The server had no authentication: every /api route was open, CORS
allowed any origin, and the identity written to the audit log came from
the request body — the UI sent a hardcoded pf_user: 'admin', which any
client could have set to anything it liked.
Accounts live in pf.app_user with scrypt hashes from node's own crypto,
so there is no native build step and the parameters travel with each
hash. Sessions are express-session over connect-pg-simple in pf.session:
a restart no longer signs everyone out, and a session can be revoked by
deleting its row, which is how disable-user cuts off access immediately
rather than at cookie expiry.
Everything under /api except login/logout/me now requires a session, and
the React app is mounted only once there is one — its load effects call
the API on mount, so a logged-out mount would just fire a burst of 401s.
A session that expires while the app is open lands back on the login
screen: auth.jsx wraps fetch once rather than teaching every call site
to check.
Identity is now read from the session for pf_user, created_by and
closed_by, and the body values are ignored.
Hardened for an internet-facing deployment: trust proxy so req.ip and
secure-cookie detection are right behind TLS termination, httpOnly +
SameSite=Lax + Secure cookies, ten login failures per IP per fifteen
minutes, one error message for unknown, wrong and disabled alike, and a
fresh session id on success. CORS is off entirely unless CORS_ORIGIN
names an origin — a wildcard alongside a session cookie would be CSRF by
construction. The server refuses to boot without SESSION_SECRET rather
than falling back to a guessable default.
pf.sh grows add-user, passwd, list-users, disable-user and enable-user;
passwords are read on stdin and hashed before they reach psql, so no
plaintext in argv or shell history. install.sh generates the secret,
applies 02_auth.sql, and creates the first account.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
