Blanket per-endpoint limits would have been the wrong shape here. Every
REST/WS/MCP surface is owner-only — an unauthenticated request is rejected by
resolve_bearer/is_owner before any handler runs — so limiting them would
mostly throttle the single legitimate operator, and real spend control for
outbound calls is already max_concurrent_calls in gateway.make_call.
What is genuinely exposed is the handful of /auth/* routes that must answer
before an identity exists. /auth/callback and /auth/refresh-callback each make
an outbound token exchange with Casdoor on every request; /auth/me opens a DB
session and runs a token lookup. All are free to trigger and none are cheap to
serve. /auth/logout is left unlimited — it builds a redirect URL and does no
I/O.
Not a defence against credential guessing: PATs are secrets.token_urlsafe(32)
(256 bits) compared by SHA-256 digest, so brute force was never the threat.
This is about unauthenticated work an attacker controls.
Fixed-window, in-process, no new dependency — one operator and one process
make a shared counter store infrastructure without a purpose. The bucket store
is bounded and evicts oldest-first, since an unbounded map keyed by source
address would itself be the exhaustion vector.
The limiter keys on the socket peer and deliberately ignores X-Forwarded-For.
That header is attacker-controlled unless a trusted proxy overwrites it, and
this app establishes no such trust; keying on it would let one client present
as thousands and make the limiter worse than useless. Behind the estate's
reverse proxy the limit is therefore per-proxy, not per-caller — correct for
exhaustion and honest about what it can enforce. Per-caller limits need an
explicit trusted-proxy config, noted in CLAUDE.md so it isn't added silently.
Verified against a real server: exactly 30 requests pass, then 429 with
Retry-After: 60, while an owner-gated route serves 40/40. The 429s appear in
the JSON access log with queryable status_code and client_addr, so an attack
is visible in Loki. The wiring test identifies the dependency by qualname
rather than string search, and was mutation-checked by removing the limit from
/auth/me.
Also documents 401/403/429 in the API reference — 401 and 403 have existed
since auth landed but were never in the status-code table. Phase 4 is now
complete.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Robert Helewka
5c178bb7bd