Rooted is not the same as safe, and the gap between the two cost a production
host every one of its API keys on 2026-08-09.
MxGateway:Authentication:SqlitePath was set to an absolute path inside the
directory the upgrade procedure renames to Server.bak.*. That passes the
existing rooted check cleanly. The deploy renamed the directory away, the store
went with it, and the gateway created a fresh empty one at the same path — no
error, no log line. No gRPC consumer could authenticate for two days. The deploy
itself was correct: the binaries were the point of the rename and the store was
collateral.
GatewayConfigPathRules gains AddIfUnderContentRoot, applied to the auth store
and the Galaxy snapshot. Both are written by the running process and both are
lost the same way. The rule compares resolved full paths and requires a
directory-separator boundary, so a sibling directory whose name merely starts
with the content root's ("/srv/app-data" against "/srv/app") is not treated as
inside it — on a fail-closed startup rule, that false positive would be a
gateway that refuses to boot on a legitimate path. Case sensitivity follows the
running OS rather than assuming case-insensitivity everywhere, which would
reject /srv/App as under /srv/app on Linux where they are different directories.
The rule is not exempted in Development. An environment-conditional guard is
never exercised where the mistake is made, and what failed in production was a
config that looked fine.
Secrets:SqlitePath is the same defect one layer down: it shipped as a bare
relative "mxgateway-secrets.db", which is how a stray database landed in
src/…Server/ and tripped the repository's tree-hygiene test. It is bound by the
shared ZB.MOM.WW.Secrets package, so appsettings.json now ships no value and the
default is computed from CommonApplicationData in code — the same mechanism
SEC-33 already used for the Galaxy snapshot, ten lines away, for the same reason.
Setting a default for an unset key is deliberately not the same act as
relocating a value someone configured, which these rules still refuse to do.
Note the migration edge this creates: a host relying on the old repo default now
looks somewhere new, finds nothing, and creates an empty store — this bug
re-introduced by its own fix. Deployed hosts are safe because they set the path
explicitly, in appsettings copied forward or in the service environment. The
latter is the more robust of the two, since it cannot be lost by a missed
preserve step.
SEC-33: make rooting host-meaningful and stop shipping foreign-platform literals.
- Delete IsRootedForAnyPlatform; AddIfNotRooted now uses Path.IsPathRooted (current OS).
- Promote AddIfNotRooted/AddIfInvalidPath to shared GatewayConfigPathRules so the new
Galaxy validator reuses them and the two validators cannot drift.
- Remove Authentication:SqlitePath and Galaxy:SnapshotCachePath Windows literals from
appsettings.json; the CommonApplicationData-derived code defaults take over. The
Galaxy default is seeded as a configuration value before AddZbGalaxyRepository
(SnapshotCachePath is init-only, so a PostConfigure mutation cannot compile).
- New GalaxyRepositoryOptionsValidator (ValidateOnStart) enforces a valid, host-rooted
SnapshotCachePath when PersistSnapshot is true.
- Root-cause the stray junk-named auth DB: host start eagerly builds
AuthSqliteConnectionFactory; under the non-rooted Windows literal on macOS SQLite
wrote it relative to the test bin CWD. The three real-host-start tests now pin
SqlitePath to a temp path.
SEC-34: verification cache Invalidate-vs-in-flight-repopulation race closed with a
per-key generation counter (bump-before-evict, snapshot-then-recheck). The expiry
cap (window 2) takes the documented fallback: the library verification identity
carries no ExpiresUtc, so the cache cannot cap at the key's expiry (donor-library ask).
GWC-24 rider: cap MxGateway:Events:QueueCapacity at int.MaxValue/2 so the derived
checked(2 * EventChannelCapacity) in WorkerClient cannot overflow at session creation.
SEC-35 (doc-only): note IsProduction() env-name semantics in GatewayConfiguration.md.
Docs updated same commit (GatewayConfiguration.md, Authentication.md) and tracking
registers/change-log flipped (00-tracking.md, 40-security-dashboard.md).
Joseph Doherty