relicario/docs/SECURITY.md

# Relicario Security Model

> **Audience:** auditors and curious users. This doc owns the threat model, attacker-scenarios table, device-authentication model, env-var trust surface, and known limitations. **Does NOT own:** crypto primitive details (see [CRYPTO.md](CRYPTO.md)), wire formats (see [FORMATS.md](FORMATS.md)), or implementation (see [../crates/relicario-core/ARCHITECTURE.md](../crates/relicario-core/ARCHITECTURE.md) and [../crates/relicario-cli/ARCHITECTURE.md](../crates/relicario-cli/ARCHITECTURE.md)).

## Cryptographic Protection

Relicario uses two-factor vault decryption:
1. **Passphrase** — user-memorized, zxcvbn score ≥3 required
2. **Reference image** — JPEG carrying 256-bit secret via DCT steganography

Key derivation: Argon2id (64 MiB memory, 3 iterations, 4 parallelism)
Encryption: XChaCha20-Poly1305 (192-bit nonce, 256-bit key)

## Manifest Integrity

The manifest (`manifest.enc`) is encrypted with AEAD, which provides:

- **Confidentiality**: Contents unreadable without master key
- **Integrity**: Any modification detected and rejected on decrypt
- **Authenticity**: Only master key holders can create valid ciphertexts

### What AEAD Does NOT Protect

- **Item deletion**: An attacker with write access can delete `.enc` files
  or git-revert commits. The manifest decrypts successfully but won't
  contain the deleted items.

- **Rollback attacks**: An attacker can replace `manifest.enc` with an
  older valid version. AEAD accepts any ciphertext created with the key.

### Mitigation

Item deletion and rollback are detectable via **git history**:

```bash
git log --oneline items/
```

For environments where git history could be rewritten (force-push):

1. Enable device authentication (commit signing + pre-receive hook)
2. Use a git server that rejects non-fast-forward pushes
3. Regular backups with `relicario backup export`

## Device Authentication

When enabled, device authentication provides:

- **Commit authorship**: All commits signed by registered device keys
- **Push access control**: Deploy keys managed via Gitea API
- **Instant revocation**: One command cuts off both signing and push

Enforcement requires deploying the `relicario-server` pre-receive hook
on the vault remote. The crate provides two subcommands:

- `relicario-server generate-hook` — emits the hook script to install at
  `<repo>/hooks/pre-receive`
- `relicario-server verify-commit <sha>` — checks one commit's signature
  against `.relicario/devices.json` and `.relicario/revoked.json` as of
  that commit; the hook calls this for every pushed ref

Without the server hook, signed commits provide authorship metadata only
— any process with push access can land an unsigned commit, since
verification is otherwise advisory.

See `docs/superpowers/specs/2026-05-02-device-authentication-design.md`.

## Access Control

Without device authentication, access control is transport-layer only:

- **CLI**: SSH key authentication to git remote
- **Extension**: Git credentials in browser storage

Device registration is optional but recommended for shared vaults.

## Org vault security

An org vault is a separate git repository alongside the personal vault. It
uses ed25519 commit-signing and a server-side pre-receive hook to make
least-privilege access control server-enforced, not advisory.

### Org device-key authentication

Every org member registers an ed25519 device key. The key appears in
`members.json` as an OpenSSH public-key string alongside the member's role
and collection grants. Fingerprint matching is done via
`relicario_core::fingerprint`, which normalises the OpenSSH format so that
whitespace and comment differences do not create phantom mismatches.

Org access requires two things at once: a wrapped key blob (`keys/<member-id>.enc`)
and the device private key that can unwrap it. There is no org passphrase —
removing a member's blob and rotating the org master key is sufficient to
revoke access (see **Key rotation** below). Device keys are completely
separate from the personal vault's KDF inputs; revoking org access does not
affect the member's personal vault.

### Pre-receive hook enforcement

`relicario-server generate-org-hook` (`crates/relicario-server/src/main.rs:511`)
emits a hook script that calls `relicario-server verify-org-commit` for
every pushed commit. Unsigned or structurally invalid commits are rejected
before they land.

`verify_org_commit` (`main.rs:286`) performs four checks in order:

1. **Signature verification** — a temporary `allowed_signers` file is
   constructed from the current `members.json`; `git verify-commit --raw`
   is run and the resulting SHA-256 fingerprint is matched back to a
   `members.json` entry. A commit not signed by a *current* member is
   rejected outright.

2. **Path-level write authorisation** — each modified path is classified by
   `classify_path` (`crates/relicario-server/src/lib.rs:19`) into
   `ProtectedJson` (owner/admin write only), `CollectionItem` (the
   `items/<slug>/…` prefix; write allowed only if the slug appears in the
   signer's `collections` grant array), or `Unrestricted`. The write is
   authorised if and only if the signer's role and grants satisfy the
   classification. Item blobs are authorised by the leading path segment
   alone — the ciphertext is never decrypted by the hook.

3. **Owner-only elevation guard** (`enforce_owner_only_elevation`,
   `main.rs:438`) — only a member whose *pre-commit* (parent) role is Owner
   may introduce a new member at Owner or Admin level, or promote an
   existing member to either. Checking the pre-commit role means an Admin
   cannot self-promote in the same commit that writes the escalated
   `members.json`; there is no epoch in which the transition is
   self-authorised.

4. **Schema monotonicity** (`enforce_schema_monotonicity`, `main.rs:521`)
   — `schema_version` values in org JSON containers may not decrease.
   Merge commits are rejected. A genesis commit (no parents) is allowed
   only when it is signed by the sole Owner it introduces.

### Key rotation

`relicario org rotate-key` generates a fresh 256-bit org master key,
re-wraps it for every current member, and re-encrypts every
`items/<slug>/<id>.enc` blob and the manifest under the new key in a single
signed commit tagged `Relicario-Action: key-rotate`. A revoked member's
wrapped blob is simply not written during rotation, so they hold a blob that
decrypts to a stale key — they cannot read items encrypted under the new
key.

### Audit action vocabulary

The `relicario org audit` command attributes actions to their verified
signer (not to the commit author or trailer value). Each event records two
actors: the **verified** actor resolved from the signing key (authoritative)
and the actor **claimed** by the `Relicario-Actor` trailer (advisory). When the
claimed actor disagrees with the verified signer, the event is flagged
`TAMPERED`. Trailers are advisory metadata; the trustworthy actor is always
the cryptographically verified signer.

Actions live in two groups:

- **Live (merged A + C streams):** `member-add`, `member-remove`,
  `member-role-change`, `collection-create`, `collection-grant`,
  `collection-revoke`, `key-rotate`, `org-init`, `ownership-transfer`,
  `org-delete`.
- **TODO (pending Dev-B B9–B13):** `item-create`, `item-update`,
  `item-delete`, `item-restore`, `item-purge` — the emitter code lands with
  the item-CRUD command stream.

### Honest limitations

The following are deliberate design boundaries, not oversights:

- **Shared org master key — reads are not cryptographically scoped per
  collection.** The pre-receive hook scopes *writes* by collection path
  and the CLI filters the manifest to each member's grants, but a single
  org key opens all collection blobs. A member with any grant can, outside
  the CLI, decrypt items from collections they are not granted. For true
  cryptographic separation, use a separate org vault per access boundary.
  Per-collection subkeys are a phase-2 non-goal.

- **No read audit.** Git records writes only. A member who reads blobs
  directly leaves no server-visible trace.

- **No "hide value."** There is no mechanism to show a member that an item
  exists without revealing its field values on decrypt.

- **`delete-org` is a local tombstone in phase 1.** The schema-monotonicity
  check causes the hook to reject protected-file deletion, so an
  `org-delete` action cannot be pushed to a hook-protected remote. The
  deletion is recorded locally only until a future phase addresses it.

## Configuration env vars

Relicario reads the following environment variables. Each is a trust
boundary: an attacker who can set them in the user's environment can
influence Relicario's behavior. They are listed here for security
reviewers to audit the surface in one place.

### User-facing (active in all builds)

| Variable | Purpose | Trust |
|---|---|---|
| `RELICARIO_IMAGE` | Override the reference-image JPEG path used during vault unlock. | Trusted: filesystem path under the user's control. Read-only; its bytes feed `imgsecret::extract_secret`. |
| `RELICARIO_GITEA_URL` | Gitea API base URL for `relicario device add`. Equivalent to `--gitea-url`. | Trusted: HTTPS URL. Used only in the device-add code path. |
| `RELICARIO_GITEA_TOKEN` | Gitea personal-access token. Equivalent to `--gitea-token`. | **Secret**: anyone who can read this env var can manage the user's deploy keys via the Gitea API. The CLI never logs it. |
| `RELICARIO_GITEA_OWNER` | Gitea repository owner (e.g. `alee`). Equivalent to `--owner`. | Trusted: opaque string. |
| `RELICARIO_GITEA_REPO` | Gitea repository name (e.g. `vault`). Equivalent to `--repo`. | Trusted: opaque string. |

### Debug-only (compiled out of `cargo build --release`)

The following variables are gated behind `cfg(debug_assertions)` and
are **no-ops** in release builds. The env-var lookup is removed by the
optimiser from any binary built without debug assertions (i.e. the
standard `--release` profile).

| Variable | Purpose |
|---|---|
| `RELICARIO_NO_GROUPS_CACHE` | Suppress the plaintext `groups.cache` write. Developer debugging tool for the cache logic. |
| `RELICARIO_TEST_PASSPHRASE` | Bypass the `rpassword` prompt during integration tests. |
| `RELICARIO_TEST_ITEM_SECRET` | Bypass the `rpassword` prompt for item-secret fields during integration tests. |
| `RELICARIO_TEST_BACKUP_PASSPHRASE` | Bypass the `rpassword` prompt for backup export/restore passphrases during integration tests. |

---

**Next:** [../crates/relicario-core/ARCHITECTURE.md](../crates/relicario-core/ARCHITECTURE.md) — implementation, starting with the platform-agnostic core.