A step-up elevation minted from the account password satisfied the fresh-factor
routes. That is a second-factor bypass: a stolen token plus a known password
could rotate the recovery codes — which take no factor in the body — and then
spend one of them to disable the second factor outright. The web has never
allowed that chain, because a password login does not stamp mfaVerifiedAt.
The method is now an authorisation input. Only totp, webauthn, and passkey
satisfy a fresh-factor gate, which is exactly the set of ceremonies the web
stamps a session for; password reaches what a plain cookie session reaches and
stops. The mint gains TOTP and security-key arms so a TOTP-only account can
still manage its factor natively, and the response says which reach it bought.
The gate also returns a discriminated context. session.id meant a session row on
one arm and a token row on the other, and the disable route passed the token id
to a session-scoped query — excluding nothing, so it deleted every browser
session and revoked the caller's own device login. The transport is now in the
type and the compiler refuses the confusion.
Redemption splits into validate-then-commit so a 429, a 422, or a wrong code no
longer burns a proof against a five-per-fifteen-minute mint ceiling. The claim
is UPDATE ... RETURNING, so the statement that decides is the one that reports.
The mint is transactional behind a partial unique index. Sign-out-everywhere and
both password-reset paths clear elevations. The status read drops to plain
requireAuth — it carries no credential material — and every mutation stays gated.
Second-factor management has been cookie-only since v1.23. The gate is right:
a Bearer token is a credential whose provenance the server cannot see, and
tearing down a second factor must not be reachable from the weaker of an
interactive login and a value pasted into a script. What was missing was never
Bearer access to those routes — it was a way to say, over a transport with no
session row, that the human holding this device just re-proved a factor.
An elevation is that proof. It is minted only against a re-proved account
password or primary passkey, bound to the exact token that re-proved, single-use
via a conditional UPDATE, five-minute-lived to match the cookie path's step-up
window, and stored hashed. A stolen token mints nothing; a second token cannot
redeem another's elevation; a password change drops every one the account holds.
requireMfaManagementAuth is the one gate the management routes share. On a
cookie session it delegates to the original helpers unchanged, so the web flow
runs the code it always did. requireAdmin stays cookie-only and out of reach.
Marc-André Bombeck