2 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
jaap-jan 573f5d5668 Keep the device key in the TPM, behind a consent Windows enforces
The last of ADR 0007's three pieces, and it does not implement what that ADR
originally decided — because writing it exposed a flaw in the decision.

The ADR said "a Windows Hello gesture gating a protected blob". That does not
deliver what the rest of the document claims for it: a gate inside the process is
not a gate. A store that showed a prompt and then read a DPAPI blob would be
bypassed by malware that skipped the prompt, read the file and called
CryptUnprotectData itself — which is exactly the attacker the whole decision was
made against, and exactly the reason DPAPI alone was rejected. The presence
requirement has to be a condition of using the key, enforced below the
application, or it is decoration.

So the device key is encrypted to an RSA key created in the Microsoft Platform
Crypto Provider — the TPM — under CngUIProtectionLevels.ProtectKey. Windows
requires consent to use that key, so the prompt is not something this code can be
talked out of showing. Malware can ask for the key; it cannot answer the dialog.
That is strictly stronger than the ADR described, and most of what option D was
being saved for: the wrapping key genuinely never leaves hardware. The X25519
device key still lands in memory to open the wrap, because DSH1 fixes that wrap at
a curve the TPM cannot do — the remaining gap, and now a smaller step than it was.

CngKey is in-box, so this needed no WinRT projection and no Windows target
framework. Which is worth stating plainly because the opposite was planned: the
piece was scoped as "where the Windows TFM lands", and it turned out a platform
guard on one class was enough. Client.App and its two test projects stay on
net10.0.

Two things were measured on real hardware rather than assumed, and the second
changed the shape of the work.

The platform provider works here and holds an RSA key — confirmed by creating and
deleting one before writing anything that depended on it.

And ProtectKey prompts at key *creation*, not only at use. The comment in the
first draft of this file said the opposite, with a confident explanation: sealing
uses only the public half, so it should be silent. It is not. CngKey.Create blocks
on a dialog, because the policy means "protect this key with a PIN" and Windows
asks the user to set that up there and then. Found by writing tests around save
and forget and watching the suite hang for ten minutes waiting for somebody to
type one.

That has two consequences worth knowing before touching this file. SaveAsync is
user-facing code — it belongs on a UI thread, behind a button somebody pressed,
never on a background pass. And almost nothing in the store can be covered
automatically: two tests remain, availability and the empty-blob case, both of
which provably reach no dialog. Disabling the UI policy to make the rest testable
would remove the one property worth having.

The interface offers two things and hides both where they cannot work. "Use
Windows Hello" appears on the unlock screen only when this machine has a cached
wrap and a keystore still willing to release the key; "Use Windows Hello here"
appears in the account bar only when the machine can keep a key and has not
already registered one, so it is spent once used. Absent rather than disabled, in
both cases: a greyed-out button on a machine that never had a TPM reads as
something broken, and the passphrase box beside it is not a fallback — it is the
ordinary way in.

Both unlock paths now share AdoptAsync rather than each opening the known-host
store, building the vault and starting auto-sync. The ordering in there is
load-bearing and a second copy would be a second chance to get it wrong.

The shell's tests drive a fake keystore. Not for speed: the real one prompts on
every save and load, so a suite using it would block forever. What the shell has
to get right is which buttons appear and what happens when one is pressed, and a
fake answers exactly that. It is shared from Client.Session.Tests by source link
rather than reimplemented.

882 tests green, 6 of them new. Zero warnings, dotnet format clean.

Not verified, and not verifiable here: the dialogs. Whether the consent prompt
appears at the right moments, reads sensibly, and returns to a usable window when
declined needs the application run by a person on a machine with a TPM. That is
the remaining half of outstanding item #7, and it is now the only thing between
this feature and being finished.
2026-07-30 15:17:30 +02:00
jaap-jan 49f617b450 Wire the Avalonia shell to the vault
The host list now comes from the vault instead of from a form. A fresh
machine takes a server URL, signs in through the browser, enrolls, and
from then on opens with the passphrase alone.

DodoSSH.Client.Session is the composition layer: where a profile lives,
how it unlocks, and how a machine gets one. ClientPaths picks a
non-roaming per-OS directory — %LOCALAPPDATA% and never %APPDATA%,
because a SQLite cache that roams between two machines is a corrupt one,
and each machine's outbox is its own. SessionOpener needs no transport at
all and could not reach one if it wanted to; that is the offline unlock,
asserted rather than asserted about. A wrong passphrase, a stale KDF and a
grant revoked by a rekey are three different answers, because the remedies
are three different things and telling someone to retype a passphrase that
was never the problem is worse than saying nothing.

The shell's states are the onboarding story. The recovery code gets its
own state that cannot be clicked past: it exists for one moment, losing it
with the passphrase loses the vault, and there is no server-side reset by
design. It is dropped from memory on confirmation rather than merely
hidden.

Sign-in is a delegate over IVaultServer, so the whole state machine runs
in a test against an in-memory server — no browser, no identity provider,
no toolkit. The view models are plain observable objects, which is what
makes that possible. What it does not cover is whether the XAML binds to
the right names; that needs a rendered tree and Avalonia.Headless, and is
its own piece of work.

Three things found by doing it rather than by reading it:

- Pooled SQLite connections keep the database file open after the last
  context is disposed. On Windows that means locked, so the application
  could never replace its own cache — and a test could not clean up after
  itself, which is how it surfaced. Dispose now clears the pool.
- EF's SQLite provider puts the database in WAL mode, so the cache is
  three files. A comment in ClientCacheFactory claimed the opposite;
  reading PRAGMA journal_mode off a real launch settled it. WAL is the
  right mode here — a sync pass writes while the interface reads — so the
  comment was wrong on the merits as well as on the fact.
- Enrolling a device key with nowhere to keep the private half would put a
  wrap on the server nobody can open and make the device list claim this
  machine can unlock without a passphrase. Device binding is now optional
  and the shell declines it until the OS keystore is wired.

Verified on Windows: the client created %LOCALAPPDATA%\DodoSSH\cache.db
and migrated it on first launch, and msedgewebview2 held an established
connection to the data plane while the unlock overlay covered it — which
is the point of covering the WebView rather than collapsing it, since a
NativeWebView that is never laid out is never realised.

630 tests, up from 593. The recovery-code gate and the offline unlock were
each verified by breaking them and watching the right test fail.

Still to do for M1's actual definition of done: the manual run against the
real API and a real Keycloak. Credentials are not a synced entity type
yet, so a connection still asks for a password, and the interface says so
rather than implying otherwise.
2026-07-29 11:02:19 +02:00