Archived
jschoubben
66768208d2
The next step after the schema: inventory now holds node records and enrolment tokens, and mesh-control has the commands to work with them. A token is issued for a node record, which is where re-enrolment gets decided -- what an identity binds to is settled when the token is made, not when it is presented, so the machine presenting one does not need to know whether it is joining or returning. What the token guarantees, each with a test confirmed to fail when the behaviour is removed: the secret is 256 random bits, shown once and stored only as a hash; it works exactly once; it stops working when it expires; issuing again for a node invalidates the outstanding one, because two live tokens are two machines able to join as the same node. Redemption is a single statement that finds and spends together, so eight concurrent attempts on one secret produce exactly one winner rather than a race between a check and a write. Refusals are deliberately identical for unknown, spent and expired. Somebody guessing must not learn which guess was a real token that had merely aged out. SHA-256 rather than a password hash, and that is a choice not a shortcut: the secret is high-entropy random, so there is nothing to guess and a slow hash would buy nothing while making every redemption expensive. It stops before what a node receives in exchange. What a machine presents afterwards to prove it is that node is not decided anywhere, and a migration is the most expensive place here to guess. So a token carries one of the four things ADR 0004 requires. The command prints the secret and then says exactly that -- the broker's address, its certificate fingerprint and the control plane's signing identity do not exist yet. Better than emitting something that looks complete and silently cannot be used.