Work
This week we hammered out the details of another experiment we want to run, and this experiment won’t need the user to use 2FA. Our current experiment does, so I’ve been thinking about how to handle that.
Levels of Authentication
The solution I hit upon was to track a user’s “level of authentication”. Currently we have one level (logged in with a username, password, and 2FA). The new experiment will introduce a second (logged in with just a username and password). Levels of authentication form a total order.
Then, for each piece of user data, we need to specify the minimum level of authentication needed to:
- check if it’s present;
- get its value; and
- update it.
The account-api will check that a user is authenticated to the right level when they try to do something with an attribute, returning a 403 error and the required level if not.
Security
How do we store this level of authentication? We could have the identity provider associate it with the OAuth access token, and have an endpoint to query it. This makes it unspoofable, but adds a network round-trip to every attribute request. Not great.
The next best option is to request it just once, when the user is returned to the OAuth callback path after successfully authenticating, and to store it in the session. This is much better, except our sessions were plaintext.
Fortunately, Rails comes with a message signer/encryptor built in, so I didn’t need to think too hard about the crypto or (god forbid) roll my own.
Authentication
The final piece of the puzzle is to allow a service to pass a desired level of authentication along in an OAuth auth request, and for the identity provider to:
- authenticate the user at the desired level if they’re not logged in; or
- upgrade the user to the desired level if they’re logged in at a lower one.
The tricky part of this is that if a user has registered at the lower level, and tries to use the Transition Checker, they’ll have to set up 2FA. So it’s a little more complex than “if the user hasn’t done 2FA, make them do it”. Not an insurmountable problem, but it moves this work out of the purely technical realm and means we’ll need to get some design input on how to explain to the user why they need to now provide their phone number.
When we’ve got this part done, we can get on with actually implementing the experiment.
Books
I didn’t finish any books this week either! Still working through the Google SRE books and Helliconia.
Orchestrating Containers
Last week I mused on making a container scheduler, and I spent a lot of this week making a start. I decided to call it Ozymandias, because I expect people to look upon my works and despair.
Built on top of podman and etcd, it’s got to the point where I can put pod configuration into etcd and run a command on the node to fetch the config and launch it. The next logical step is to add a little daemon which’ll monitor for pod configurations being added or removed, and automatically update the local state.
Implementing even this little has given me a much greater understanding of the sorts of problems Kubernetes needs to solve, so maybe I’ll have another go at learning that. I think I’d do better this time.
New Server
I consolidated my two VPSes into a single, slightly bigger, one. I set it up in the “erase your darlings” style, so it gets wiped on boot other than a limited selection of preserved state:
- My home directory
- The compiled NixOS configuration
- Some non-recoverable state:
- SSH host keys
- Persistent docker volumes
- Minecraft server files
- Log files and Prometheus metrics
- Other recoverable, but nice to keep, state:
- Static website files
- HTTPS certs
- Docker registry contents
- Syncthing configuration
Not all of this is strictly needed: for example, I could throw away logs and metrics at boot; regenerate HTTPS certs; redeploy static websites; and rebuild docker images. But that would make reboots more of a pain. I think what I’m keeping strikes a good balance between immutability and practicality.
I learned something new about Concourse setting up this server: if you’re running workers in docker, you should make them “ephemeral”, or you’ll have a disk space leak.
RPG Blog
I published a short post about a Knowledge of the Future of the Universe skill, which I gave one of my Call of Cthulhu characters back in January.