fix(security): refuse consultation signups for accounts the caller doesn't own - #272
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…esn't own
POST /api/consultation/submit is the PUBLIC signup route (IP rate-limited
only), so the submitted email is unproven — anyone can type anyone's.
Creating records for a brand-new address is fine; operating on an address
that already has an account was not.
The route swallowed Clerk's form_identifier_exists ('proceed to DB/DrGreen')
and carried on against the existing account, ending in:
prisma.users.update({ where: { id: userId },
data: { drGreenClientId, tenantId } })
i.e. an anonymous caller could submit a victim's email and re-point that
victim's account at a Dr Green client the caller controls. Approving the
caller's own genuine ID then made the VICTIM's account read VERIFIED —
inherited by the purchase gate, the tenant-admin badge, and (once client
status webhooks are enabled) propagated in near real time.
Fix — ownership must be proven before the handler touches a pre-existing
account. Provable two ways only: Clerk minted a NEW account for that address
in this request (nobody held it), or the caller holds a session for it.
- lib/security/email-ownership.ts: the rule as a pure, tested module
(emailsMatch + canClaimAccount).
- Route: session email read Clerk-direct (never getCurrentUser — this path
must keep working for anonymous visitors and must not throw on
unprovisioned/multi-tenant accounts), preferring the primary address since
the value is an ownership claim.
- Two choke points now answer 409 'sign in first, then complete your
consultation': the Clerk-exists path and the local-existing-row path
(legacy/webhook-provisioned users with no live Clerk account).
- The linking write re-asserts ownership, so a future path that sets userId
another way cannot silently re-open this.
Unchanged for every legitimate flow: new signups (Clerk mints the account),
and signed-in customers completing their own consultation. The only newly
refused case is the attack — an anonymous caller submitting an address that
already belongs to someone.
Tests: rule table incl. both refusal cases, plus a static regression guard
(same idiom as the Article 9 persistence check) asserting the route keeps the
linking write gated and never restores the swallow-and-proceed path.
📝 WalkthroughWalkthroughThe consultation submission route now resolves the Clerk session email and enforces ownership before using existing Clerk or local accounts. Dr Green client linking requires proven ownership. New helpers and regression tests cover normalization and account-claim decisions. ChangesEmail ownership security
Estimated code review effort: 3 (Moderate) | ~20 minutes Merge Risk: 🔴 Critical · up to The current implementation can still let an unauthenticated caller reassign an existing customer's consultation and verification linkage without proving ownership, potentially affecting account status and regulated identity checks. Merge should be blocked until ownership requires a verified, matching signed-in session for existing accounts. Sequence Diagram(s)sequenceDiagram
participant ConsultationSubmitRoute
participant Clerk
participant LocalUserDatabase
participant DrGreen
ConsultationSubmitRoute->>Clerk: Resolve currentUser email
ConsultationSubmitRoute->>Clerk: Create or access submitted account
Clerk-->>ConsultationSubmitRoute: Account result or existing-account error
ConsultationSubmitRoute->>ConsultationSubmitRoute: Check canClaimAccount
ConsultationSubmitRoute->>LocalUserDatabase: Check existing local user
ConsultationSubmitRoute->>DrGreen: Create consultation client
ConsultationSubmitRoute->>LocalUserDatabase: Link drGreenClientId when ownership is proven
🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5✅ Passed checks (5 passed)
✨ Finishing Touches📝 Generate docstrings
🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)
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Inline comments:
In `@nextjs_space/lib/security/email-ownership.ts`:
- Around line 47-53: Update canClaimAccount so ownership requires a non-null
verified session email matching submittedEmail, removing accountJustCreated from
the rule. Update callerOwnsAccount usage in
nextjs_space/app/api/consultation/submit/route.ts lines 283-290 to pass only the
verified-session ownership inputs, and replace the affected acceptance test in
nextjs_space/tests/unit/email-ownership.test.ts lines 59-67 to cover rejection
without a verified matching session.
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nextjs_space/app/api/consultation/submit/route.tsnextjs_space/lib/security/email-ownership.tsnextjs_space/tests/unit/email-ownership.test.ts
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The first cut of this fix was defective, and the security review caught it:
`callerOwnsAccount` was computed as
canClaimAccount({ accountJustCreated: Boolean(clerkUser), ... })
AFTER both paths that reach it had already forced it true — the Clerk-exists
path returns 409 unless the session matches, and the success path sets
clerkUser. So `if (existingUser && !callerOwnsAccount)` and the guard on the
linking write were dead code: present, correctly named, never able to fire.
Worse, the abstraction itself was wrong. 'The identity provider just minted
an account' proves nobody held the CLERK identity; it proves nothing about a
local users row that predates the request (legacy import, or a dropped Clerk
delete-webhook leaving an orphan). That left the mirror-image attack open:
target an address with a local row but no Clerk account, Clerk's createUser
succeeds for the attacker, and the handler adopts and re-points the
pre-existing row — the same outcome via the opposite precondition.
Corrected:
- Ownership of anything pre-existing is now provable ONE way: an
authenticated session for that address. canClaimAccount is deleted rather
than fixed — a helper that offers 'freshly minted' as a route to ownership
is a footgun; lib/security/email-ownership.ts keeps only emailsMatch, and
documents why the removed rule was unsound.
- ONE choke point (`existingUser && !sessionOwnsEmail`) sits ahead of every
write in the handler — questionnaire, Dr Green client and linking update
all follow it. The linking write documents that invariant instead of
re-testing it, since a second check there would again be unfirable.
- getSessionEmail now requires the primary address to be VERIFIED, so the
guarantee does not rest on Clerk's verified-primary invariant holding.
- The P2002 race branch documents why the row it adopts is necessarily the
webhook mirror of the account this request just minted.
Tests: the static regex guard is gone — it passed against the vulnerable
code, which is the whole lesson. Replaced with
consultation-submit-ownership.test.ts, which drives the real handler and
asserts NO write (users, questionnaire, Dr Green) happens for each refusal
case, including the mirror-image one the first fix missed and an unverified
primary address; plus positive controls for new signups and signed-in
customers.
A no-Clerk-account legacy user who lands on the 409 can sign in with the
account Clerk just created and re-submit — refused, not locked out.
CI caught two of my own defects on the previous commit: - Lint max-lines: my comments pushed route.ts to 815 lines over the repo's 800 cap. getVerifiedSessionEmail moves to lib/security/session-email.ts (its own concern anyway — email-ownership.ts stays pure and Clerk-free) and the invariant comment at the linking write is trimmed. 776 lines now. - The new behavioural tests all returned 400, not 409: the submission fixture omitted countryCode, which consultationSchema requires. The 400 at least proved the tests drive the real handler and the real schema.
…eover
Second review pass found the fix closed the single-request exploit but not a
two-request version of it, using the very recovery path the previous commit
advertised as benign:
1. anonymous POST with the target address -> gate refuses 409, no local or
Dr Green write. BUT Clerk has already minted an account for that
address, because createUser ran before the gate. Clerk performs no
mailbox-control check here; the password is the submitter's own.
2. caller signs in with that account.
3. same POST again -> the session now satisfies sessionOwnsEmail, the gate
passes, and the pre-existing row is re-pointed at the caller's Dr Green
client. Original outcome, no human interaction, fully scriptable.
Fixes:
- The users lookup + ownership gate now run BEFORE the Clerk call. An address
that already has a local row is refused without minting anything, so there
is no account to sign into on a second attempt — and no squatting on a
stranger's address as a side effect either.
- The P2002 race branch no longer asserts an invariant in a comment; it
enforces it. A raced row is adopted only when it IS the mirror of the Clerk
account this request minted (id match) or the caller is signed in as the
address. Another writer landing a row for the same address in that window
is refused rather than adopted.
- 409 copy no longer implies 'sign up again' (which is indistinguishable from
the attack); it points at sign-in or support.
Accepted trade-off, stated plainly: the real owner of a local row with no
Clerk account can no longer self-serve here. Restoring that needs a flow
proving mailbox control (Clerk verification / password reset), not a form
that re-links an account to whoever fills it in.
Tests: refusal cases now also assert createUser was never called — without
that, a 409 is just step one of the chain above. New case covers the raced
row this request did not create.
Still unverified and worth confirming empirically (flagged by the reviewer):
whether Clerk's Backend-API createUser marks the address verified. The
reorder makes the fix hold either way, which is why it was chosen over
depending on that answer.
5 tasks
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What this fixes
POST /api/consultation/submitis the public signup route (unauthenticated, IP rate-limited 5/60s), so the submitted email is unproven — anyone can type anyone's. Creating records for a brand-new address is fine. Operating on an address that already has an account was not.The route swallowed Clerk's
form_identifier_exists("proceed to DB/DrGreen") and carried on against the existing account, ending in:Impact: an anonymous caller submits a victim's email → the victim's
usersrow is re-pointed at a Dr Green client the caller controls. The caller then uploads their own genuine ID — nothing looks fraudulent to a Dr Green reviewer — and on approval the victim's account reads VERIFIED: inherited by the storefront purchase gate, the tenant-admin badge, and, once client-status webhooks are enabled, propagated in near real time. On a regulated cannabis platform that is an identity-verification bypass.Pre-existing; found during the security review of #271 and flagged there as the blocker for enabling Phase 3 webhooks.
The fix
Ownership of anything that already exists is provable one way only: an authenticated session for that address — and the gate runs before Clerk is touched.
That ordering is load-bearing. Two earlier iterations of this fix were defective and both were caught in review; the design below is what survived:
usersrow that predates the request (legacy import, dropped delete-webhook). The resulting guard was unfirable by construction, and the mirror-image attack (local row exists, Clerk mints happily) walked straight through.Final shape:
lib/security/email-ownership.ts— pure, dependency-freeemailsMatch. ThecanClaimAccounthelper was deleted rather than repaired: a helper offering "freshly minted" as a route to ownership is a footgun.lib/security/session-email.ts— the Clerk read, requiring the primary AND verified address, so the guarantee doesn't rest on Clerk's verified-primary invariant holding.Blast radius
Verification
Typecheck · Lint · Buildgreen;consultation-submit-ownership.test.ts7/7 andemail-ownership.test.ts3/3 (191 files passed). The Test job's red is the inherited coverage gate onapi-auth/encryption/drgreen-webhook-verify, failing on main before this branch.Open, non-blocking: whether Clerk's Backend-API
createUsermarks an address verified is unconfirmed. The reorder was chosen specifically so the fix holds either way, rather than depending on that answer — worth confirming empirically.Test plan
drGreenClientId/tenantIduntouchedSequencing
Merge before setting
DRGREEN_WEBHOOK_SECRET/PARTNER_STATUS_WEBHOOK_*(Phase 3, DrGreenNft/dr-green-backend#554 — draft pending approval). Independent of #271; either order.