Yesterday's drill proved a retained escrow package opens a set-aside store and
restores planted files byte-identical, while this agent answered the customer's
correct code with "the recovery code did not open the sealed bundle". Nothing had
ever tried the retained packages, so a correct-but-earlier code and a mistype were
genuinely indistinguishable.
OffsiteKeyRecoverer gains an optional FetchRetained, consulted ONLY after the
current package refuses, so the ordinary recovery pays nothing for it and cannot
fail because of it. A match returns ErrCodeOpensRetained wrapped in a
RetainedOpenedError carrying the supersession date - no material, no code, no
password. The local API answers 422: a FIFTH status added to the R-224 switch,
never a restructuring of it.
Fail-safe in every direction. Nil fetcher, a hub too old for the route (404 is a
clean "none"), a transport failure, a malformed package: each leaves the original
refusal standing. Attempts bounded at 6 because each unwrap is ~1s of scrypt.
Seven tests with REAL age crypto - the two situations are indistinguishable AT
THE UNWRAP, so a faked unwrap would prove nothing. Red-proof asserted applied:
remove the retained lookup and the fail-closed wrong-code error returns, which is
the lie in those exact words.
A hub the agent could not reach was reported to the customer as a bad recovery
code. Measured live 2026-08-05 (CAMPAIGN-11 F3): hub firewalled off, a CORRECT
current code, and the customer told it did not open their package — in 0.0556s
against ~1.0s for a real unseal. No unseal was attempted.
The discriminator existed here and this boundary threw it away: recover.go
fails at four distinguishable points and the local-api handler had cases for
two, with a default answering 'the recovery code did not open the sealed
bundle, OR the bundle could not be fetched'.
escrow.ErrBundleFetch now joins the fetch leg and the handler routes it to 502
with its own words — the code was NOT used. 502 not 4xx: the request was not
bad, an upstream dependency failed. Four situations, four statuses: 502 fetch /
400 fetched-and-refused / 404 no bundle / 409 predates the field. The
controller classifies on the STATUS and never parses the sentence.
A GREEN TEST NAMED THIS DEFECT AND DID NOT PREVENT IT.
TestRecoverOffsiteRepoPassword_FetchErrorIsDistinct has said since v0.125.0
that the operator must not be sent to re-read their code because the hub was
unreachable — and passed throughout, because it asserted this package's error
STRING one layer below the merge, and a string is not something a caller can
branch on. Re-pointed at the sentinel, with a consequence-level twin asserting
the status.
Red-proofs: removing the %w join fails the sentinel test; deleting the handler
case makes fetch and wrong-code both answer 400 with the wrong-code sentence.
29 packages ok, vet clean, agent gates OK.
Link 7's only production caller was a --selftest reading R from an env var. Link 8 did not
exist: that selftest writes the whole bundle JSON and its success message named
"tunnel_token + pbs_token" -- accurate when written, a misstatement since v0.77.0 sealed the
offsite repository password into the same bundle. It now names what THIS bundle carried and
what it did not.
POST /escrow/recover-offsite-password: the controller supplies R, the agent fetches this
host's own blob from the hub (self-scoped by the per-host key), unseals it, and returns ONLY
the offsite restic repository password plus its sha256. Not the tunnel token, not the PBS
token, not the WG key -- the controller is a trust tier down and needs none of them.
R: in memory for one call, cleared on every path, never on disk, never in argv, never logged,
never echoed. A test redirects TMPDIR and asserts the tree is EMPTY afterwards -- emptiness
rather than a content scan, because a content scan is defeated by a later call overwriting the
leaked file, which is how the first version of that test passed its own red-proof while R sat
on disk.
Three distinct outcomes: no blob (404), a bundle that opens but predates the field (409), a
code that does not open it (400, fail-closed at the KDF, nothing written).
The wiring is asserted by an AST walk from func main() to the Options field, not by grep.
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