event.

  A denied item is queued BadUserAccessDenied and then DETACHED from its
  MonitoredNode2 fan-out, not set MonitoringMode.Disabled. Disabling discards
  the item's queued notifications, so the client is silenced without ever being
  told why. The over-the-wire test caught this; the unit-level path reports the
  item as stood down either way. Detaching is also reversible, so a restored
  grant resumes the feed with no client action.

- The decision cache holds the grant WALK, not the decision. Grants and the
  trie are fixed for a generation; a key's ExpiresUtc passes with the clock, so
  caching the whole decision would let an expired key keep working until the
  next deploy — the stage-5 open-session hole in a subtler form.

- TranslateBrowsePath is gated, without which browse filtering is decorative: a
  client refused a browse asks TranslateBrowsePathsToNodeIds for the same path.

Found en route: UserAuthorizationState's staleness ceiling couples two clocks.
MembershipResolvedUtc is stamped from DataPlaneAuthorizer's TimeProvider while
IsStale is evaluated against TriePermissionEvaluator's; they are the same
instance in production and diverge the moment anything injects a test clock, at
which point the evaluator denies EVERYTHING with a verdict indistinguishable
from "no grant matched". Stage 5's claim that these predicates cannot fire was
accidentally true; they are now disabled explicitly.

Also fixed: ContinuationPoint.NodeToBrowse is the manager HANDLE, not a
NodeState. The declared type is object, so the wrong cast compiled cleanly and
silently yielded null — skipping the browse source gate entirely.

Falsified: disabling the transit marking reddens exactly the three tests that
assert transit works; implementing transit as an ancestor grant reddens the
sibling-leak test; skipping the fan-out detach reddens the revocation test.
Full solution suite green.

The stage 8 live gate has NOT run yet.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015p7wGqy3YpZNCpDzTpGMKo
2026-08-01 09:22:12 -04:00
..

OtOpcUa documentation

Two tiers of documentation live here:

  • Current reference at the top level (docs/*.md) — describes what's shipped today. Start here for operator + integrator reference.
  • Implementation history + design notes at docs/v2/*.md — the authoritative plan + decision log the current reference is built from. Start here when you need the why behind an architectural choice, or when a top-level doc says "see plan.md § X".

The project was originally called LmxOpcUa (a single-driver Galaxy/MXAccess OPC UA server) and has since become OtOpcUa, a multi-driver OPC UA server platform. Any lingering LmxOpcUa-string in a path you see in docs is a deliberate residual (executable name lmxopcua-cli, client PKI folder {LocalAppData}/LmxOpcUaClient/) — fixing those requires migration shims + is tracked as follow-ups.

Platform overview

v2 (2026-05-26): the separate OtOpcUa.Server + OtOpcUa.Admin services fused into a single role-gated OtOpcUa.Host binary, joined by an Akka.NET cluster. See v2 design for the architectural decision.

  • Core owns shared abstractions (driver capability contracts, scripting, virtual tags, alarm historian).
  • Drivers plug in via capability interfaces in ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.Core.Abstractions: IDriver, IReadable, IWritable, ITagDiscovery, ISubscribable, IHostConnectivityProbe, IAlarmSource, IHistoryProvider, IPerCallHostResolver. Each driver opts into whichever it supports.
  • Host (src/Server/ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.Host) is the single fused binary (.NET 10, AnyCPU). OTOPCUA_ROLES env decides what to mount: admin (Blazor + control-plane singletons), driver (OPC UA endpoint + per-node actors), or both. See ServiceHosting.md.
  • Cluster + ControlPlane + Runtime + AdminUI + Security sit between Core and Host. The cluster glues per-node actors into one logical fleet; the control-plane singletons (deploy coordinator, audit writer, redundancy state) live on the admin role-leader. See Redundancy.md.
  • The Galaxy driver still reaches MXAccess via gRPC to a separately-installed mxaccessgw sidecar (sibling repo).

Where to find what

Architecture + data-path reference

Doc Covers
OpcUaServer.md Top-level server architecture — Core, driver dispatch, Config DB, generations
AddressSpace.md GenericDriverNodeManager + ITagDiscovery + IAddressSpaceBuilder
ReadWriteOperations.md OPC UA Read/Write → CapabilityInvoker → IReadable/IWritable
DriverLifecycle.md Server-side driver lifecycle + infrastructure contracts (IDriverFactory, IDriverProbe, IDriverHealthPublisher, IDriverConfigEditor, IHistorianDataSource) + the Commons library
Subscriptions.md Monitored items → ISubscribable + per-driver subscription refcount (v1 archive)
AlarmTracking.md IAlarmSource + AlarmSurfaceInvoker + OPC UA alarm conditions — native Galaxy alarms end-to-end (live)
AlarmTracking.md Original alarm-tracking write-up (v1 archive)
AlarmHistorian.md Core.AlarmHistorian store-and-forward sink — LocalDbStoreAndForwardSink, the replicated alarm_sf_events buffer + Primary-only drain, IAlarmHistorianWriter, dead-letter/retry/eviction
DataTypeMapping.md Per-driver DriverAttributeInfo → OPC UA variable types (v1 archive — live mapping is in src/Drivers/ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.Driver.Galaxy/Browse/DataTypeMap.cs)
IncrementalSync.md Address-space rebuild on redeploy + sp_ComputeGenerationDiff
HistoricalDataAccess.md IHistoryProvider as a per-driver optional capability (v1 archive)
VirtualTags.md Core.Scripting + Core.VirtualTags — Roslyn script sandbox, engine, dispatch alongside driver tags
ScriptEditor.md Monaco script editor — Roslyn-backed IntelliSense (completions, diagnostics, hover, tag-path) for C# virtual-tag scripts; AdminUI/ScriptAnalysis/ backend
ScriptedAlarms.md Core.ScriptedAlarms — script-predicate IAlarmSource + Part 9 state machine

One Core subsystem is shipped without a dedicated top-level doc; see the section in the linked doc:

Project See
Analyzers (Roslyn OTOPCUA0001) security.md § OTOPCUA0001 Analyzer

Drivers

Doc Covers
drivers/README.md Index of the eight shipped drivers + capability matrix
drivers/Galaxy.md Galaxy driver — in-process gRPC client to the mxaccessgw sidecar
v1/drivers/Galaxy-Repository.md Galaxy-specific discovery via the ZB SQL database (v1 archive — the gateway owns this path now)

For Modbus / S7 / AB CIP / AB Legacy / TwinCAT / FOCAS / OPC UA Client specifics, see v2/driver-specs.md.

Operational

Doc Covers
Configuration.md Live appsettings + environment-variable reference (current state)
Configuration.md appsettings bootstrap + Config DB + Admin UI draft/publish (v1 archive — OTOPCUA_GALAXY_* env vars now live in mxaccessgw config)
Uns.md The global /uns master tree — manage Area/Line/Equipment/Tag/VirtualTag fleet-wide; replaces the per-cluster UNS/Equipment/Tags tabs
security.md Transport security profiles, LDAP auth, ACL trie, role grants, OTOPCUA0001 analyzer
Redundancy.md RedundancyStateActor (cluster-scoped singleton), ServiceLevelCalculator, IRedundancyRoleView, per-cluster meshes, Prometheus metrics
Reservations.md Fleet-wide ZTag / SAPID external-ID reservations — publish-time claim, release flow
ServiceHosting.md Single fused OtOpcUa.Host binary install/uninstall with OTOPCUA_ROLES gating; the historian backend is the external HistorianGateway
StatusDashboard.md Pointer — superseded by v2/admin-ui.md

Client tooling

Doc Covers
Client.CLI.md otopcua-cli — OPC UA command-line client
Client.UI.md Avalonia desktop client
DriverClis.md Driver test-client CLIs — index + shared commands
Driver.Modbus.Cli.md otopcua-modbus-cli — Modbus-TCP
Driver.AbCip.Cli.md otopcua-abcip-cli — ControlLogix / CompactLogix / Micro800 / GuardLogix
Driver.AbLegacy.Cli.md otopcua-ablegacy-cli — SLC / MicroLogix / PLC-5 (PCCC)
Driver.S7.Cli.md otopcua-s7-cli — Siemens S7-300 / S7-400 / S7-1200 / S7-1500
Driver.TwinCAT.Cli.md otopcua-twincat-cli — Beckhoff TwinCAT 2/3 ADS
Driver.FOCAS.Cli.md otopcua-focas-cli — Fanuc FOCAS/2 CNC

Requirements

Doc Covers
reqs/HighLevelReqs.md HLRs — numbered system-level requirements
reqs/OpcUaServerReqs.md OPC UA server-layer reqs
v1/reqs/ServiceHostReqs.md Per-process hosting reqs (v1 archive — only OtOpcUa server hosting remains in scope post-PR-7.2)
reqs/ClientRequirements.md Client CLI + UI reqs
v1/reqs/GalaxyRepositoryReqs.md Galaxy-scoped repository reqs (v1 archive — owned by mxaccessgw today)
v1/reqs/MxAccessClientReqs.md Galaxy-scoped MXAccess reqs (v1 archive — owned by mxaccessgw today)
reqs/StatusDashboardReqs.md Pointer — superseded by Admin UI

Implementation history (docs/v2/)

Design decisions + phase plans + execution notes. Load-bearing cross-references from the top-level docs:

v1 archive

The v1 in-process MXAccess architecture (Galaxy.Host + Galaxy.Proxy + Galaxy.Shared, .NET 4.8 x86 COM, the OtOpcUaGalaxyHost Windows service) was retired in PR 7.2 (2026-04-30, commit ae7106d). Docs that described that shape are kept under v1/ as historical record — see v1/README.md for the index.