[d3vhex]

Security keys, a table that never had a collector, and the console around them

Verified against the running deployment rather than only in tests — which
turned out to matter, because four of the bugs below were found by clicking the
button, after the tests for them had passed.

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1. Security keys (WebAuthn)

A one-time code typed into a convincing copy of this login page works on the
real one, and the operator has no way to tell. A key signs over the origin it
is actually talking to.

There is no configuration, and that was the design question. The
relying-party ID is derived from the request, so a laptop at
https://localhost:8000 and an estate at https://soc.example.com both work
without being told anything, and no setting can disagree with the URL people
type.

The cost is that some origins cannot host a key, and the console says which
rather than showing a button that fails:

Console opened at	Security keys
https://soc.example.com	available
http://localhost:8000	available — localhost is a secure context by definition
https://10.0.0.5:8000	unavailable. A relying-party ID must be a domain; browsers reject an address.
http://soc.example.com	unavailable. Needs a secure context — set TLS_ENABLED=1.
any, webauthn package absent	unavailable. The import is lazy, so the option is lost rather than the console.

One-time codes are unaffected in every row, and the message says so — an
operator who reads "unavailable" as "two-factor is off here" turns the whole
thing off.

Three decisions worth reviewing:

• A credential records its RP ID. A key registered at localhost is one
  the browser will not offer at a hostname. Without the column the console
  lists a factor that cannot work and the prompt times out silently.
• _has_security_key is deliberately not scoped to the RP ID. Whether a
  login needs a second factor is a property of the account; whether this
  browser can offer a key is a property of the origin. Conflating them would
  let somebody with a key registered at a hostname skip the second factor
  entirely by opening the console at an address — turning the origin binding,
  the whole point of WebAuthn, into a bypass.
• The signature counter is checked. A key presenting a lower count than the
  last one seen is refused and raises WEBAUTHN_COUNTER_REGRESSED (CRITICAL).
  Zero means "not implemented" — true of most platform passkeys — and is
  accepted, because refusing it would switch the control off for the hardware
  people actually have.

Verified end to end on a real authenticator:

user_webauthn        rp_id=localhost  transports=hybrid,internal  sign_count=0
                     created 18:17:25   last_used 18:56:31
webauthn_challenges  0 rows            (single-use deletion works)
login_logs           admin  success  "security key"

base64url is not base64

frontend/src/lib/webauthn.ts has its own tests because this is where WebAuthn
fails intermittently. - and _ stand in for + and /, padding is dropped,
and atob accepts neither. The alphabets agree until a byte lands on one of
the four differing characters — so an implementation that forgets to translate
passes a demo, passes review, then throws InvalidCharacterError for one
operator in three.

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2. Certificate names (TLS_SAN)

The shipped certificate carried DNS:localhost, DNS:localhost — the SAN list
was [cn, "localhost"] with no dedup and no way to add a name. A console at
https://10.0.0.5:8000 failed hostname verification in every browser, on top
of the untrusted-CA warning: two errors that look like one.

TLS_SAN takes hostnames and addresses; anything that parses as an address
becomes an IP SAN, because a bare address in the DNS list matches nothing.

Generation is idempotent, so editing .env on a deployment that already
has a certificate does nothing — correctly, since a new identity per restart
would break every agent that pinned the CA. It now says so at startup with the
command to fix it. That check silently vanished on its first draft
(except: return made "unreadable" and "names match" produce identical
output); it has its own test.

docs/production-deployment.md §3.8 is the six-step version, including that
--force issues a new CA, and what happens if you skip all of it: nothing
breaks, you just do not get a security key.

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3. security_audit: the table nothing ever wrote to

It existed in both schemas, in ALLOWED_TABLES, in DEDUP_TABLES and in two
encrypted-field maps since the beginning. Three modules were documented as
producing it. None of them ever did. So it shipped empty every cycle and
the console showed it permanently as NOT COLLECTED — a sensor that reads as
broken rather than as never built.

Sentora/modules/security_audit.py is the collector: posture findings, read
only. Windows (registry, services, local accounts, firewall) and Linux
(sshd_config, sudoers, /etc/passwd, file modes).

Running it on a real host immediately produced three bugs worth keeping:

• It accused the anti-malware service of being malware. WinDefend,
  WdNisSvc and MDCoreSvc came out as CRITICAL persistence, because
  \programdata\ was in the writable-directory list. That root is writable,
  which is what makes it the textbook example — but the vendor subdirectories
  under it are not, and Defender lives there. The worst false positive
  available, and one is enough for an operator to stop reading the category.
• It crashed on a localised Windows. subprocess.run(text=True) decodes
  with the console code page — cp1254 here — and raised UnicodeDecodeError
  inside subprocess's own reader thread, where the caller cannot catch it.
• It overstated. "Can authenticate with an empty password" for
  PasswordRequired=False, which means the account is permitted to have a
  blank password, not that it has one. Downgraded and reworded; a finding that
  overstates is one an operator learns to dismiss, along with the next.

The group-membership check queries by SID (S-1-5-32-544), not by name:
Administrators in English, Yöneticiler here, and matching the name is a
check that silently finds nothing on a localised install.

Deduplication is on (category, finding) and deliberately not on
details — details drift ("2 members: …" → "3 members: …") and a fingerprint
over them re-inserts the same finding whenever one changes. send_alert
learned the general version of this: a state-reporting detector without
deduplication produced the identical alert 288 times a day.

And then the chain still ended in a wall. The rows arrived, stored
correctly, decryptable — and there was no route and no UI. Added both:
GET /<agent>/security_audit and a Posture tab. Its empty state is worded
differently from the telemetry tabs on purpose: empty here is a real answer.

Verified live: 6 findings on this host, all independently confirmed, read back
through the real decrypting path.

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4. Agent fixes

automations/pending had been 401ing for the life of every install.
AutomationsClient sent no headers at all. The 401 is correct — unauthenticated
the route let anyone read the response actions queued for a host and POST
{"task_id": N, "status": "SUCCESS"} against every id, so the actions never ran
while the console showed them green.

What was missed is that this is not dead code. call_agent_soar queues a
pending row precisely "so an agent that missed the push can still poll for it".
Broken, the fallback did not exist. It authenticates now, and a rejection is
said once rather than four times a second.

The vulnerability scan reported a clean result it could not have reached.
scanners/vuln.py mapped Windows to OSV's NuGet ecosystem, but the package
list is registry Uninstall display names — "Google Chrome" — and NuGet is
Newtonsoft.Json. The two name spaces do not overlap and OSV has no ecosystem
for programs installed on Windows, so the query was structurally incapable of
matching while reporting new_findings=0 every cycle. It is a named skip now,
surfaced through the skipped_reason the console already renders.

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5. The console (C2 + responsive)

All eight remaining pages moved onto the shared kit: 460 inline style objects
→ 171, and eight hand-rolled modal overlays → the kit's Modal (Escape
closes, backdrop closes, portals to document.body because position: fixed
resolves against the nearest containing block — AgentDetail had hit exactly
that).

The styling was the smaller half. Every one of the eight swallowed its load
errors. An empty Identity & Access reads as "nobody has access". Blank
AdminConfig forms read as "nothing is configured" and those forms save.
Playbooks reported a failed run to the browser console only — on a page whose
own editor labels steps "cannot be undone". AIAnalysis had a hardcoded green
"RabbitMQ Worker Active" pill with no request behind it. Deployment lost
enrolment tokens silently, because navigator.clipboard does not exist outside
a secure context and the button still said "Copied".

Then responsiveness, which the kit's own docstring had warned about: six pages
wrote gridTemplateColumns: '300px 1fr' inline, where a breakpoint cannot go.
Added .split-grid. Three places decided layout from window.innerWidth read
during render — which never follows a resize, and looks responsive to anyone
testing by reloading at each size. Sidebar was right only by accident; it
takes isMobile as a prop now.

---

6. Documentation that described a different product

Sentora/docs/MODULES.md was unchecked and substantially wrong:

• Three table names that do not exist: installed_software,
  resource_log, disk_info.
• edr_enforcer's entry was wrong end to end — documented as a
  hash-baseline scan writing security_audit; it is the agent's main periodic
  collector and writes five other tables, four of them undocumented.
• network_inventory and packages appeared nowhere.

tests/test_module_reference.py holds both directions now. While correcting
the paragraph about scrub_nuls, a real NUL byte got into the file from an
escape that collapsed one layer too far — enough for grep to call it binary
and go quiet. Fixed, with a test.

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7. tsc --noEmit -p tsconfig.json checks nothing

frontend/tsconfig.json is a solution file: "files": [] and project
references. Pointing tsc -p at it type-checks the empty set and exits 0, for
any code. vite build does not close the gap either — rolldown strips types
without checking them.

Two unused imports left by a refactor passed both, and were caught by the
Docker image build (which runs npm run build → tsc -b) — after the
container had spent a day serving an old agent binary, because the failing
build never produced a new image and the failure was masked by a
docker ... | tail pipeline returning tail's exit code.

tests/test_frontend_typecheck.py makes the real gate structural.

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8. Four bugs the tests could not have caught

Every one was found by using the feature, and in each case the tests written
for it passed:

Bug	Why the tests missed it
security_audit had no route or UI	The tests checked the collector, not the chain
register/begin returned 500	json in app.py is Sanic's response helper, not the module. Valid Python, fails at request time only
login/2fa/webauthn/* returned 401	Added to the test's session-only list, not to the server's public-handler list
The first fix for that went to the wrong list	_PUBLIC_EXACT_PATHS is a path-shaped mirror, consulted only as a backstop; authenticate matches handler names

New invariants for each: no module attribute may be read off a shadowed name
in app.py; any route that authenticates with a pending token must be in
_PUBLIC_HANDLERS; and the mirror must not drift from it. Each detector was
run against the shipped state to confirm it fires.

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Testing

2710 passed, 5 skipped (Python) · 42 pass, 0 fail (frontend) ·
npm run build and docker compose build both exit 0, unmasked.

Verified against the running deployment: the security-key ceremony completed on
real hardware, security_audit findings reached the server and read back
decrypted, automations/pending answers 200, and the agent log carries no NUL
errors.