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Why an event bridge

A grant is issued against the facts at the time: the business was active, the case was open, the principal was employed. Facts change after issuance. A provider that monitors a business learns it was dissolved; an identity provider learns a session was revoked. The event bridge lets those systems tell the auth service, so the grants that relied on the old facts stop working. The bridge has three rules:
  1. Only verified events count. A delivery that does not verify is refused with 401, counted, and never acted on.
  2. An event is acted on at most once. Every event id is claimed in a replay store before anything happens.
  3. Nothing is inferred. A verified event that no mapping rule matches is logged, counted and ignored. It never widens or narrows a grant by default.
The bridge is off unless EVENT_BRIDGE_ENABLED=true. With it off every event bridge route answers 404 (ingestion) or 403 FEATURE_DISABLED (registration), and nothing else in the auth service changes.

Registering a source

Sources belong to one developer and are managed with the developer API key.

SSF/CAEP transmitter

A transmitter pushes Security Event Tokens (RFC 8417) to the receiver, as in RFC 8935 push delivery. Register its issuer and its public keys, inline or by URL:
The response carries ingestUrl (/v1/event-bridge/ssf/<id>). audience defaults to that URL; set it to what the transmitter puts in aud if it differs. jwksUri is fetched through the same outbound guard as webhook URLs (no private hosts in production), cached for five minutes and refetched at most every 30 seconds when a token names an unknown kid. Inline jwks must contain public keys only. A SET is accepted only when all of these hold, and each failure has its own reason code: The subject is read from the SSF sub_id claim, or from an event’s subject member for transmitters on earlier CAEP drafts.

Generic signed webhook

For systems that do not speak SSF, register a webhook source:
The response includes secret once. It is stored encrypted with VAULT_ENCRYPTION_KEY, bound to the source id. The sender signs the timestamp and the exact body bytes:
This is the scheme the auth service uses for its own outbound webhooks (X-Grantex-Signature-V2), so one signer serves both directions. The body is JSON:
The signature is checked before the body is parsed; then the timestamp must be within toleranceSeconds of the receiver’s clock, in either direction (timestamp_out_of_window). Several sha256= values may be sent, comma separated, while the sender changes secrets. Rotation. POST /v1/event-sources/<id>/rotate-secret returns a new secret. The previous one keeps verifying for previousSecretTtlSeconds (default one day, at most seven). Pass 0 for a leaked secret so it stops immediately.

Replay protection

Each verified delivery claims (source, event id) — the SET jti or the webhook id — before it is processed: A replay outside the webhook window, or of a SET older than maxAgeSeconds, is refused before it reaches the replay store.

Responses

  • 202 {"status": "unmapped" | "applied" | "observed" | "duplicate"}
  • 401 {"err": "<reason>", "description": "…", "code": "EVENT_UNVERIFIABLE"} for every verification failure, including an unknown or disabled source (so source ids cannot be probed)
  • 415 for the wrong media type
  • 404 when the bridge is off for the source’s developer
  • 5xx when processing failed; the receipt is left failed so the sender’s retry is processed again

Observability

Every refused delivery also logs alert: "event_bridge_verification_failure" with the source id and reason, never the payload or signature. Alert rules are in deploy/prometheus/event-bridge-alerts.yml.

Settings

What this does not defend against

  • A transmitter whose signing key is stolen can send events that verify. Scope what its events can do with mapping rules, and disable the source (PATCH /v1/event-sources/<id> with {"status": "disabled"}) if its key leaks.
  • Events are only as timely as the sender. The bridge bounds how old an accepted event may be, not how late the sender is.
  • A disabled source’s events are refused, not queued: re-enable it and have the sender retransmit.
Last modified on September 15, 2026