Impersonation borrows the customer's portal session; this is access to their
installation, which is a different thing and now a different button.
Nextcloud has no passwordless admin jump, so this does the only honest thing it
offers: it resets OUR managed admin account inside that installation and hands
the credentials over once. The customer's own accounts are untouched, and the
next request sets a new password again.
- New capability instances.adminlogin, Owner and Admin only — stronger than
impersonation, because it hands over control rather than a session.
- The operator's own password is required every time, rate-limited: taking over
a customer's installation is not something an unattended browser should manage
on its own.
- The reset runs on the provisioning worker (it owns the tunnel and the Proxmox
credentials); the console polls a handoff token, so the credentials never
enter a Livewire snapshot.
- A silent instance is reported as such instead of appearing to succeed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Reworked after a design consultation with Codex, which pushed back on my first
proposal in three useful ways.
Ownership and rights:
- vpn.manage split into vpn.view.all and vpn.manage.all. Seeing an access is
not managing it, and neither is holding its private key.
- Record-level rules live in VpnPeerPolicy, not in permissions: an access
belongs to a person, and ownership is what grants sight of it. Every operator
reaches the page, but sees only their own unless they may see all.
- Issuing an access is not self-service — it reaches the management network, so
it needs vpn.manage.all even for oneself.
- New Developer role: sees everything, manages nothing. Writing code does not
imply authority over other people's access.
- kind (staff|host|system) replaces a null user_id that had to mean two
different things at once.
Config storage, opt-in per access:
- Downloading is owner-only — explicitly NOT for view.all or manage.all. An
admin who needs access revokes this one and issues their own, which keeps the
record of who holds what honest.
- The password is asked on EVERY retrieval, rate-limited. Laravel's
password.confirm keeps a 15-minute session stamp, which would authorise
unlimited later downloads from an unattended browser.
- Stored under VPN_CONFIG_KEY, not APP_KEY: a leaked application key must not
also hand over the management network. Purged on revocation and when a staff
member is revoked — console taken away, tunnel left open was the worst case.
- The plaintext never enters a Livewire snapshot (the page polls every five
seconds); the component carries an opaque handle instead.
Also: copy button works without HTTPS again (navigator.clipboard only exists in
a secure context, so over http it silently did nothing), plus config download
as a file and a QR code for the mobile apps.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>