PR #72 declared the WebAuthn passwordless policy and a restructured browser-mfa
flow in the realm import. That declaration could not take effect: a
KeycloakRealmImport is a ONE-SHOT, and prod's reads Done=True / Started=False, so
every realm-level field and flow declared after the first import is inert -- in
git, applied by Flux, reported Ready, reaching the realm never. Merging it changed
nothing about how anyone logs in, and nothing anywhere said so. Same failure class
as the 2026-09-06 client-secret incident, third field over.
A SIBLING reconciler converges all three declared things every 15 minutes. It is a
sibling, not a second pass of client-secret-reconciler.yaml, so that reconciler's
allow-list -- and its guarantee that prod's real user and the media-users /
platform-admins / viewers groups are structurally unreachable -- stays literally
true. Its selftest still passes unchanged.
pass 1 webAuthnPolicyPasswordless* -- strict read-modify-write of
GET/PUT /admin/realms/homelab, readback-verified.
pass 2 webauthn-register-passwordless -- strict read-modify-write of ONE
literally-named alias; enabled, defaultAction false so enrolment stays
opt-in.
pass 3 the browser flow -- BLUE/GREEN.
PASS 3 NEVER MUTATES THE FLOW USERS ARE LOGGING IN THROUGH. Converging a
five-flow, ten-execution tree needs create-subflow, create-execution,
set-requirement and bind-config as SEPARATE untransacted calls; doing that to the
BOUND flow means a run dying between them leaves a half-built login path for every
SSO app and kubectl, and this repo has had a total SSO outage from a realm change.
So instead:
1. BUILD under a NEW, unused alias (declared alias + a hash of the desired
shape, applied to EVERY alias in the tree -- reusing browser-mfa-forms would
mean writing INTO the bound tree). A failure leaves an orphaned, unbound flow
and zero user-visible effect.
2. VERIFY by readback -- levels, ordering, authenticators, requirements, and the
conditional-OTP config CONTENTS -- before anything is bound, so the
regression that once 403'd every platform-admin is caught BEFORE it bites.
3. BIND with ONE atomic PUT setting browserFlow.
4. ROLLBACK is one write; no DELETE exists anywhere in the allow-list, so the old
flow survives as the rollback target.
The widened allow-list is made safe structurally. It cannot say "but not the bound
flow" -- its write entries are alias-parameterised -- so a second guard screens
every write against the live browserFlow's WHOLE subtree (sub-flow aliases and
execution ids) before a socket opens, FAIL-CLOSED until that binding has been
read. The create-flow endpoint carries no alias in its path, so it is screened on
its request BODY; the selftest caught that it otherwise escaped the guard.
Idempotence is load-bearing: a rebuild-and-reflip every 15 minutes would churn the
login path on a schedule. The bound flow is compared STRUCTURALLY and a match
produces zero writes and no new flow. Sub-flow and config ALIASES are deliberately
not compared -- a built flow carries a hash suffix, so comparing labels would make
it permanently unrecognisable as converged.
Single source of truth: the desired state is GENERATED from the realm import by
ci/render-keycloak-passkey-policy.py and gated with --check, so the RP ID -- baked
into every credential at enrolment and never re-keyable -- is declared once. The
pod keeps automountServiceAccountToken: false and reads a mounted ConfigMap, so no
rbac.yaml is added anywhere.
Read from Keycloak 26.0.6 source before being relied on: updateRealm
(DefaultExportImportManager 725-894) makes no getUsers/getClients/getGroups/
getRoles/getRequiredActions/getAuthenticationFlows call; it DOES read
getBrowserFlow(), which is what makes the atomic bind possible and why the policy
write pins it; the passwordless policy is applied all-or-nothing only when
RpEntityName is non-empty, with defaults substituted for omitted keys; and
updateExecutions compares rep.getPriority(), so a body omitting `priority` would
silently reshuffle the whole execution order.
Gate coverage: a new whole-repo L0 check extracts the script and runs its
--selftest (216 assertions, including a build killed at four different points each
asserting the old flow is still bound and the bound subtree was never written),
plus mutations.py (30 injected regressions, all caught) proving the selftest can
fail. An earlier iteration of this work only AUDITED the flow and left the
restructure manual; decisions/2026-10-18-keycloak-passkey-reconciler.md records
that design and why it was reconsidered.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Adds the realm's WebAuthn Passwordless policy and restructures the browser-mfa
flow so a passkey is an ALTERNATIVE beside the password form. Additive and
optional by design: this IdP gates every SSO app plus kubectl, so a mandatory
passkey flow that misfires is a total lock-out. Enrolment is not forced.
Policy: RP ID is ${BASE_DOMAIN} (not the keycloak host) because a passkey's RP ID
is fixed at enrolment and must not be bound to a name that can move; resident key
required (a non-discoverable credential is a second factor, not a passkey); user
verification required (without it, possession alone is a complete login).
Flow: auth-username-password-form is split into auth-username-form +
auth-password-form, because the server must know who is logging in before it can
decide whether a passkey exists. Conditional OTP for platform-admins is relocated
intact onto the password branch only — a UV-required passkey is already two
phishing-resistant factors.
No requiredActions block is declared, deliberately: Keycloak 26.0.6 treats
requiredActions as REPLACE not merge, so declaring one would delete the default
set including CONFIGURE_TOTP and lock every platform-admin out of the OTP step
this flow still enforces. webauthn-register-passwordless is already registered
enabled-but-not-default by Keycloak's own defaults.
UNAPPLIED: the realm import is a one-shot resting at Done=True/Started=False, so
this reaches the live realm never. See the handoff entry and the README section.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Records K1-K9: extend-vs-sibling and why, the generated+gated desired state, verbatim
token pass-through, per-pass fail-closed, order-insensitivity, unmanaged-means-untouched,
public clients' URLs managed, one alert pair not two, and the mutation harness.
Also records a process note: my first pass reported three false findings (reconciler
absent from main, import not templated, BASE_DOMAIN dead) because I diffed against
origin/main -- origin is dev's Gitea, stale at 4809199, while the live remote is
prod-gitea at fa4deac. All three were wrong. The rule for this repo is written down so
the next agent does not repeat it: origin is not the source of truth.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Minimal prod delivery, authored directly on main (= prod's live revision d1a6628)
rather than by merging work/prod-standup-campaign. That branch carries the DNS apex
inversion, which would have set prod's BASE_DOMAIN to home.keithjackson.dev; prod
runs external-dns with policy: sync and txtOwnerId: prod, so it would have begun
rewriting apex records dev owns while the non-k3s prod still serves 443 there.
Operator sequencing is "dev migrates first". Nothing under clusters/ is touched
here at all, which is what makes this safe to land now.
Also deliberately EXCLUDED, because prod's live cluster-vars has no CNPG_BACKUP_PATH
key and StrictPostBuildSubstitutions would fail the whole tier: the R2 rework of
platform/velero/ and the CNPG destinationPath changes. Those land as
feat/r2-backup-prod together with the endpoint and bucket knobs.
WHAT THIS FIXES
1. Nothing was watching CNPG. All three prod databases have run since bootstrap with
ContinuousArchiving=False and firstRecoverabilityPoint=null, and no alert existed
anywhere. Because archive_mode=on and the archive command fails, Postgres refuses
to recycle WAL: keycloak-db holds every segment ever written (257 MiB on a 5 GiB
volume, ~6.8 MiB/h) — roughly 29 days to a disk-full PANIC on the cluster's SSO
database. Found by hand, 38h late. CNPGWALArchiveBacklog would have fired within
the hour, and evaluates to 3 firing series on prod today.
Rules key on cnpg_collector_* rather than cnpg_pg_stat_archiver_*, because
nextcloud-db's exporter cannot log in to its own database (permission denied for
database "nextcloud", both clusters) so the pg_stat_archiver family does not exist
for it — the obvious metric would have been blind to one database in three.
2. No PVC outside namespace=monitoring had any fill alert. New rules are partitioned
by namespace so they cannot double-fire with MonitoringVolumeFillingUp, pinned to
job="kubelet" (the apiserver copy of the same series reports namespace=default),
and guarded by inodes > 0 — block-mode PVCs such as unifi-rootdisk report
available=0 forever and would otherwise have fired critical permanently.
3. VPNTunnelDown could never clear on a cluster with no gateway node; it has been
firing critical on prod since 2026-09-05. Now guarded so prod self-arms the moment
a node carries the egress-gateway label, with dev's behaviour unchanged today.
4. The Keycloak realm import fails OPEN: an unresolved placeholder is stored
LITERALLY and the import still reports success, then sits at Done=True and never
re-runs. On 2026-09-06 all 12 prod OIDC clients held the literal
$(env:..._CLIENT_SECRET) string and every SSO login failed, while every signal was
green. The CronJob is the level-triggered correction; two alerts make its silence
observable. Repaired live already — this stops it recurring.
Also: the R-NET-04 conformance scan descended into nested agent worktrees under
.claude/, counting 4 egress policies where 1 is authored.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
jakman85andClaude Opus 5