fix(auth): address Copilot review round 10, and document the concurrency design
The headline is a correction to my own claim rather than a new defect. **The optimistic verify is weaker than the comment said it was.** It described the residual as a crash between the write and the verifying read. The reviewer pointed out that no crash is needed: order two writers as write-A, verify-A, write-B, verify-B and both report success while A's entry is gone — A's verify simply ran before there was anything to see, and B did nothing wrong. A crash is one instance of that shape, not the whole of it. The trace in the old comment quietly assumed A verifies *after* B writes, which nothing guarantees. Corrected in the doc comment, the README and the spec, and the honest summary is now stated rather than implied: this converges in every interleaving where the clobber lands before the verify, it is not mutual exclusion, and a deployment that needs the guarantee wants an OS-backed lock from a dedicated library — not another hand-rolled election. It remains better than what it replaced, which lost updates across a wider set of interleavings and could not be closed at all with what Node exposes. The other findings: - **An envelope naming the cipher still is not an openable one.** Round 9 added a `kdf`/`data` presence check; three dot-separated strings satisfied it while an empty tag, a 4-byte IV or `N: 3` still made every decrypt throw — so the quiet "Encrypted file" footer went to a file whose next save was guaranteed to fail. Now validates part sizes, a non-empty ciphertext, and the scrypt cost parameters (node rejects a non-power-of-two `N` synchronously, out of the derivation rather than the decrypt). A positive control asserts a file we actually wrote still reads as encrypted. - **`encryptionUnknown` + `looseMode` claimed an exposure it had not established.** With both set, `plaintext` is absent, so a `!== false` test landed on "anyone who can read it can read the secrets in it" — about a file that may well hold ciphertext we simply could not classify. Three-way now, in `secretStorageCaveat` and mirrored in the footer's tooltip, with a test on each. - **The README described a lock that no longer exists**, which is the worst kind of stale doc: it stated a durability guarantee the code had stopped providing. Rewritten to describe the actual design, including the residual. - **The private-method access in the concurrency test** now carries the justification the repo's TypeScript rules require: the asserted shape is `writeMap`'s real signature, so a rename breaks the line instead of silently detaching the stub, and a production injection seam would let the real write path drift from the tested one. Also updates `specification/v2_servers_file.md`, which still described #1356's world: one keychain-only store, and unavailability as a hard error. It now covers store selection and the probe, the file format and lazy encryption upgrade, the concurrency design and its residual, the `getStrict`/`getMany` seams and the two traps `getStrict` hit, the durability gate on migration, the keychain hand-off and its conditional delete, and how the active store is surfaced. Full `npm run ci` green. (One unrelated `AppRenderer` theme-flip test failed once under full-suite parallelism and passes in isolation with and without these changes — a flake, not a regression.) Signed-off-by: cliffhall <cliff@futurescale.com>
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@ -482,7 +482,9 @@ Setting the passphrase later is safe — the next write upgrades an existing pla
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The Inspector writes the file `0600` and re-tightens it at startup if something loosened it. If it _cannot_ — the file belongs to another user, or the mount is read-only — it says so in the log rather than continuing to describe the file as protected, since on that box the mode claim above is not true.
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**One durable file, one writer.** Mutations take a lock (`secrets.json.lock`) so a second Inspector on the same box — a CLI run beside a web session — cannot read the same state and overwrite the first one's save. A lock left behind by a killed process is treated as abandoned after 10 seconds and stolen, because a lock that only a clean exit can release would turn one `docker kill` into permanently broken secret writes.
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**Two Inspectors, one file.** Within a process, mutations are serialized per file path, so a web session's own concurrent saves cannot lose each other. Across processes — a CLI run beside a web session — there is deliberately **no lock**: writers are allowed to collide and the loser is made to notice. Each mutation reads the file, applies its change, writes, then reads back and compares the whole map; if another process wrote in between, it re-applies onto what they left and retries, and after five lost rounds it fails loudly rather than returning as though the value were saved.
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This is **not mutual exclusion**, and the residual case is worth stating: the verify only catches a clobber that has already landed, so if one Inspector reads back *before* the other's write arrives, both report success and one value is gone. That needs two Inspectors writing the same file within the gap between one's write and its read-back — narrow, but not only a crash. An earlier build did take a lock (`secrets.json.lock`); it was removed because making a `mkdir` lock single-winner on a stale takeover needs a compare-and-swap on a directory entry that Node does not expose, so it had the same class of failure with several hundred more lines and no way to close it.
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Three env vars affect where the file lands. `MCP_INSPECTOR_SECRET_STORE=keyring|file|memory` picks the store outright, bypassing the probe. `MCP_INSPECTOR_SECRET_FILE` names the file. Failing both, the file follows `MCP_STORAGE_DIR` — the same variable that relocates OAuth tokens and `client.json` — so mounting a volume at your configured storage directory is enough to make secrets durable there.
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