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>
This commit is contained in:
cliffhall 2026-08-22 18:33:59 -04:00
commit 219765efff

View file

@ -482,7 +482,9 @@ Setting the passphrase later is safe — the next write upgrades an existing pla
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.
**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.
**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.
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.
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.