Decide what Lock does to a running shell, and say it

Pressing Lock nulled and disposed the vault view model and touched nothing else.
TerminalWorkspace is injected from App.axaml.cs and outlives every lock, so the SSH
connection, the pty and the pump all kept running while the window said "Unlock your
vault" — and since 0500e43 collapsed the WebView while locked, that live session was
invisible as well as unstopped. CloseSessionAsync was reachable in production only from
DisposeAsync, i.e. shutdown. None of this was written down anywhere, so it was neither a
policy nor a bug, which is the actual problem.

Shells now deliberately outlive the lock, and every layer says so.

The reason to prefer this over making Lock a disconnect: locking is what a person does
when they walk away from the machine, which is exactly when a long upgrade, build or
transfer is most likely to be in flight. Ending every shell would make Lock a button that
destroys work, and the predictable response is to stop pressing it and leave the vault
open instead. The idle auto-lock this will grow decides it outright — an unattended
timeout that killed a running job would be worse than the exposure it removes. Closing
the channel also buys less than it looks: the session was authorised at connect time by a
credential the remote verified itself, and no vault key participates in keeping it alive,
so locking cannot retroactively un-authorise it any more than removing a member can.

Stated honestly rather than implied, because the lock screen is what hides it:

- The unlock screen shows how many shells are still connected, and that locking closes
  the vault and not the connections — so a machine still holding authenticated SSH
  channels does not present itself as merely "locked". Shown only when there is something
  to disclose. Quitting is what ends them, and the text admits that.
- The Lock button carries the same thing in a tooltip, since its name implies the
  opposite of what it does to a shell.
- README lists it as a third architecture consequence beside non-retroactive revocation,
  which is the same shape of honest limit; docs/crypto.md §10 records it as a threat-model
  boundary; TerminalWorkspace and LockAsync carry the argument next to the code.

LiveSessionCount deliberately does not count dictionary entries. Nothing removes a
session when the remote closes the channel by itself — RunSessionAsync only drops the
renderer registration — so sessions.Count would report a shell that exited half an hour
ago as still running, on the one screen where a user is deciding whether it is safe to
walk away. A completed Run task is what "the shell is gone" actually looks like. While
locked the number can only fall, since opening a session needs the vault, so a stale
value over-reports rather than under-reports.

Both new tests fail when the policy is reverted: the count test times out against
sessions.Count, and the shell test reports "workspace.LiveSessionCount should be 1 but was
0" when Lock closes sessions. ShellFlowTests also stops building its workspace with a real
SshNetConnectionFactory that nothing ever called, which had made the suite's independence
from the network a coincidence rather than a property.

Verified by hand with a live shell, which nothing had done: a harness mirroring
MainWindow.axaml's 340,* grid with a real NativeWebView, the shipped WebAssets, a real
sshd in a container, and an ISshShellSession decorator recording every window-change the
remote is actually told about. Across lock and unlock, no window-change reached the remote
at all, stty size answered 50 118 before and after, the renderer's own buffer came back
byte for byte with the wrapped line intact, and the session stayed live throughout. A
control run that never hides the WebView behaves identically, so nothing above is startup
or idle behaviour. Keystrokes injected while locked reach nothing: twelve of twelve
SendInput events accepted with the harness confirmed as the foreground window, no probe
character in the remote's output, and a following Ctrl-U answered BEL, so nothing was
queued in the line editor either. A hidden WS_CHILD window is not eligible for keyboard
focus, which is what makes surviving the lock defensible rather than merely convenient.

Correction to a claim made in f80b3d4: terminal.js's guard comment listed "a host that
hides the WebView while the vault is locked" among the paths that reach a degenerate fit.
It does not. Collapsing the control hides a native child window without resizing it, so
the page still reports paneWidth 840 and paneHeight 760 with unchanged cols and rows, no
ResizeObserver callback fires and the fit never runs. Establishing that rather than
assuming it: the same cycle with MINIMUM_FITTABLE_PIXELS patched to 0 — the guard fully
disabled — is equally clean. The guard is still right for minimising and for a splitter
dragged to the edge; it is simply not what makes locking safe, and must not be cited as
though it were.

Recorded, not fixed:

- Nothing closes one terminal from the interface, so a user reading "1 shell is still
  connected" can only act on it by quitting. CloseSessionAsync is tested and correct;
  VaultViewModel discards the session id it would need.
- A session whose remote exits keeps its ISshConnection, and the thread ShellStream parks,
  until the process ends.
- Suspected and seen once: before the harness waited for the window's scale to settle, a
  DPI settle pushed a 2202x1328 pane for a window 1180 logical units wide and a later
  re-push reflowed the wrapped line. Three later runs at RenderScaling 1.00 never showed
  it, so it is filed as a lead, not a finding.
- WebView2 fails to initialise with CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE when the host executable
  sits under a very long path. Cost an hour on the harness; relevant to packaging.
This commit is contained in:
2026-07-29 14:44:02 +02:00
parent f80b3d4351
commit 5a899afd78
11 changed files with 525 additions and 11 deletions
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@@ -25,13 +25,21 @@ zero-knowledge.
| Vault | End-to-end encrypted; X25519 + Ed25519 + XChaCha20-Poly1305, Argon2id unlock |
| Connections | Client-direct SSH by default, with an optional raw-TCP server relay |
Two consequences worth knowing before you read further:
Three consequences worth knowing before you read further:
- **Revocation is not retroactive.** A removed member keeps what they already downloaded. The
real remediation is rotating the SSH credential, so offboarding is built around a rotation
checklist rather than a button that implies more than it delivers.
- **No session recording in relay mode.** The relay forwards SSH ciphertext, so it cannot see
commands. That is the cost of the relay not being able to read your traffic.
- **Locking the vault does not close your shells.** Lock closes the vault and zeroes every key it
held; a session that authenticated before it keeps running, because the remote host never
consulted the vault and the credential was already spent. That is deliberate — you lock when you
walk away from the machine, which is exactly when a long upgrade or transfer is most likely to be
in flight, and an idle auto-lock that killed it would be worse than the exposure it removed. The
honest reading is that *locked* describes the vault and not this machine's access to your hosts.
The unlock screen therefore shows how many shells are still connected, and quitting DodoSSH is
what ends them.
The reasoning behind each major decision is recorded in [`docs/adr/`](docs/adr/), starting with
[the E2EE trust model](docs/adr/0001-e2ee-trust-model.md).