Security in Artist Alley

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Artist Alley holds three classes of valuable data: artists’ creative work (often confidential, often NDA-bound), studio metadata (project names, internal review comments, unannounced IP), and operator credentials (auth, third-party API keys, license signing material). The security posture is built around protecting all three from accidental exposure and from determined attackers with credentialed access.

This page documents the load-bearing rules. Any PR that touches an authentication path, a credentials store, a permissions check, an asset-bytes path, or an external integration follows them.

Threat model

Three concrete adversaries shape the design:

The credentialed but unprivileged user. A user with a valid login but no business reading restricted assets. The attacker the permission system is built against.
The leaked credential. A stolen session, a published API token, a misplaced license file. Mitigation is short-lived tokens, revocation surfaces, and audit trails that surface anomalous behaviour quickly.
The compromised peer / connector / add-on. A federated peer, an import source, a third-party plugin running malicious code. Mitigation is per-surface trust boundaries — no surface trusts another by default.

Not in scope:

Nation-state targeting. Out of scope for the project’s threat model; operators with that risk profile run their instance behind air-gapped infrastructure.
Physical access to the server. If the attacker can read disk, all bets on data confidentiality are off — disk-level encryption is the operator’s responsibility, not ours.
Side-channel attacks against the host OS. Speculative execution, hardware-level RNG bias, etc. — out of scope.

Authentication

Sessions are server-side. The sessions table holds a SHA-256 digest of the token; the client gets an opaque cookie carrying the plaintext, which never reaches the database. There is no client-readable session payload.
API tokens are Personal Access Tokens, prefixed aa_pat_ — random high-entropy strings. Only their SHA-256 digest lands in api_tokens.token_hash; the plaintext is shown once at creation and never persisted, so a database dump yields no usable tokens. Each token carries a scope list and an optional expiry, and a token can only be created from a cookie session — you can’t mint one using another token.
Passwords are peppered with HMAC-SHA256 (keyed by AA_SCRAMBLE_KEY) and then hashed with bcrypt. The pepper means a stolen database alone can’t be cracked offline without also holding the scramble key. Plaintext passwords never enter logs, audit events, or response bodies.
SSO (LDAP / SAML / OAuth) lands in Phase 1.18. Generic SAML / OIDC stays in core; provider-specific bridges (Okta / Auth0 / WorkOS) are add-ons per ADR 0038.

Authorisation

Capability codes are the unit of permission, not role names. Code that checks “is this user an admin” is wrong — code that checks “does this user have the assets.delete capability” is right.
Capabilities live in the capabilities table; roles bundle capabilities via role_capabilities; users get roles via user_roles. Per-user overrides — user_capability_grants and user_capability_revokes — let an admin grant or revoke a specific capability without inventing a one-off role.
The capability check happens at the handler entry, not deeper. A repository method does not check capabilities; the handler that calls it does. This keeps the trust boundary visible.

Asset sensitivity

Planned — Phase 1.28 (ADR 0020). The full tier system, server-side blur, and Reveal flow below describe the intended posture and are not yet shipped. A coarse sensitivity visibility floor already backs reverse-image search.

Per-asset sensitivity tier (public / team / restricted / embargo, per ADR 0020). The tier is set per-asset and will gate access at the storage-fetch layer — not just the UI.
Server-side blur for restricted and embargo assets. Blur is a preview variant generated server-side, so even an unauthenticated network-tap leak shows blurred bytes. A Reveal action lifts the blur for the session and writes an audit event.
Embargo lift via the scheduled-action engine. The lift is a timed action, audit-logged when it fires.

Secrets handling

Encrypted credentials store for third-party API keys, OAuth refresh tokens, SMTP passwords, federation peer auth, import-source credentials, license-signing material. At-rest encryption uses the host master key (AA_MASTER_KEY, required at boot); the broker decrypts in memory and zeroes after the consumer finishes.
Connectors / add-ons never see raw credentials at rest. They receive an opaque Credentials blob from the broker that decrypts on demand. No connector logs credentials, no connector writes them.
Master key rotation is a documented operator-side procedure; the rotation re-encrypts the credentials table under the new key without changing connector code.
Cloudflare Worker Secrets will hold the Ed25519 signing key for license .lic issuance (once licensing ships at Phase 1.24, per ADR 0017); the signing key never leaves the Worker.

Audit trail

Every state change that crosses the security boundary writes an audit_events row: auth login / logout / failure, capability grant / revoke, asset sensitivity change, share-link creation / consumption, license issuance, add-on install / start / stop, import-source create / sync.
correlation_id ties every event from a single request or job together — cascade effects are reconstructable from the audit log.
Audit retention defaults to 7 years. Enterprise tier supports signed audit export (Ed25519 over JSONL); the signing key’s public half is published at /.well-known/audit-signing-key per ADR 0017.

Planned — Phase 1.26 (ADR 0018). The design below is the intended posture; share links are not yet shipped.

Signed, expiring share URLs for external collaborators (per ADR 0018):

Token is a 32-byte random ID, not a JWT. Revocation is a single-row delete — no key rotation, no token-blacklist surface.
Per-link scope — view / comment / annotate / download. Scope is enforced at the handler; bypassing the link viewer to hit the canonical endpoint still requires the matching capability.
Optional password on the link, stored hashed. Failed-password attempts are rate-limited and audited.
Per-fetch audit trail — IP, user-agent, password-result, scope satisfied. The operator can see who’s used a link without contacting the recipient.

Input handling

Every HTTP entry point validates inputs at the OpenAPI layer. The strict-server generator rejects malformed requests before the handler runs.
No SQL string concatenation. sqlc enforces parameterised queries at compile time; raw db.Exec(fmt.Sprintf(...)) is a code-review block.
No HTML concatenation in templates. Svelte’s auto-escaping is the default; {@html ...} is a code-review block requiring justification.
Path traversal — every filesystem path derived from user input is canonicalised and verified to live under the expected root. The storage abstraction does this once; handlers don’t.

Per ADR 0024:

Soft delete first — deleted users and content are recoverable for 30 days before hard delete (shipped).
Cookie / tracker banner (Planned — Phase 1.32) will render only when a non-essential category is in use; a bare studio install with no analytics shows no banner.
DSAR tooling (Planned — Phase 1.32) — every user will be able to export their personal data as JSON and request deletion; hard delete reassigns authored content to a deleted-user tombstone so collaborative work survives.
Audit-log access is itself capability-gated. Reading the audit log writes an audit event.

Reporting a vulnerability

If you believe you’ve found a security issue:

Do not open a public GitHub issue. Use the security contact at security@artist-alley.org (or open a private security advisory on GitHub, which routes to the same place).
Include reproduction steps, the version affected, and the impact you observed.
Expect an acknowledgement within 72 hours and a fix or mitigation plan within 14 days for confirmed issues.

We don’t run a bug bounty programme yet. Public credit for the report (your choice, opt-in) lands in the release notes for the fix.

Things that look like security features but aren’t

Anti-AdBlock. The aa-ads add-on respects user-agent ad-blocking. We don’t arms-race against it from the AGPL core.
DRM on asset bytes. We do not encrypt asset bytes at rest within the storage backend beyond what the backend itself provides (S3 server-side encryption is an operator-configured option, not an Artist Alley feature). DRM-protected delivery is out of scope.
Anti-account-sharing. Once licensing ships (Phase 1.24, ADR 0017), active seats will be counted for licensing, not surveillance — purely “how many distinct users have been active in the last 30 days”; we don’t fingerprint sessions, don’t device-bind logins.