Two halves of one rule: the address someone typed is theirs to keep, and it must be
the one that gets them back in.
A plus-tagged or dotted Gmail is often a deliberate choice -- registering as
me+siftlode@gmail.com is how you find out later which site leaked your address. The
Google callback overwrote it with the account's primary, which can never contain a
'+', so the tag vanished on the first Google sign-in and, because sign-in matched the
stored address, took their chosen address with it. The rewrite line is older than
this epic, but S3 made it reachable here by matching adoption across spellings. It
now runs only when the mailbox GENUINELY changed, and lives in a named helper rather
than inline, so the rule has one home.
The three lookups that resolve a typed address -- password login, password reset,
verify resend -- go through find_user_by_email: exact spelling first, then the unique
canonical candidate, and None when several accounts share a mailbox rather than
guessing which one a password should open. Reset and resend previously answered a
different spelling with silence (they reply uniformly by design), which was a dead end
with no way out. Their mail now goes to the address on the account, never the one
typed into the form.
Gmail delivers x.y@, xy@ and xy+tag@ to one inbox; the invite gate only lowercased.
On 2026-09-03 that turned an approved user's Google sign-in into a silent SECOND
access request -- OAuth returns the account's stored primary, which need not be the
spelling they typed -- and left prod with two user rows for one mailbox (ids 13, 14).
The +tag case fails every time: a Google account cannot contain +, so OAuth can only
ever answer with the base address.
Mail still goes to the address AS TYPED; only identity matching uses the canonical
form. utils.canonical_email is the single definition, and a model validator derives
users.email_canonical / invites.email_canonical on every write, so no call site can
forget it. Scope is narrow on purpose: dots are significant on most providers and the
Gmail rule does not hold for Workspace custom domains.
Swept every sibling of the same principle, not just the reported one: is_allowed,
upsert_pending_invite, the Google-callback adoption, _register_account (so no new
duplicate pair can be created), _activate_user_by_email, admin _accounts_for (an
invite backing a live user under another spelling used to look deletable) and
add_invite, plus purge_user, which now erases every canonically-equal invite instead
of leaving one behind that still grants access.
Migration 0079 backfills both columns and indexes them NON-uniquely: prod already
carries canonical duplicates (approved invite pairs since 2026-06-16), and merging
accounts is a judgement call about people's data, not something a migration does on
its own. A test pins the backfill SQL against the Python helper.
The token was only ever consumed inside Welcome.tsx, which App renders ONLY when
there is no session. Opening the emailed link in a browser that already held a
Siftlode session posted nothing, the fragment was then stripped, and the user got
no signal at all -- the link simply did nothing. Incognito worked, which is why it
survived. Confirmation now happens in App, above that branch: signed out the outcome
still drives the auth card's banners, signed in it drives a top-of-app bar.
The entry URL is snapshotted once at import time (lib/entryUrl) instead of per
component, so no future URL writer can strip a token before whoever needs it has
read it -- that ordering race is what broke this in the first place. POST /auth/verify
now names the address it confirmed, which matters when the browser holds a session
for a different account; the same reasoning as password_reset_required already
covers the disclosure.
Also here, from the 2026-09-02 review tail: the dead GET /auth/verify goes (both
senders emit the fragment form, and the last query-token link expired 24h after the
0.78.7 deploy), a spent #verify=/#reset= fragment is cleared while signed in, and
the auth-card banners get role=status. The verifyOkReset copy no longer blames
admin approval, which E9.5 S1 made false.
SEC-10 revoked any password set while an account's email was unverified, on both
the Google-adoption and the admin-approval path. On the approval path that was
redundant: password_login refuses an unverified account before it ever reads
is_active, so approval hands a pre-emptor's password nothing it could use. All the
revoke achieved there was destroying the password a legitimate registrant had just
chosen -- and since the admin normally decides before the user reads their mail,
'your password was cleared for security' was the DEFAULT experience, not an edge
case. The guard stays on the Google-adoption path, where the real owner does attest
ownership.
password_reset_required and the ok_reset banner stay: accounts stripped on prod
before this change have no other way back in.
Two existing tests pinned the old rule, so they are rewritten rather than deleted,
and the SEC-10 recovery pack now builds the revoked state through the surviving
producer.
Two independent bugs made an email+password registration unrecoverable in prod.
The verification link did nothing. urlWithParams/clearParams rebuilt the URL as
pathname+query and dropped the fragment — but the one-time auth tokens ride the
fragment (#verify=/#reset=, SB3), and the providers that mirror nav params
(useUrlMirror in FeedFilters/Playlists/Plex/Channels) sit ABOVE the lazily-loaded
<App> in main.tsx. Their mount effect replaceState'd the token away before the auth
card's chunk had loaded, so the card read an empty hash: the link opened a bare
sign-in page, no request, no banner. Both helpers now carry the fragment over.
The account was then locked out for good. SEC-10 nulls password_hash when an
unverified account is attested (here: admin approval landing before the user could
verify — which the bug above made impossible). That is indistinguishable from a
Google-only account, and reset eligibility keyed off password_hash alone, so no
reset link was ever issued: no password to sign in with, and no way to get one.
users.password_revoked_at records the revocation, reset eligibility honours it, and
setting a password again (reset-confirm or set-password) clears it. An account that
never had a password stays ineligible on purpose — its owner adds one from Settings.
/auth/verify now also answers password_reset_required so the card can say why the
registered password stopped working, instead of leaving the user at the uniform
"Invalid email or password". Telling the holder of a valid verify token leaks
nothing: they have already proved they own the mailbox.
The 0078 migration backfills the stamp for rows carrying the exact lockout signature
(local, non-demo, no password, unverified), so existing victims recover unaided.
Round 5's correctness/security pass came back clean; what was left was text that
said more than the code does.
- The register-path notify comment (and its test) claimed the admin "is still
told". The call fires, but on a no-SMTP instance _send drops it — which is the
open half of the problem, not something this branch fixed. Both now say so.
- The release notes tell admins what to actually do: an account whose address was
whitelisted in advance has no pending request to approve, so the whitelist box
is what activates it. That instruction only existed in the roadmap and in
chores, which the dialog does not render.
- "That one line is the whole production change" now accounts for the test-only
RateLimiter.reset() that also ships.
- The rate-limiter test claimed to pin that blocked attempts are not counted, on
an assertion that held either way. Replaced with one that drives the clock
across the window boundary and fails if hammering extends it.
Round 4 showed the `inv is not None` gate added in b5a1002 removed a signal that
matters: for an address the admin had already approved, that email is their only
notice that someone has now created an account on it — the invite is not pending
so nothing lands in the Access-requests queue either. Suppressing it left the
registrant at "awaiting admin approval" with the admin unaware they existed. The
duplicate it avoided (Request access, then sign up) is mild noise by comparison.
The production change is now one db.commit(), which is all the reported bug ever
needed. Release notes corrected again: a previously-denied address was also
unaffected, the pending-request case never lost its queue entry (only the
account behind it), and the test inventory was missing a guard.
Round 3 of the review killed the reopen from b5a1002: flipping an approved
invite back to pending let an unauthenticated POST /auth/register REVOKE a
standing approval for any whitelisted-but-unclaimed address, which then fails
is_allowed() and locks the real owner out of Google sign-in — the primary way
people get in here. It also re-armed the pre-emption window it was meant to
close, because with no SMTP email_verified is set True and the SEC-10 guard the
design leaned on never fires.
Two attempts at fixing the stranded-account UX in the same change both came back
worse than the wart. What remains is the narrow, real bug: the account was
silently rolled back and is now committed. An admin still binds the approval to
the account, exactly as before this branch. UX-25 in the roadmap records the
follow-up and both dead ends so they are not retried.
Also from round 3: the upsert docstring no longer claims the admin UI cannot
reach these accounts (re-entering the address in the same panel's whitelist box
does, and a test now pins it), the release notes are scoped to what the diff
actually changes with the operator note moved where the dialog renders it, and
RateLimiter has unit tests so reset() is not production code only a fixture
calls.
Replaces the activation added in ea931dc, which round 2 of the review showed was
a real weakening: on a no-SMTP instance it made a standing whitelist entry a
bearer grant — the first anonymous party to register an approved-but-unclaimed
address got an immediately usable account under that identity, with no
attestation, no admin action and no signal anywhere. The verify-time activation
had the same shape one step removed, and neither site ran the SEC-10 preset-
password guard or left an audit trail.
Keep a human in the loop instead. An approval granted before any account existed
was a decision about the ADDRESS, so registration reopens the invite
(upsert_pending_invite gains revive_approved, used only by the register worker).
The request lands in the Access-requests queue, approving it runs
_activate_user_by_email — and with it revoke_preset_password_if_unverified — and
the account activates. One mechanism, already audited, no new grant path, and
the "awaiting admin approval" copy is honest again.
The explicit commit from the previous commit still matters: with an invite
already pending, upsert returns without committing and _issue_token is gated on
SMTP, so a no-SMTP registration was still being rolled back.
Also from round 2: gate the admin notice on a fresh decision (matching the two
other upsert callers) so a retry no longer re-pings every admin, and reset the
module-level rate limiters between tests — the suite pooled every login into one
300s window and was two logins short of failing an unrelated test with a 429.
Follow-up to the commit fix, from the deep-review. Persisting the account was
only half the story: when the admin had approved the address BEFORE the person
registered, the account landed is_active=False against an invite that is no
longer pending — absent from the Access-requests queue, and approve_invite 409s
on an already-decided invite. The sign-up worked and still could not sign in.
Derive activation from is_allowed() at the moment ownership is attested:
- verify_email_confirm activates a pre-approved account when the emailed link is
confirmed (only the mailbox owner can follow it), so SEC-10 stays intact;
- _register_account activates only when there is no SMTP to verify with, where
the admin whitelist is by design the sole gate — the same one add_invite
already activates on.
Tests: the pre-approved no-SMTP case and the verify-activates case are real
regression tests (both fail without this change); guards cover the unknown-email
and denied->pending branches, verification of an unapproved account, and the
first end-to-end coverage of the /auth/register route and its
allow_registration gate. Release notes rewritten — the previous entry miscounted
its regression tests and advertised an email fix this release has no code for.
_register_account() flushed the new User but relied on someone else to commit:
upsert_pending_invite() commits only when it actually writes an invite row, and
_issue_token() runs only when SMTP is enabled. For an email an admin had ALREADY
approved, on an instance where email is unavailable, neither fired — the session
closed and the account was rolled back. The would-be user got the uniform "ok"
and no account, could not sign in, and re-registering was a silent no-op.
Commit explicitly after the invite upsert (a no-op when upsert already committed
the same transaction). Three DB-lane regression tests cover the pre-approved
no-SMTP path (fails without the fix), the unknown-email path that always worked,
and the pre-approved path with SMTP on.
None are referenced by the SPA or tests; the Scheduler dashboard's "run now"
covers every manual trigger. Removed: POST /api/sync/{rss,backfill,enrich}
(+ the now-dead _user_channels helper and three sync.runner imports),
POST /api/tags/recompute (+ its admin_user / run_autotag_all imports), and
GET /auth/me (a lesser duplicate of the canonical /api/me in routes/me.py).
This also retires a latent bug: POST /api/sync/backfill reset backfill_done /
backfill_cursor on already-fully-backfilled channels (tipping them back to
"needs full history") for up to 25 channels per curl. Full lane 365 pass.
request-access / demo / register / verify / verify-resend / password-login /
password-reset(request|confirm) / set-password each took an untyped `payload:
dict` and hand-picked fields with `.get(...)`. Replace with five small BaseModels
(EmailIn, EmailPasswordIn, TokenIn, TokenPasswordIn, SetPasswordIn) so FastAPI
validates the body shape and publishes the schema. Fields are `str | None` to
preserve exact behaviour — a missing/null field still coerces via the existing
`(... or "")`, no stricter 422s. Green under the auth-session suite (7), ruff clean.
Review round on the whole E1 stack (main..HEAD). 6 findings, all low/medium,
none blocking; fixed for a clean gate-green handoff.
- plex/sync (correctness): the un-enriched cast guard compared the stored cast
against THIS listing's length, so a trimmed Plex cast on a not-yet-enriched
row was never applied. Compare against the listing CAP (_LISTING_CAST_CAP=20)
instead: >cap = enriched (keep, survives a watermark reset), <=cap =
listing-sourced (track edits in both directions). +2 regression tests.
- main (security): add X-Frame-Options: DENY as the legacy-browser fallback for
the CSP frame-ancestors clickjacking guard.
- downloads/service (altitude): finalize_if_running now uses a SQLAlchemy 2.0
update() construct instead of a hand-built text() UPDATE string — same atomic
WHERE status='running', idiomatic, no identifier interpolation, no manual
StrEnum coercion. Drops the now-unused text import.
- auth/admin (reuse): extract the SEC-10 "drop untrusted preset password + bump
epoch" invariant into one helper (revoke_preset_password_if_unverified) so the
Google-callback and admin-activation paths can't drift.
- tests/migrations (robustness): guarantee the shared schema is restored to head
in a finally, so a downgrade/re-upgrade failure can't cascade into later tests.
- worker (simplification): align _finish_from_cache's display_name fill with the
_download path's guard (no behavior change).
Gate green: ruff clean, 334 pytest (0 skip), frontend unchanged.
SEC-10 (account pre-emption / "pre-hijack"): a password set on an account whose
email was never verified is untrusted — whoever registered the address (to
pre-empt the real owner) could have chosen it. Both the Google-adoption callback
and admin activation (_activate_user_by_email) now drop that pre-set password and
bump the session epoch when the account isn't email_verified, so a later Google
login / admin approval can't hand the pre-set password a working login. No-op for
a verified account (the legit no-SMTP flow). +2 tests.
SEC-11 (link/upgrade bound to the session default): the OAuth link/upgrade GETs
resolved to the session DEFAULT account, so a tab acting as a secondary account
would link Google / the YouTube grant to the wrong account. The frontend now
threads the active account through the navigation URL (withActiveAccount ->
?account=<active>), and _complete_link accepts any wallet account, not only the
default, so the identity lands on the account that started the flow.
Cleanup only, no behaviour change (ruff clean + pytest 193):
- keep the whole OAuth scope vocabulary together in app/auth.py: the bundles
(BASE_SCOPES/READ_SCOPES/WRITE_SCOPES/_YOUTUBE_SCOPES) move back next to the
atoms (READ_SCOPE/WRITE_SCOPE) as core; routes/auth.py imports the bundles it
needs instead of rebuilding them from the atoms.
- compact the const groups the split generator spread out (the six rate
limiters, the TTLs, the demo/scope constants) back into blocks.
R12 S2. app/auth.py (1154 lines) mixed the core auth surface with 18 HTTP
endpoints on one /auth router. Split by dependency graph:
- app/auth.py (223 lines) keeps ONLY the core surface other modules import
(current_user, resolved_user_id, admin_user, require_*, has_*_scope,
purge_user, count_admins, get_or_create_demo_user, google_enabled,
is_allowed, operator_contact, optional_current_user) plus everything it
transitively depends on.
- app/routes/auth.py (883 lines, new) gets the router + all 18 endpoints +
their endpoint-only helpers, importing the core surface from app.auth.
- main.py includes auth_routes.router (was app.auth.router).
- test_oauth_redirect imports _oauth_redirect_uri from its new home.
The STAY/MOVE partition is driven by an AST scan of the COMPLETE external
surface (every `from app.auth import` incl. multiline + `from app import
auth; auth.X`), so no still-referenced symbol was moved. Behaviour-equivalent:
every symbol relocated verbatim (get_source_segment equality), route set
proven identical, no undefined names (symtable sweep).
Gate: ruff clean (backend + scripts), pytest 193 passed.
peter