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pad/internal
xarmian 73ae90236a fix(server): narrow the gate, stop refusing natural-shape fields (BUG-2803)
Codex round 6 plus one measurement of my own. Three changes, one of them
a revert of something I got wrong in the previous commit.

1. THE GATE COST TOO MUCH, so it is narrower and still sound. The
previous commit gated the walk on "does the raw body contain a
backslash", which is correct but catches every body carrying nested JSON
(each `\"` is a backslash). Measured on a ~377 KB import-shaped body:
60106 allocs/op with that gate versus 30073 with the walk disabled — the
walk was running on ordinary traffic.

The gate is now the four bytes that begin any \u escape for a character
below U+0100. The argument: to manufacture the six-character NUL escape
inside a decoded string, each of its characters arrives either literally
from the raw bytes — in which case the raw contains the escape, which
begins with that prefix — or from a \u escape of its own, and the three
characters involved (backslash U+005C, 'u' U+0075, '0' U+0030) all sit
below U+0100, so those escapes begin with it too. Back to 30073
allocs/op, identical to the walk-disabled build.

That argument is the same KIND of reasoning that was wrong two rounds
ago, so it does not stand on its own: a differential test runs the gated
function against an UNGATED walk over a corpus built to attack it —
oblique backslash, upper-case hex, an escaped 'u', an escaped '0', a
doubled backslash — and fails on any disagreement. It also asserts the
corpus contains both answers, since agreement over a one-sided corpus
would be vacuous. Reverting the gate to the old substring fails it.

2. THE CHECK REFUSED THE NATURAL SHAPE OF ITS OWN FIELDS. `tags` and
`fields` accept both a JSON-encoded STRING and their natural array/object
form, and the walk propagated "this subtree is JSON-encoded" into
containers — so a free-form tag whose whole value happened to be a JSON
document was refused, though nothing re-parses it. Measured: refused
before, accepted now, while the JSON-encoded spelling of the same field
is still refused. The flag now marks only a direct STRING child of a
listed key.

3. REVERTED: I wired the three LOGIN paths to the User-Agent sanitiser
last commit, before reading store.CreateSession. It HASHES the header
and stores no text — the round-5 enumeration named "sessions.user_agent"
and I took the name for a column. The change would have been actively
harmful: login would store sha256(sanitised) while middleware_auth still
compares sha256(RAW), so every session from a client with a non-UTF-8
User-Agent would fail validation. A sink named in a review is a pointer
to verify, not a finding. The real sink is activities.user_agent, from
three document paths and the connected-apps revoke.

4. And the wiring leg codex asked for, on that real sink: a request
through the router with a malformed header, reading the STORED value out
of the activities row, with a control asserting an ordinary header is
kept VERBATIM. Unwiring the production call site fails it; the helper's
unit test does not notice.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011T365kP1N9V88y15HxL4YN
2026-08-28 17:26:05 +00:00
..
2026-03-26 01:52:36 +00:00