A store connection string carries a password, and the control plane took it
from MESH_STORE_<CONTEXT> — an environment variable, which is readable in
`docker inspect`, in the process's own /proc entry, and in whatever composed
it. Every other module in the catalogue is given secret material as a file the
mesh sealed to the machine and the host wrote.
That difference is what stopped the control plane from being an ordinary module
(novox/hq ADR 0067). A manifest can put a sealed value into a file's `content`
with ${secret:…}; it has no substitution into a container's `env` at all. So a
control-plane manifest could be written with the password in it, or without the
setting — neither honest. The fix is not to change the manifest format but to
let the control plane read what everything else reads: a file.
MESH_STORE_<CONTEXT>_FILE names one. Exactly one of the two may be set; both is
refused rather than settled by precedence, because whichever won, the other
would still read as the setting in force and the process would be writing to a
store nobody expects. Trailing whitespace is trimmed — a file written by a
person or by a filled-in placeholder ends in a newline, and a newline inside a
URL is rejected several layers from anything that could explain it. Leading
whitespace is left, being a mangled value rather than a habit.
The no-leak property is kept and extended: a file that cannot be read names its
path, never its contents, and the parse failure now names whichever source was
used because a variable name and a path are not the secret.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
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