sower/docs/security.md

Security: sowerd Edge Threat Model and Anti-Probing Rules

Authoritative security design for the sowerd TLS edge. Rules here are normative; historical analysis lives in docs/plans/ (non-authoritative).

Threat Model

Two adversaries are in scope:

• Passive DPI observer — sees wire bytes and flow metadata; does not complete handshakes.
• Active prober — completes TLS handshakes, sends arbitrary application bytes, observes responses. Does not know the sower password.

Goal: keep the 443 edge behaviorally consistent with an ordinary TLS website for both adversaries, so that no single observation — wire bytes, handshake behavior, or application responses — is by itself proof that the sower transport exists. This is a design goal, not a guarantee: known residual signals that fall short of full indistinguishability are listed under "Residual Accepted Signals" and drive the rejected-directions recorded below.

Layer 1 — Wire Format Is Ordinary HTTPS

• Real TLS 1.2+ with publicly trusted certificates: autocert/Let's Encrypt, or a configured static pair. All sower metadata (the transport Head) rides inside TLS; there is no protocol-specific plaintext.
• ALPN is http/1.1 only. This is a residual but accepted signal (see "Rejected directions" for why h2 is not served).

Layer 2 — Protocol Identification Happens After the Handshake

• The sower transport is recognized by the first application byte 0x80. ~0x80 == 0x7F is the highest printable code point, so no valid HTTP/1.1 plaintext can begin with 0x80; probe dispatch is unambiguous.
• The Head checksum (HMAC-SHA256 over cmd/port/target keyed by the password) authenticates the frame and prevents MITM retargeting of captured frames. It is not an encryption layer; confidentiality and integrity come from TLS.
• ALPN is never trusted for dispatch. A sower client may offer h2 (e.g. uTLS Chrome fingerprint); the post-handshake sniff routes it to the transport path regardless of the negotiated protocol.

What the Transport Password Gates

The frame checksum is the only access control on the transport path. Its consequences are deliberate, and must not be mistaken for per-service authorization:

• One shared secret, no identity. Every client presents the same password; there is no per-client identity, no per-target authorization, and no revocation short of rotating the password for everyone (transport/sower's Sower holds only the password).
• A passing frame reaches any target the host can dial. Sower.Unwrap rejects only empty hosts and control characters — there is no allowlist. A leaked password therefore exposes the host's whole network position, not just the service the operator meant to share, including cloud metadata endpoints and same-VPC peers.
• No attempt throttling. A wrong checksum falls back to the website path (cmd/sowerd/main.go:handleConn) without counting the failure, and nothing else rate-limits the transport path: a weak password is guessable online at roughly one TLS handshake per attempt. Only the site_routes visitor gate is throttled.
• A fresh install generates its own password. sowerd -i writes a random 128-bit client password into a new /etc/sower/sowerd.toml and prints it once (internal/install), instead of shipping the template's placeholder. The example template keeps change_me for manual/development configs, and validation rejects only an empty password (SowerdConfig.Validate), so a hand-written config is the operator's responsibility. The HMAC key is the raw password with no KDF (see Residual Accepted Signals).

Use it as a transport, not as a boundary: keep the exposed service's own authentication, keep the password long and unique to this deployment, and keep what sowerd can dial as small as the deployment allows.

Layer 3 — Everything Else Is a Website

Dispatch order for non-transport traffic (cmd/sowerd/main.go:handleConn):

1. TLS SNI hit in site_routes → reverse proxy to the route's upstream.
2. Otherwise, a valid HTTP/1.1 request line → reverse proxy to fake_site.
3. Otherwise → raw TCP relay to fake_site.

A matched route is always fed to the reverse proxy, HTTP request line or not: site_routes serves HTTP/1.1 only. Non-HTTP traffic on a routed domain fails HTTP parsing rather than being relayed, which is also why an HTTP-layer visitor gate (below) covers the route's entire surface.

Transport auth failures fall back to the same website paths (never RST, never hang), so a prober without the password observes ordinary site behavior on every probe.

Site Route Visitor Gate

site_routes upstreams are public: autocert issues certificates for the routed domains on demand, and issued certificates are published in Certificate Transparency logs. The optional per-route site_routes.auth block gates the route with HTTP Basic credentials, for upstreams that cannot authenticate their own visitors — the edge is the only insertion point, because sowerd owns 80/443 on the host.

Rules:

• Opt-in and default off. A route without auth (or with both fields empty) behaves exactly as before, including passing the client's Authorization header through to the upstream.
• The gate runs in the reverse-proxy handler (reverseProxyConn), so it covers the route's whole surface: path-prefix overrides and WebSocket upgrades included. The sower transport path is dispatched before SNI routing and carries its own frame-checksum authentication; it is never gated.
• Credentials are compared in constant time (sha256 + subtle, so length does not leak).
• A passing request has its Authorization header removed. The edge credential authenticates the visitor to the edge, not to the upstream: forwarding it would copy the edge password into the upstream and its logs, and would collide with an upstream realm that carries the same name.
• Failures are throttled per direct peer address: authMaxFails failed attempts from one source accumulate (there is no decay window; only a request that passes the gate clears the count) and lock that source out for authLockDuration. The failure map is bounded (authMaxEntries) so source-IP rotation cannot grow it without bound. A lockout only ever affects the IP that caused it; the counter is shared by all gated routes so a visitor cannot get a fresh budget by moving between them.
• Upstream credentials are a separate mechanism: URL userinfo (upstream = "http://user:pass@host") is sent to the upstream as Basic credentials. net/http turns userinfo into that header only in http.Client; httputil.ReverseProxy round-trips through a Transport and drops it, so sowerd sets the header explicitly. Upstream passwords are redacted in error logs (url.URL.Redacted).
• ACME is unaffected: HTTP-01 runs on :80 and TLS-ALPN-01 completes during the handshake, both before any request reaches the reverse proxy.
• What it is not: a substitute for the upstream's own authentication, an account system (one credential per route, no session, no logout), or a second factor. A weak password stays weak against a distributed or IPv6-rotating attacker. Cross-origin browser calls that need a CORS preflight also stay broken: a preflight carries no credentials, so the edge rejects it before the cross-origin request is even attempted.
• Browser WebSocket clients are the open edge case. The gate does run on the Upgrade request, but script cannot set Authorization on a WebSocket handshake: a browser can only pass it by replaying the origin's cached Basic credential, and whether it does so is browser-specific and unverified here. The gate is per-route, so a /ws path cannot be exempted while the rest of the route stays gated. A reconnecting client makes this self-inflicted: every failed handshake feeds the shared per-IP counter, so an auto-reconnecting browser client (socket.io and friends) can lock its own source IP out of the whole route — ordinary page loads included — for authLockDuration, and again after each expiry. Verify in the target browser before putting a browser WebSocket route behind the gate, or reach that upstream through the sower transport instead.

Unknown-SNI Certificate Fallback

Rule: the TLS handshake must complete for arbitrary SNI. A handshake failure on unknown names is an active-probing signal — real sites present their default vhost certificate.

Implementation rules (cmd/sowerd/main.go:getCertificateWithFallback, autocert mode only):

• The issuance whitelist is cert.domains + every site_routes domain — the same source as the autocert HostPolicy, so the membership decision cannot drift from issuance behavior.
• Whitelisted names take the plain autocert path. Failures (ACME issuance, cache) surface as-is and are never masked by a wrong-name certificate.
• Unknown or empty SNI is answered with the primary domain's certificate. "Primary" is the first entry of the issuance whitelist, so keep cert.domains[0] a concrete domain (a leading wildcard entry would break the fallback lookup).
• The client's capabilities (signature schemes, curves, cipher suites) are carried over to the fallback lookup so autocert resolves its usual ECDSA/RSA cache key; a bare hello would count as non-ECDSA and force a spurious RSA issuance.
• Static certificate mode (cert.cert configured) already answers every SNI with the configured pair; the wrapper is autocert-mode only.

Client-Side Fingerprint

The default Go TLS ClientHello is an uncommon fingerprint for a "browser". sower clients should set [remote.tls] client_hello = "chrome" (uTLS) in deployment configs. This is a client configuration knob, not a protocol property, and has no server-side effect.

Rejected Directions

Decisions recorded here so they are not re-litigated without new evidence:

• QUIC / HTTP3 transport — requires either a dedicated UDP endpoint or a custom ALPN. Both expose nonstandard-protocol existence to an active prober (port scanning / ALPN enumeration), which is strictly weaker than the current byte sniff that reveals nothing. Would also require a TCP fallback path everywhere. Experimented with on 2026-09-17/18 and removed.
• h2 on the fallback path — once h2 is advertised, browsers negotiate it and WebSockets require RFC 8441 extended CONNECT. The Go standard library httputil.ReverseProxy has no extended-CONNECT support (it treats the request as a plain CONNECT), and x/net/http2 (through v0.59) gates extended CONNECT behind GODEBUG=http2xconnect=1, default off (golang/go#71128). The per-SNI ALPN workaround (h1-only for WS-bearing routes) was declined: it makes "new WS routes must opt out of h2" a silent failure mode on an anti-censorship edge.
• Wildcard site_routes domains (*.example.com) — rejected in config/sowerd.go (validateSiteRoutes) and must stay rejected. SNI dispatch is an exact-match map (siteRouter.lookup); a wildcard either collapses every subdomain onto one upstream — losing the per-domain routing it was meant to add — or needs priority/ambiguity rules on the edge's hottest path. autocert.HostWhitelist is exact-match too, so wildcard issuance would additionally force a hand-written HostPolicy.
• Additional listen addresses and configurable 80/443 ports — one serve_ip and hardcoded 80/443 are deliberate: an edge listening on a non-standard port is itself an active-probing signal. Multiple public addresses are served by one instance per address, not by widening this listener. serve_ip may be a concrete address to bind a single interface.
• Per-site certificate binding — the edge's certificate set is independent of the site_routes table (autocert issues for the union of routed domains plus cert.domains; static mode serves one pair for every SNI). Keeping it independent means a prober cannot enumerate configured sites from the certificate. Multi-SAN certificates already cover the legitimate multi-domain case.
• Domain routing on plain HTTP (:80) — the :80 listener only completes ACME challenges and 308-redirects public traffic to HTTPS; the fake_site directory is served there on loopback only (isLocalRemoteAddr). Routing :80 by domain would hand out a cleartext bypass of the TLS edge.
• Session-cookie login for site routes — declined in favor of HTTP Basic: a login page plus server-side sessions adds edge state and login-page surface, and non-browser clients (curl, media players, mobile apps) speak Basic rather than HTML forms. Basic costs one browser credential prompt per origin and keeps the gate stateless.
• Gating the fake_site fallback — the fake site is the decoy that answers unknown SNI (probes and failed transport auth included) and must keep answering like an ordinary public website. An operator's real site that needs a gate belongs in site_routes.
• Rejecting known-weak passwords in SowerdConfig.Validate — declined: a blocklist of placeholder strings is not a strength policy (it catches change_me and nothing else), and it would stop existing deployments from starting on upgrade. The fixable half of that risk is handled where the config is created — the installer now generates a random password instead of writing the template's placeholder — and the remaining operator duty (replace the placeholder in a hand-written config) is stated under "What the Transport Password Gates".

Residual Accepted Signals

• ALPN http/1.1-only: plausible for small self-hosted sites; h2 is blocked by the rejection above.
• Flow statistics (many short-lived TLS connections, no HTTP semantics on transport connections): common to all TLS-in-TLS proxies; connection reuse is deferred.
• The Head HMAC key is the raw password without a KDF: only relevant to an observer who can already capture a Head, which requires defeating TLS.