The gate landed with a softer mode for accounts holding no second factor,
on the premise that they could not clear it. That premise was wrong. A
passkey is a possession factor here and the codebase already says so in
three places: a primary passkey login stamps Session.mfaVerifiedAt,
passkey sits in FRESH_FACTOR_METHODS so a passkey-proved elevation reaches
the fresh-factor routes, and the enrolment policy counts a primary passkey
as satisfying it outright. The only thing refusing such an account was the
reachability pre-check inside requireFreshMfa, which counts second factors
and nothing else.
So the mode is gone and the route asks for a full freshFactor: true with
proofSource: "any-possession" — a second knob that widens which credentials
count as "could ever prove this", and changes nothing about the gate. A
passkey-only account now gets a real gate with the re-provable
auth.stepup.required rather than no gate at all, and the dead-end
auth.stepup.mfa_not_enrolled is reserved for an account holding nothing.
hasSecondFactorEnrolled is deliberately NOT widened. It answers a different
question, and requireFreshMfaIfEnrolled asks it before deciding whether
account deletion, the data reset, the password change, the encrypted export
and key rotation gate at all — counting a passkey there would change five
destructive actions in passing. The two predicates sit beside each other
with docblocks saying why they differ, and collapsing them turns eight
existing tests red across three files.
Recovery is named rather than assumed. On Bearer: mint an elevation with
method "passkey". On the web: sign in again, which is what stamps the
session — there is no in-page re-proof for a cookie session because the
mint endpoint is Bearer-only by design. That limit is written into the
route docblock instead of left to be discovered, and the removal's refusal
now renders its own sentence in all six locales rather than the server's
English "second-factor" prose, which was wrong for the account this card
mostly serves.
DELETE /api/auth/passkeys/{id} took a plain cookie session or a wildcard
Bearer, while DELETE /api/auth/me/mfa/webauthn/{id} beside it demanded a
fresh factor proof. The softer gate sat on the primary sign-in credential:
the last-method check stops an account locking itself out, but nothing
stopped a hijacked session stripping the credentials the owner signs in
with.
The route now goes through requireMfaManagementAuth, the same gate the
security-key removal uses, in a new "if-enrolled" mode. An account with a
second factor pays the full price on either transport — a freshly verified
cookie session, or a factor-proved X-Step-Up elevation on Bearer, so the
native client keeps the capability rather than being sent to the website.
An account with no second factor keeps the contract it had, because a gate
it can never satisfy is not a safeguard but a locked door in front of its
own credential list.
The elevation is spent immediately before the delete, so a foreign id or a
refused last credential does not burn a proof that then has to be minted
again. The route is added to the elevation allowlist with its reason, and
the either-factor enrolment test that was written out three times in the
API kit is now one function.
Five assertions slept a fixed 100 ms and then read the audit ledger. The write is
fire-and-forget, so on a busy runner the read lands first and the assertion fails
with "expected [] to include 'consumed'" — which reads as a broken refusal when
the refusal worked and only its breadcrumb was still in flight. CI failed on
exactly that while nothing in the branch touches step-up or MFA.
Replaced with a poll that returns the moment the reason appears and, on timeout,
asserts against the real list so a genuine regression still says what WAS
written rather than reporting a bare timeout.
The contract now names which factors satisfy the fresh-factor routes and which
do not, carries `satisfiesFreshFactor` on the mint response so a client can pick
the ceremony before spending a proof, and describes the options endpoint's two
ceremony kinds. The second-factor status read is documented as plain
authentication — it carries no credential material, so it needs no elevation.
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.
The three unit suites that stubbed `requireCookieAuth` / `requireFreshMfa`
directly now stub `requireMfaManagementAuth`, and the password-change suite
stubs the elevation revocation the route gained. Adds the unit checks that need
no database: the elevation TTL is pinned to the cookie path's step-up window so
the two cannot drift apart, the minted value is a prefixed CSPRNG secret whose
plaintext never reaches the row, and a value carrying another credential's
prefix is refused without costing a query.
Adds the structural guard that freezes the exact route set an elevation can
unlock, plus the behavioural suite that drives each threat case against a real
Postgres: a token alone mints nothing, an elevation minted for one token is
refused for another (same account included), a second redemption fails, a
concurrent redemption lets exactly one winner through, an expired one is
refused, an elevation never reaches requireAdmin, a wrong password is throttled
and audited without saying what was wrong, and the cookie flow is untouched.
The OpenAPI registry carries both new routes and names the accepting set in
prose, so the client implements against the contract rather than against a
description of it.
Marc-André Bombeck