scripts/reset-admin.js mints a JWT carrying `recovery: true`, and middleware/auth.js
accepted that claim on its own with no database involvement. Three consequences:
- NOT REVOCABLE. The only way to invalidate an outstanding recovery token was to rotate
JWT_SECRET, which logs out every user on the instance.
- NOT ENUMERABLE. Nobody could answer "is a recovery token outstanding right now?"
- NOT AUDITED. The synthetic id ('recovery-<nonce>') is not a users row, so every
activity_log insert for it failed the user_id foreign key and was swallowed by a catch —
a break-glass session left no trace at all.
A `recovery_grants` row per minted token turns all three around: DELETE revokes, SELECT
enumerates, expires_at bounds, and used_at + source_ip record when and from where it was
first exercised. The migration is additive and idempotent, so re-running is a no-op and a
code-only rollback just leaves an unused table.
The grant is session-scoped, NOT single-use-per-request. Recovery means many requests —
load the dashboard, list users, reset a password — so consuming the grant on the first
would make break-glass unusable, a worse outcome than the narrow replay window it closes.
Revocation and expiry are the controls; used_at is the audit stamp.
Also fixed, because it is the mechanism that hid this: logActivity now rewrites a
'recovery-*' id to a NULL user_id with the identity in `details`, so break-glass actions
are actually recorded instead of failing the FK; and a dropped audit row now logs a loud
[AUDIT-DROP] line naming the action and increments a counter, rather than vanishing into
console.error.
The token is written to a 0600 file instead of stdout — under systemd or Docker, printing
it meant journald captured a live admin credential well past its lifetime. Added --list
and --revoke-all.
In-flight recovery tokens minted before this change stop working; they live one hour and
were unrevocable, which is the problem being fixed. Minting already required a working DB,
so redeeming against one is not a new dependency.
test/session-token-resolution.test.js now mints a real grant for its recovery token, so
its assertions keep testing that break-glass is refused on those surfaces for lack of a
users row — not for the unrelated new reason that the token is invalid.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
scripts/reset-admin.js signed a JWT with a synthetic id ("recovery-XXX")
and instructed the operator to paste it into localStorage. But the
requireAuth middleware always SELECTs the user row by id, so every
authed API call under the recovery token returned 401 "User not found"
and the recovery flow was effectively dead.
Fix:
- reset-admin.js now sets a `recovery: true` claim on the JWT.
- requireAuth / optionalAuth short-circuit the DB lookup when
decoded.recovery === true and synthesize a req.user record in
memory (role: admin, plan_id: enterprise). The synthetic user is
never persisted, so FK-constrained writes that expect a real
user (creating devices, etc.) will still fail — which is fine,
recovery is only meant to let the operator reset a password or
create a fresh admin via the Settings UI.
Security: a recovery token still requires the jwtSecret to sign,
so only someone with filesystem access to the server can mint one.
Token TTL remains 1h.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
ScreenTinker - open source digital signage management software.
MIT License, all features included, no license gates.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
