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ZeroEcho/docs/pki-server-admin-https.md
Leo Galambos d7793e5c49 feat(pki-server): add secure administrative HTTPS API
Add the mutually authenticated administrative HTTPS server with strict
typed JSON, bounded request execution, multi-authority authorization,
approval enforcement, safe auditing and finite shutdown.

Reuse one long-lived realm and PKI session without duplicating backend
authority or operation semantics.
2026-08-04 20:16:34 +02:00

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ZeroEcho administrative HTTPS server

The pki-server distribution exposes the transport-neutral realm gateway through mutual TLS. One process opens one realm and one long-lived PKI session; all administrative execution uses the existing typed operation catalog and ServerOperationGateway.

Starting the server

zeroecho-pki-server --validate-config --config server-config.json
zeroecho-pki-server --config server-config.json

Use --help and --version for launcher information. Validation parses the strict versioned JSON and checks finite security bounds without opening a listener, realm, store, provider, or audit sink.

The loopback and production examples are pki-server-loopback-example.json and pki-server-production-example.json. They contain no credentials or key material. Replace every illustrative commitment and identity with provisioned values before use. The mapped principal must already exist in the durable server-control store and have explicit scoped grants; a certificate mapping establishes identity only and never grants authority.

TLS and authentication

Administrative access has no anonymous mode. The listener always requires a client certificate. The built-in jsse-pkcs12 TLS provider reads server identity and client trust stores from configured files, while passwords are resolved exclusively from named environment variables. Provider exceptions, aliases, references, certificate subjects, SANs, fingerprints, and paths are not returned to clients or written to request audit details.

Client certificates map to persisted principals through an exact SHA-256 certificate, canonical SPKI, or issuer-and-positive-serial commitment. Subject and SAN strings are not trust identities. An absent, ambiguous, expired, malformed, untrusted, or disabled mapping fails before typed operation decoding.

API

The listener exposes only:

GET  /health/live
GET  /health/ready
GET  /admin/v1/realm
GET  /admin/v1/operations
GET  /admin/v1/operations/{operationId}
POST /admin/v1/operations/{operationId}

No ACME or public certificate repository routes are part of this server. Administrative POST bodies are strict UTF-8 JSON containing version, optional authority and approval identities, an optional shortening deadline, and the closed argument object for one typed operation. Batch execution, file paths, raw DER, polymorphic class metadata, unknown keys, duplicate keys, and trailing JSON are rejected.

Responses are deterministic version-one JSON. They carry only safe typed results or stable failure codes. RECOVERY_REQUIRED and EXTERNAL_OUTCOME_UNKNOWN remain distinct; deadlines never claim rollback and never trigger automatic retry.

Capacity and shutdown

Transport workers, transport backlog, concurrent operation workers, waiting operation capacity, admitted requests, request body size, deadlines, and both shutdown periods are finite configuration values. Saturation never runs a request on the caller thread and a rejected request never invokes the gateway.

Shutdown first removes readiness and admission, stops listener acceptance, drains for the configured graceful period, cooperatively cancels remaining work, waits only for the forced period, then closes the one realm context. Already committed PKI changes remain committed.

Request correlation

Clients may supply X-ZeroEcho-Request-Id using 16128 ASCII letters, digits, underscore, or hyphen. Otherwise the server creates a random opaque identifier. It is correlation metadata—not an idempotency key, object identity, approval, or capability token.