Reproduced again on this node today: with no session cookie, six app
ports answered HTTP 200 with their real UIs (18083 LND, 8334, 8175
Fedimint Guardian, 8336 FIPS Mesh, 8090, 7777), all bound 0.0.0.0 and so
served on every host address. Same bug class as the /lnd-connect-info
and /bitcoin-rpc/ leaks closed in v1.7.120, but across every app.
LAN, Tailscale, Tor and the FIPS mesh all converge on 127.0.0.1:<port>,
so this is one gate rather than four. It lives in the daemon rather than
a per-app sidecar (umbrel's app_proxy model): rootless, no extra
container per app, and it can reuse machinery that already exists.
It invents no authentication policy. verify_password, TOTP secret
decryption, verify_code with used-step replay protection, the session
store, and — importantly — the SAME LoginRateLimiter instance as the
JSON-RPC path, so an attacker cannot get a fresh budget of password
guesses by moving to an app port. Only the transport differs, an HTML
form instead of JSON-RPC, because a browser being sent to an app cannot
speak JSON-RPC.
2FA comes for free: a session still pending its TOTP step fails
validate(), so the gate rejects it without knowing what a second factor
is.
Details worth keeping:
- 401, not a redirect. A redirect to a login page is indistinguishable
from the app itself redirecting, and machine clients would follow it
and parse HTML as their API response.
- Cookie and Authorization are stripped before proxying. The app has no
use for the node session and must never be able to log or forward it.
- The challenge page names and pictures the app being opened, so the
visitor can confirm what they are authenticating to.
- device_tokens grew `apps: Option<Vec<String>>` and verify_for_app for
machine clients. None = node-wide, which every existing companion
token is; migrating them by guessing a scope would silently revoke
access nobody asked to revoke. An empty list is rejected rather than
minted, since it reads as unrestricted while authorising nothing.
The rollout is necessarily per-app and the gate is built to say so. A
container publishing 0.0.0.0:<port> claims every host address, so the
gate cannot bind that port until the app is pinned to bind: 127.0.0.1
and recreated — gate-first is impossible, and all-at-once would recreate
every container on a node simultaneously. Every port it cannot claim is
logged at warn each sweep and recorded in GateStatus::unprotected,
surfaced by security.app-gate-status. The failure mode being designed
against is a gate that binds nothing, logs at debug, and reports success
while every app stays exactly as open as before — worse than no gate,
because it stops anyone looking. Same reasoning that ruled out an
nft drop-in, whose absence is a silent no-op.
Not yet done: pinning the 39 gated ports to loopback, repointing
HiddenServicePort at the gate, and on-node verification.
Tests: 21/21 appgate, workspace builds clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
