secrets-and-pki: add real evidence for the asymmetric-trust and cert-renewal claims
Step 5 re-audit. Caddyfile contrast (skip-verify default vs Vault's real cert verification block) shown as text, IP/domain genericized. The cert-rebuild hook script's real 19-day-expiry story is shown as a screenshot instead of a text excerpt - the script has a hardcoded P12 password in its body, so a screenshot with that one line blurred shows the actual guard logic in full without a text-copy risk of the password ever landing in a file.
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@@ -57,7 +57,28 @@ None of these ever call the Vault API themselves — every one of them goes thro
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| Bootstrap auth | Rare, human-initiated | Operator uses a root token to mint new AppRole credentials or update policies — never part of any workload's runtime path |
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> [!IMPORTANT]
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> **The one deliberately-asymmetric trust decision**: every other backend connection inside the internal zone described in [`docs/dns-naming.md`](dns-naming.md) skips certificate verification on the reverse-proxy hop (still encrypted, just doesn't check identity) — a pragmatic tradeoff for low-stakes internal traffic between containers that already share a trusted network. The connection to Vault is the single exception: the proxy verifies Vault's certificate for real, against a dedicated internal CA cert. Given that Vault is the root of trust for every other secret in the fleet, treating it identically to a media-server backend would have been the actual mistake — the asymmetry here is the correct call, not an inconsistency.
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> **The one deliberately-asymmetric trust decision**: every other backend connection inside the internal zone described in [`docs/dns-naming.md`](dns-naming.md) skips certificate verification on the reverse-proxy hop (still encrypted, just doesn't check identity) — a pragmatic tradeoff for low-stakes internal traffic between containers that already share a trusted network. The connection to Vault is the single exception: the proxy verifies Vault's certificate for real, against a dedicated internal CA cert. Given that Vault is the root of trust for every other secret in the fleet, treating it identically to a media-server backend would have been the actual mistake — the asymmetry here is the correct call, not an inconsistency. This is the real config contrast, not a description of it — every other backend uses this:
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>
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> ```
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> handle @trusted {
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> reverse_proxy https://{args.0} {
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> transport http { tls_insecure_skip_verify }
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> }
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> }
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> ```
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>
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> Vault's own block, specifically, does not:
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>
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> ```
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> handle @trusted {
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> reverse_proxy https://[Vault's IP]:8200 {
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> transport http {
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> tls_trust_pool file { pem_file /etc/caddy/certs/pki_int_ca.crt }
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> tls_server_name vault.[app-to-app zone]
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> }
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> }
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> }
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> ```
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## What's protected
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@@ -69,6 +90,10 @@ None of these ever call the Vault API themselves — every one of them goes thro
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| Alerting | Root-token use or permission-denied bursts trigger an alert through [`docs/notifications.md`](notifications.md)'s pipeline |
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| Cert renewal reliability | Technitium's DNS-over-TLS/DoH cert bundle auto-rebuilds whenever Vault Agent re-renders its certs, guarded to skip unless under 7 days from expiry. This closed a real prior gap: the rebuild never used to happen automatically, and an expired cert was silently served for 19 days before anyone caught it. |
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This is the real hook script, not a description of it — the full guard logic, the actual PKCS12 rebuild, and the service restart it triggers (password redacted, everything else genuine):
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## Access model
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One policy per host, scoped to exactly what that host needs — no host's credentials can read another host's secrets. Every host-scoped policy follows the same shape: a shared grant for lightweight self-registration, plus a private grant with full read/write access only to that host's own namespace. Onboarding a new host copies this shape rather than reinventing it — and the shared grant does *not* automatically imply the private one, so both get verified before assuming a host is fully provisioned. This same "shared + private" pattern shows up again in [`docs/iac-pipeline.md`](iac-pipeline.md)'s tag-driven Ansible model — a deliberate consistency, not a coincidence.
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