The rate limiter and the audit log key on the caller's address, and that address
was read with chi's middleware.RealIP — which believes X-Forwarded-For from
anyone. So a caller could set it to a new value on every request and get a fresh
password-guess bucket each time, and could write any address they liked into the
log the panel's watchers read. The one control meant for when a password is
already gone was keyed on a number the attacker got to pick.
Now the header is believed only when the machine that *connected* is a trusted
proxy — by default anything on a private network, which is the shape of a reverse
proxy or tunnel sharing the host or the docker bridge. A connection straight off
the internet is trusted for nothing and is keyed on the address it actually came
from. VERDANDE_TRUSTED_PROXIES overrides the set (CIDRs, or "none" to trust no
proxy at all); VERDANDE_REAL_IP_HEADER names the header.
Verified in the current deployment before the change: behind the Cloudflare
Tunnel a spoofed X-Real-IP already got no fresh bucket, because cloudflared
overwrites it. This makes that safety a property of the code, not of the
deployment — expose the instance directly, or put a header-passing proxy in
front, and it would have been a live hole.
Also COOP: Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: same-origin on every response, isolating
the browsing context. verdande scripts no other window, so there is nothing to
lose and a class of cross-window attacks to close.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
