cairnobs/docs/security/threat-model.md

Sentry Threat Model (Phase 4)

Written for a prospective enterprise customer's security team, describing the system as actually built through Phase 4 task 7 — not the target architecture. Where a control is designed but not yet implemented, this document says so explicitly, with a pointer to the tracking doc/task. See /docs/phase-4-isolation-design.md and /docs/phase-4-rbac-design.md for the full design rationale behind the controls described here.

Read this first: the single most important open finding

Updated: this section originally read "log data queried through POST /query is not tenant-isolated at all." That's now only half true, and the half that's no longer true matters — read carefully, because the remaining gap (Tantivy/free-text) is easy to miss if you stop at "ClickHouse is isolated now."

ClickHouse (the SQL path) is now built, but only if you run the right binary — and it has not yet been confirmed against a real ClickHouse. enterprise/internal/tenantprovision (real CREATE DATABASE/CREATE USER/GRANT against ClickHouse) and enterprise/internal/chrunner (a per-tenant driver.Conn registry implementing api's querylang/executor.SQLRunner, resolving which tenant's connection to use from the authenticated identity in request context — never from a client-suppliable field) now exist, and a new binary, enterprise/cmd/enterprise-api, wires them into the same api/queryapi.Handler/api/dashboards.Handler core already ships. Real integration tests exist and would prove the core adversarial claim — enterprise/internal/tenantprovision/tenantprovision_test.go's TestProvisionedUserCannotReadOtherTenantDatabase and TestProvisionedUserCannotReadSystemTables, enterprise/internal/chrunner/chrunner_test.go's TestRegistryTenantCannotReadOtherTenantEvenViaRawSQL — but this environment had no Docker/ClickHouse access while these were written, so they've only been confirmed to skip cleanly offline, not to pass for real. See /docs/phase-4-runbook.md's verification-status section before treating "the test exists" as "isolation is confirmed."

But plain api/cmd/api still runs with one shared connection, and nothing in this repo automatically routes traffic to enterprise-api instead — docker-compose.yml includes it "available, not defaulted into the traffic path" (same shape as enterprise-auth's own addition), and the Helm chart has no service for it at all yet. A deployment is only as isolated as which binary is actually serving traffic — this is an operational decision nothing currently enforces or even surfaces as a warning.

Tantivy (the free-text path) is still fully unisolated. There is no enterprise/internal/searchclient (the Tantivy-side equivalent of chrunner) — search's gRPC service and proto/sentry/search/v1/search.proto's SearchRequest still carry no tenant field anywhere, confirmed by reading the code. Every tenant's free-text queries hit the same shared Tantivy index regardless of which binary (api or enterprise-api) serves the HTTP request. A query that resolves to a pure pipe-syntax free-text search (e.g. message:"error") is not protected by chrunner at all.

What this means concretely: treat a deployment as tenant-isolated for structured/SQL queries only if it runs enterprise-api fronting provisioned tenants, and treat it as not isolated at all for free-text search regardless of which binary runs. RBAC (below) and dashboard tenant-scoping (below) hold regardless of which binary is running; the ClickHouse/Tantivy split above is what changed.

System overview

Browser ──▶ web (SvelteKit, static)
              │
              ▼
Browser ──▶ api OR enterprise-api ──▶ ClickHouse (log data, SQL path)
              │                    └─▶ search (gRPC) ──▶ Tantivy (log data, full-text path)
              └─▶ Postgres (control plane: dashboards, alert_rules,
                             tenants, users, tenant_memberships, audit_log)

# api: one shared ClickHouse connection, nil AuditLogger -- Phase 0-3 behavior.
# enterprise-api: enterprise/internal/chrunner (per-tenant ClickHouse
# connections) + enterprise/internal/audit.QueryAPILogger (real audit
# writes) wired into the SAME api/queryapi.Handler/api/dashboards.Handler
# core -- see this document's "Read this first" section. Either binary
# can be running; nothing forces the isolated one.

alerting ──▶ api or enterprise-api (POST /query, RoleService credential)
alerting ──▶ Postgres (rulestore, notifystore)

api/alerting ──▶ enterprise-auth (POST /internal/authorize, HTTP only —
                                    no Go import edge, see "Module
                                    boundary" below)

Browser ──▶ enterprise-auth (GET /auth/oidc/login, /auth/oidc/callback)
              └─▶ external IdP (OIDC authorization code flow)
              └─▶ Postgres (rbacstore: users, tenant_memberships)

sentryctl ──▶ api, alerting (Bearer token when SENTRYCTL_TOKEN is set)

Ingest path (agent → Redpanda → ingest → ClickHouse, and Redpanda → search → Tantivy) carries no tenant concept at all yet either — every ingested log record lands in the one shared logs table/index. Tenant isolation for ingest, not just query, is out of scope for what's built so far and is not separately designed in /docs/phase-4-isolation-design.md; named here as a gap that design doc doesn't yet cover, not just an implementation gap.

Module boundary (trust boundary #1)

enterprise/ (commercial license: SSO, RBAC storage, audit logging, session issuance) is never imported by AGPL core (/api, /alerting, /web, /cli) — enforced in CI by hack/check-tenant-boundary.sh, which greps for the import edge on every build. Core calls enterprise-auth over plain HTTP (api/authz.HTTPAuthorizer), forwarding only the Cookie/Authorization headers, never the full request (api/authz/httpauthz_test.go asserts this — an unrelated header like X-Forwarded-For is never forwarded). This means core's authorization decision is only as trustworthy as the network path to enterprise-auth — see "Deployment/network assumptions" below.

Authentication

Implemented for OIDC, still missing for SAML. enterprise/internal/loginhandler serves GET /auth/oidc/login (redirects to the configured IdP, with a short-lived HttpOnly cookie carrying CSRF-protection state) and GET /auth/oidc/callback (validates state, exchanges the code, verifies the ID token via enterprise/internal/oidc's real coreos/go-oidc wiring, upserts a users row keyed by SSO subject, resolves tenant/role from tenant_memberships, and issues a session.Manager-signed session cookie). Verified end-to-end with real cryptography, not mocked: the tests spin up a real fake IdP (coreos/go-oidc's own oidctest package) that signs genuine RS256 ID tokens, and enterprise/internal/loginhandler's handler verifies them for real via the same code path production uses — every test in loginhandler_test.go passes, including the full login→callback→ session-cookie round trip. Not yet verified: wiring this into a running enterprise-auth container against a real external IdP (Google/Okta/etc.) — that needs real IdP credentials and a reachable callback URL neither of which this environment has; see /docs/phase-4-runbook.md.

A user with zero or more than one tenant_memberships row is refused outright (403 / 501 respectively) rather than guessed at — a tenant-selection UI for the multi-membership case is real, undesigned future work, not silently approximated. enterprise/internal/saml still only does the protocol mechanics (AuthnRequest generation, assertion validation) with no ACS HTTP handler calling it — SAML login remains unimplemented, following loginhandler's OIDC pattern once it is built. GET /auth/features (enterprise/internal/authhandler) reports whether OIDC/SAML are configured, for /web's settings page to conditionally render — independent of whether a login button actually exists yet in the UI (it doesn't; only the two HTTP endpoints do).

Implemented for the one machine caller. /alerting's evaluator is the sole service-to-service caller (POST /query, to evaluate rule conditions across tenants). It presents a long-lived, signed (HS256/JWT) RoleService credential, minted offline via enterprise-auth -mint-service-token=alerting (an operator action, not a network-reachable endpoint) and configured via API_SERVICE_TOKEN. enterprise/internal/session.Manager issues and validates this token; enterprise/internal/authhandler's POST /internal/authorize resolves it. RoleService is a distinct, non-comparable lane on the Role type (api/authz.Role.Satisfies) — a service credential can never satisfy a human-role check and vice versa, verified by exhaustive table-driven tests (api/authz/authz_test.go).

Session/token integrity. Tokens are HS256-signed JWTs with a single shared signing key (ENTERPRISE_SESSION_SIGNING_KEY, ≥32 bytes, required at enterprise-auth startup). Compromise of this key lets an attacker forge any identity, including RoleService — it is the single highest-value secret in the enterprise deployment and should be treated accordingly (a real KMS/secrets-manager-backed value, not the docker-compose.yml/Helm chart's dev-only literal). Token validation (enterprise/internal/session.Manager.Validate) collapses every failure mode — bad signature, malformed token, expired — into one ErrInvalidToken, deliberately not distinguishing "expired" from "forged" so a caller can't be tempted to treat either as a softer case.

Authorization (RBAC)

Live and enforced. POST /query and every /dashboards endpoint in api require a minimum role, resolved per-request via api/authz.RequireRole/RequireRoleOrService calling enterprise-auth. Roles: Viewer < Editor < Admin < Owner, plus the separate RoleService lane above. GET /dashboards is Viewer+; create/update/delete require Editor+ (api/dashboards/ handler.go). A nil Authorizer (no ENTERPRISE_AUTH_URL configured) is a deliberate no-op, matching Phase 0-3's no-auth behavior — this is correct default-open-for-single-tenant behavior, not an oversight, but means an operator who forgets to set ENTERPRISE_AUTH_URL in a multi-tenant deployment gets no enforcement at all, silently. Worth a deployment-time check a real rollout should add (not built here).

Not yet enforced: the RBAC matrix's (own/granted) qualifier for Editor-level dashboard actions — dashboard_permissions (per-resource grants beyond a user's tenant-baseline role) has a schema (metadata/migrations/0024_create_dashboard_permissions.sql) but no handler reads it yet. Every Editor in a tenant can act on every dashboard in that tenant, not just their own/granted ones.

Application-layer tenant scoping (dashboards only). Every dashboards store query filters WHERE tenant_id = $identity.TenantID (api/dashboards/store.go), and the handler resolves that tenant ID from the RBAC-authenticated identity's context (authz.IdentityFromContext), never from a client-supplied request field. This closes a real gap found during this document's own review: Dashboard.TenantID is a JSON-tagged, client-settable field (api/dashboards/types.go), and the original handler/store implementation trusted it directly on create/update and applied no tenant_id filter at all on list/get/update/delete — meaning any authenticated user could read, modify, or delete any other tenant's dashboards simply by supplying (or guessing) their UUID, or spoof tenant_id on create/import to write into a tenant they don't belong to. Fixed as part of this task, with regression tests proving cross-tenant access now returns 404 (not 403, which would itself leak that the ID exists under a different tenant) — api/dashboards/handler_test.go's TestCrossTenant*/TestCreateDashboardIgnoresClientSuppliedTenantID/ TestImportIgnoresExportedTenantID. This same class of bug should be assumed present anywhere else client-supplied identifiers cross a tenant boundary until proven otherwise by an adversarial test — see task 8's adversarial test suite for what's been checked so far and what hasn't.

Query-path tenant scoping: none — see the top of this document. RBAC's role check on POST /query answers "is this identity allowed to run a query," not "does this query's result set respect tenant boundaries" — it can't, because the executor has no tenant concept to enforce.

Audit logging

Live, and independently verified against a real Postgres (not just written) — enterprise/internal/audit's integration tests. Two independent defenses back "no update/delete path from the application layer":

1. A dedicated audit_writer Postgres role with only INSERT+SELECT grants (metadata/migrations/0012-0014), via its own pgxpool.Pool — never the shared sentry role/pool every other store uses.
2. A BEFORE UPDATE OR DELETE ... RAISE EXCEPTION trigger (metadata/migrations/0015-0016) that rejects the operation for any role, including the table owner — confirmed live: even the sentry role cannot UPDATE a row without first disabling the trigger, a privileged operation distinct from ordinary application access.

Tamper detection, not tamper prevention against a privileged attacker. Rows are hash-chained (prev_hash/row_hash = SHA256(prev_hash || canonical_fields), serialized under pg_advisory_xact_lock so concurrent writers can't fork the chain — verified with a 20-goroutine concurrency test against live Postgres). The chain alone only proves internal self-consistency: a Postgres superuser (or anyone who compromises that credential) can wipe audit_log and regenerate a perfectly self-consistent new chain from row 1. enterprise/internal/audit.Checkpointer periodically ships a rolling hash to an external CheckpointSink for exactly this reason — FileSink (the only implementation built so far) is explicitly documented as a dev/testing stand-in, not a real external-anchoring guarantee (it writes to a local file the same privileged attacker could also reach). A real deployment needs a genuine CheckpointSink (S3 with Object Lock, or equivalent, reachable by a credential the database administrator doesn't also hold) before the "prove nothing was altered after the fact" claim actually holds against a privileged insider.

Fail-open by design for routine queries. queryapi.Handler.logAudit (api/queryapi/handler.go) logs a write failure and otherwise ignores it — an audit-log outage does not take down the query path. This is a deliberate availability-over-completeness tradeoff: it means a brief audit outage produces an under-logged (not over-blocked) window. No privileged/administrative action (role change, SSO config change, notification-target secret reveal) currently exists to enforce fail-closed on, since none of those flows are built yet (enterprise/internal/rbacstore has no HTTP handlers) — when they are, they should fail closed per /docs/phase-4-isolation-design.md's original policy, and that policy is not yet exercised by any real code path.

What's logged: query text, language, row count, duration, success/error — not result contents. Source/EventType fields exist (SourceAPI/SourceWeb/SourceCLI/SourceAlerting, EventQuery/EventRoleChange/EventGrantChange/ EventSSOConfigChange/EventSecretReveal) but only EventQuery from SourceAPI is actually wired to a call site (queryapi.Handler.logAudit) — the others are typed placeholders for work not yet built (there's no role-change/grant-change/SSO-config handler to call them from).

Known residual risks (explicitly out of scope, not silently assumed away)

Per /CLAUDE.md's Phase 4 non-goals, restated here in threat-model terms:

• A privileged ClickHouse/Postgres administrator is not defended against. Every isolation and audit-integrity guarantee in this document is a structural defense against application-layer bugs and injection — not against someone holding database superuser credentials. That's an operational control (credential custody, infrastructure access review), out of scope for this system's own code.
• system.query_log metadata leakage — per-tenant users are now real, but the check itself hasn't run yet. Was an open verification item because there were no per-tenant ClickHouse users to check against; that blocker is gone (enterprise/internal/tenantprovision exists), and tenantprovision_test.go's TestProvisionedUserCannotReadSystemTables asserts exactly what the design calls for (system.query_log/system.tables inaccessible, SHOW DATABASES not revealing other tenants) — but this environment never had ClickHouse access to actually run it, so it remains unconfirmed against the pinned version (clickhouse/clickhouse-server:24.8) until someone with Docker access runs it (/docs/phase-4-runbook.md §8). Also still contingent on the deployment-shape caveat at the top of this document: even once confirmed, this only holds when enterprise-api (not plain api) is actually serving traffic.
• No deny-override grants — dashboard_permissions is additive-only by design; a full allow/deny ACL system is unbuilt, future work.
• No data retention/deletion policy for a deprovisioned tenant — the tenants.status state machine includes deprovisioning, but what actually happens to that tenant's ClickHouse/Tantivy/Postgres data is an unanswered compliance question, not a designed-and-deferred one.
• No general multi-cluster orchestration — /deploy's Helm chart/Operator (/deploy/README.md) proves the K8s-side per-tenant secret-management model, not a fully general multi-cluster system, and was never applied to a live cluster in this environment (see that README's verification section).

Deployment/network assumptions

• enterprise-auth's /internal/authorize and /auth/features endpoints have no authentication of their own beyond the credentials they're validating — they must be reachable only from inside the cluster/trusted network (api/alerting/web), never exposed publicly. Nothing in this codebase enforces that at the network layer; it's a deployment responsibility (NetworkPolicy, or equivalent) not yet codified in /deploy/helm/sentry.
• ENTERPRISE_SESSION_SIGNING_KEY, ClickHouse/Postgres passwords, and (once minted) the alerting service token are all K8s Secret objects in the Helm chart (/deploy/helm/sentry/templates/ secrets.yaml) — standard K8s Secret semantics apply (base64, not encrypted at rest without a cluster-level EncryptionConfiguration). No secrets-manager integration (Vault, cloud KMS) exists; the chart documents this as an operator decision, not something it enforces.

Summary: what's actually enforced today

Control	Status
Role-based access control on /query, /dashboards	Enforced
alerting↔api service-identity credential	Enforced
Tenant scoping on dashboards (control-plane data)	Enforced
ClickHouse per-tenant provisioning (tenantprovision)	Built, not live-verified — real integration test exists, not yet run against ClickHouse
ClickHouse query routing (chrunner)	Built, not live-verified — and only applies when enterprise-api serves traffic, not plain api
system.* ClickHouse metadata isolation	Built, not live-verified — same caveat as above
Tantivy/free-text tenant isolation	Not implemented — no per-tenant index routing at all
Deployment actually routing traffic to enterprise-api	Not implemented — no Helm service, no default wiring
Human SSO login — OIDC	Built, verified with a real fake IdP (not yet tried against a real external IdP)
Human SSO login — SAML	Not implemented
Multi-tenant-membership login (tenant picker)	Not implemented — refused with a clear error, not guessed
Per-resource dashboard grants (own/granted)	Not implemented
Query audit logging (routine queries)	Enforced, fail-open, and now wired to a real writer via enterprise-api (audit.QueryAPILogger)
Audit log tamper detection (hash chain)	Enforced, verified live
Audit log tamper prevention (external anchoring)	Design only — FileSink is a dev stand-in
Mid-provisioning-race handling (evaluator ticks against a not-yet-active tenant)	Unverified — see api/queryapi/tenant_isolation_gap_test.go
Protection against a privileged DB administrator	Explicit non-goal