Owner decision 2026-10-04: fix the account privacy findings.
- Sign-in. Every failure answers "That username and password do not match." after the same work: an unknown login
is hashed against a decoy, and the comparison is constant-time. "Banned" is told only to someone who gave the right
password. This covers /clientapi/user/login, /invitation/login and /oauth/login.
- Recovery.
- Every request answers the same sentence and queues a SendRecovery job, whether or not the account exists or has an
email. The lookup, the code and SMTP move to RecoveryJob, so neither the answer nor its timing says anything.
- Codes are kept only as a SHA-256 hash, for one hour. Migration _011 drops the plaintext ones, which never expired.
- A recovered password ends every session of the root. RootSessions sets CredentialsChangedAt, which JwtEvents
checks against the JWT's issue time, now stamped as nbf, and revokes each persona's OAuth tokens and authorizations.
- Deleting a root (RootRemoval: the admin route, or the restored self-delete at /clientapi/user/delete, which asks for
the password).
- Its sessions end.
- Each persona and each group it owns sends Delete{Actor} to its followers, its members and the accounts it follows.
- The personas' posts are emptied.
- /peasants/{name} answers 410 with a Tombstone (formerType Person or Group), as do its inbox and WebFinger, through
LocalActorService.Gone. The names stay reserved.
- The root keeps only a unique `deleted-{id}` name; the second deletion on an instance used to collide on
"Deleted user".
Also, from phase 2's pasture: GoToSocial files a circle post like a DM and shows it only to accounts it mentions. Each
member's copy, and a member's refetch, now also mentions that member silently. The GoToSocial scenario checks circle
posts in conversations, like DMs, and they pass there now, as on Mastodon.
657 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
Owner decisions (2026-10-04, recorded in docs/ROADMAP.md): production runs everything that is built, and nothing waits
on a person running a command.
- Geolocation updates itself. GeoUpdater, a hosted service, checks daily whether each DB-IP Lite database was built this
month. If not, it fetches this month's, or last month's early in the month. It installs a file only once it opens as
the right kind of database, then swaps it in atomically, and the locator reloads at once. Lookups now run under the
lock, so a reload can no longer dispose a reader mid-lookup. The systemd timer, its script and their setup.sh lines
are gone: the root step they needed never happened, and none is needed now. /stargazing names the database in use.
- The admin CLI runs after the app is built, with every service and nothing started.
- `create-root <login> [--admin]` takes the password on stdin; it is how the first login is made while sign-up is
closed.
- `smoke <persona>` keeps the root `deploy-smoke` and an undiscoverable persona, and gives the root a new password
on every run.
- The deploy signs in as @thepra. It runs the CLI, gets a token through the real OAuth flow (tools/smoke/oauth.sh,
moved out of the pasture's privapub_token, which now uses it), checks the signed-in API and that @thepra is
undiscoverable, then revokes the token. PRIVAPUB_SMOKE_TOKEN is gone.
- The deploy also fails when:
- NodeInfo and the instance API disagree about registrations;
- /stargazing does not say the crawler is on;
- the geolocation databases are missing or more than 40 days old.
- The crawler is on in production, seeded with ten large servers of different kinds. FEDERATION.md now describes it
and how to opt out.
- One registrations switch (Registrations:Mode, default Invitations; Open in tests and the pasture). It is read by
open sign-up (403 when closed), NodeInfo `openRegistrations`, and v1 and v2 of the instance API, so they can no longer
disagree. Before, NodeInfo said open and the instance API said closed. Group invitations always work, so
invites_enabled is true.
- A persona edit through /clientapi no longer resets what the Mastodon API set (discoverable, locked, quote policy…):
the theme is merged into the settings instead of replacing them.
650 tests pass. The deploy's smoke step was rehearsed against the pasture's PrivaPub.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
96 integration tests through PrivaPubHost, the real pipeline end to end:
- OAuth: the token's subject is the persona, and neither the token response,
verify_credentials nor the stored token entries name the root. A wrong password shows
an error and sets no login cookie; a login without the antiforgery token is a 400; the
return address never leaves the site; deny answers access_denied with no code; another
root's persona re-renders the choice with no code; a banned root is sent back to the
login and a code issued before the ban buys no token; force_login asks again; a code
works once and its reuse revokes the token it bought; password and refresh_token
grants are refused; a client_credentials token gets 401 on user routes; a read-only
token gets 403 with a Mastodon error on POST /api/v1/statuses; follow covers
read:follows; revoke works; the login and authorize pages send their CSP and no-store;
the 11th /oauth/login from one address in a minute is a 429.
- Accounts: sign-up, duplicates in any case, invalid models answer 400 with a message,
login and logout, recovery email, settings, password change, invitation sign-up and
login (refusing a persona named after the login), recovery without an email, through
an unreachable mail server, with a wrong and with a valid code, token refresh, the 11th
sign-up from one address, expired, garbage and foreign-key JWTs.
- Personas: a rootId in the body is ignored, the username regex and reserved names hold,
personas and groups share ReservedName, an update delivers Update{Person} to followers,
PublishedOn and the id's day fall within two weeks before creation, the list holds only
one's own personas, another root's persona cannot be updated.
- Groups: communities and circles are created, joining takes the code and the password,
members leave and owners cannot, a remote follow request becomes a member only on
approval, a circle never shows in lookup, account by id, v2 search or /@name, and its
/flock and /wardens answer 404 unsigned and to non-members, 200 to a member's signed GET.
- Moderation (Exclusive, it suspends localhost): ban, unban and remove; non-admins get
403; reports are listed without the reporter and resolved; domain blocks are inserted,
listed and deleted, bad domains refused, and a suspended server's delivery is answered
202 and kept nowhere; the data endpoints.
- AdminCommands: exit codes 0, 1 and 2 and the resulting policies.
Fixed:
- A banned or removed root kept using /clientapi with its JWT until it expired: only /api
re-checked the root. JwtEvents.TokenValidated now loads the root and fails the request
when it is banned or deleted, and takes the policy claims from the database, so a
demoted admin loses admin at once (and a promoted one gains it).
- The 401 and 403 bodies JwtEvents writes were PascalCase while every other /clientapi
answer is camelCase; they now use the web defaults.
- /clientapi/user/sniff/again (token refresh) answered an empty 200; it now answers a
fresh JwtUser, like login.
- Password recovery answered SMTP reply codes as HTTP statuses (421, 454, 554, and 550 for
an invalid address); a mail server failure is now 503 and an invalid address 400.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
- Sign-up, login, the invitation flows and password recovery allow ten
requests a minute per client address; the inboxes give each sending
origin (the keyId's) a bucket of 300 that refills at 300 a minute, and
answer 429 beyond it, which peers retry.
- deploy.yml dumps the PrivaPub database to /var/backups before it stops
the service (the last seven are kept), and after the swap checks that
Swagger answers 404 and that the shared inbox answers junk with 400 and
an unsigned activity with 401.
- ActivityPubClient and PostBoost, never used, are gone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
S14 and the privacy items of P0:
- signing up as "admin" no longer grants admin; `PrivaPub admin promote
<root>` (and `demote`) does, run on the box against the configured
database;
- Swagger is served in Development only;
- every service and controller answers "Something went wrong." where it
used to send ex.Message, and the SMTP warnings no longer log the
recipient's address;
- sign-up and login no longer log the IP, User-Agent and root id together;
- invitation sign-up takes the persona's own AvatarUserName (and optional
AvatarName) instead of naming the avatar after the private login, and
refuses a persona username equal to the login's. Invitation login uses
the named persona, creating it if it is new;
- recovery mail comes from "PrivaPub", not collAnon's support address name.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
The tree had not compiled since its first commit: Group, DmGroup and
IGroupUsersService were referenced and never written, an IDE rename had
turned the user-settings DTO into the ViewAvatarServer enum, and the settings
were saved as an entity they no longer were.
Built now:
- Group (an ActivityPub Group actor with its own keys, members, invitation
code and optional password) and DmGroup (a conversation), with
/clientapi/group/{list,insert,update,join,leave,approve}.
- Posts and DMs: /clientapi/post/{list,insert,delete}, /clientapi/dm/{list,insert};
DM recipients are local usernames or user@host handles resolved by WebFinger.
- Invitation sign-up and login against the group's invitation code, checking
the password before any account is created.
- Federation: WebFinger, NodeInfo 2.0, actors at /peasants/{name} (Person,
Group, and an Application instance actor) with SPKI keys, draft-cavage
RSA-SHA256 HTTP signatures both ways, an inbox handling Follow (+Accept),
Undo, Create, Delete and Update, an outbox, notes at /posts/{id}, and a
persisted, retried, signed delivery queue. A post to a group is announced
by the group to its followers (FEP-1b12).
- The unused, broken typed ActivityPub models are replaced by a renderer;
NSign's HMAC setup, which could not federate, is gone.
Upgrade: net10.0, MongoDB.Entities 25.1 (instance DB API, Standard GUIDs),
Swashbuckle 10 / OpenApi 2, Serilog.AspNetCore 10, MailKit 4.18,
PasswordGenerator 3. The JWT keys are 64 bytes (IdentityModel 8 refuses
shorter for HS512). Production runs its own mongod on 127.0.0.1:27022, as
Sintopia's apps do, and deploys to privapub.thepra.dev from the build runner.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
thepraandClaude Opus 5.5