Files
mcias/PROJECT.md
Kyle Isom a80242ae3e Add HTMX-based UI templates and handlers for account and audit management
- Introduced `web/templates/` for HTMX-fragmented pages (`dashboard`, `accounts`, `account_detail`, `error_fragment`, etc.).
- Implemented UI routes for account CRUD, audit log display, and login/logout with CSRF protection.
- Added `internal/ui/` package for handlers, CSRF manager, session validation, and token issuance.
- Updated documentation to include new UI features and templates directory structure.
- Security: Double-submit CSRF cookies, constant-time HMAC validation, login password/Argon2id re-verification at all steps to prevent bypass.
2026-03-11 18:02:53 -07:00

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# MCIAS
We are building a single-signon and IAM system for personal projects.
## Background
The Metacircular Identity and Access System (MCIAS) provides standard
tools for user and access management among metacircular and wntrmute
systems.
In particular, the target audience is a single developer building
personal apps. It should be easy to use MCIAS to facilitate onboarding
friends onto these personal apps.
MCIAS is a foundational security and identity system. As such, the
highest priorities are for security, robustness, and correctness.
Performance is secondary, and can be tuned later.
## Specifications
+ Applications should be able to either do an interactive login, using a
username/password (and potentially a TOTP), or present a token.
+ Applications should be able to renew the token, which would nominally
expire after some period (defaulting to maybe 30 days).
+ There are two kinds of users: human and system accounts.
+ System accounts can only present a token; they have a single token
associated with that account at a time.
+ User accounts have roles associated with them.
+ Users with the admin role can issue tokens for any app, or users with
the role named the same as a service account can issue tokens for that
service account.
+ Admin users can also revoke tokens for a service account.
+ Service accounts (and users with the a role named the same as the
service account) can also retrieve Postgres database credentials for
the service account.
+ Human accounts should eventually support FIDO logins and Yubikey auth,
but the first pass only needs username, password, and optional TOTP.
## Technical details
+ User passwords will be stored using Argon2id (PHC format), meeting
OWASP 2023 recommended parameters (time=3, memory=64 MiB, threads=4).
+ The service account tokens and user/password authentication can be
used to obtain a JWT, if that is appropriate.
+ All authentication events should be logged.
+ This service should use the packages contained in
git.wntrmute.dev/kyle/goutils for logging etc.
+ The database should be sqlite.
+ Modern cryptography should be used. Preference should be given to
Ed25519 as the public algorithm for signatures, for example.
## Interfaces
+ The primary interface will be an REST API over HTTPS. TLS security is
critical for this.
+ We will also need to build client libraries in several languages
later on.
+ There are four command line tools associated with MCIAS:
+ mciassrv is the authentication server.
+ mciasctl is the tool for admins to create and manage accounts, issue
or revoke tokens, and manage postgres database credentials.
+ mciasdb is the offline database maintenance tool for break-glass
recovery, bootstrap, and direct SQLite operations.
+ mciasgrpcctl is the gRPC admin CLI companion (mirrors mciasctl
over gRPC).
## Notes
+ We need an explicit security model.
+ This is a system for small, personal services. Manual user lifecycle
managment is acceptable and expected. Federation is an explicit
nongoal.
+ Strong testing is a requirement.