Oxicloud/docs/architecture/magic-link-auth.md

Magic-Link External Authentication

OxiCloud supports sharing resources with people who do not yet have an account on the instance, via per-email invitations and per-email sign-in links. Recipients are provisioned lazily as external users and authenticate exclusively through one-time URLs delivered by email, until they later set a password or link an OIDC identity.

This page is the architectural overview of the magic-link mechanism specifically. For the overall identity / login / registration model — what credential slots a user has, which login paths are available, anti-enumeration behaviour — see the canonical Authentication model page. For configuration knobs, see Environment Variables. For how grants are evaluated, see ReBAC Authorization.

Why this exists

Two scenarios are not covered by username/password or OIDC:

1. Sharing with someone who is not yet an OxiCloud user. The sharer should be able to type an email address into the share modal and let the server handle the rest.
2. A pre-existing external user has lost their bookmark. They never had a password — the only way to get back in is a fresh magic link to the address on file.

Both are handled by the same magic-link primitive: a single-use, time-limited token issued out of band (by email) that exchanges for a session on redemption.

Two flows

Invitation flow                           Login-via-email flow
───────────────                           ────────────────────
Alice fills share modal                   Bob hits /login, types his email
       │                                         │
POST /api/grants                          POST /api/auth/magic-link/send
{ subject.type: "email" }                 { email: "bob@example.com" }
       │                                         │
resolve_or_create_recipient               find user by email
  ├─ found  → reuse                       (no creation here)
  └─ new    → User::new_external                 │
       │                                         │
mint token (resource_type/id set)         mint token (NULL resource)
       │                                         │
queue invitation email                    queue sign-in email
       │                                         │
return GrantDto (201)                     return uniform 200
       │                                         │
       └──────────────┬──────────────────────────┘
                      │
              recipient clicks /magic/v1/{token}
                      │
               validate, mark used, issue cookies
                      │
       ┌──────────────┴──────────────────────────┐
       ↓                                         ↓
Redirect to /#/files/folder/{id}        Redirect to /#/sharedwithme
(resource target)                       (no resource target)

The same redemption endpoint serves both — the only difference is the landing redirect, which is decided by whether magic_link_tokens.resource_id IS NULL.

Identity model for external users

A user is magic-link-eligible if and only if they have no other authentication method configured. The single source of truth is User::has_login_credential():

State	password_hash	oidc_subject	Eligible?
External, freshly invited	__EXTERNAL_NO_PASSWORD__	NULL	yes
External who set a password	real Argon2 hash	NULL	no
External who linked OIDC	__OIDC_NO_PASSWORD__	set	no
Internal, password	real Argon2 hash	NULL	no
Internal, OIDC-only	__OIDC_NO_PASSWORD__	set	no

The placeholder strings (__EXTERNAL_NO_PASSWORD__, __OIDC_NO_PASSWORD__) are an acknowledged smell. A future refactor introduces an auth.user_auth_methods side-table with one row per (user_id, method_type); the migration touches the body of has_login_credential() only.

The eligibility rule rules out one specific bypass: an internal user with a password cannot be signed in via a magic link sent to their mailbox. Mailbox ownership is not a substitute for the password — that distinction matters when mailboxes are easier to compromise than passwords (mail-forwarding rules, shared aliases, etc.).

Username and display

• External users get username = normalised_email. Login forms accept username OR email; lookup tries username first, falls back to email.
• The auth.users.username column was widened from 32 to 254 chars (RFC 5321 maximum) when this work landed.
• auth.users.given_name and auth.users.family_name are TEXT NULL — populated from OIDC claims at JIT provisioning; external users get NULL initially and can fill them in later.
• Home folder name ("My Folder - alice") is not renamed when username changes — it was display text at creation; the folder is semantically owned by user_id.

Email normalisation

Every email crossing the boundary into the DB or a rate-limit key goes through domain::services::email_normalize::normalize_email:

1. Trim whitespace.
2. Split on the last @.
3. Lowercase the local part.
4. Punycode-encode the domain via idna::domain_to_ascii.

So Alice@Example.COM, alice@example.com , and alice@münchen.de all map to a stable ASCII form before storage or comparison. Gmail's +tag and . insensitivities are deliberately not special-cased — addresses are treated as opaque strings post-normalisation.

Token lifecycle

                    ┌─────────┐
   (insert) ─────►  │ pending │  ─── redeem ──►  ┌──────┐
                    │         │                  │ used │
                    └────┬────┘                  └──────┘
                         │
                  (sweeper, TTL)
                         ↓
                    ┌─────────┐
                    │ expired │
                    └─────────┘

auth.magic_link_tokens mirrors auth.device_codes exactly: PostgreSQL ENUM status, 32-byte CSPRNG token in base64url, single-use via UPDATE … WHERE status = 'pending', partial index on expires_at WHERE pending, and a background sweeper that promotes pending-and-overdue rows to expired.

Salient properties:

• Single-use — second redemption attempt rejected as "link already used".
• TTL-enforced — expires_at < NOW() → "link expired". TTL is OXICLOUD_MAGIC_LINK_TTL_HOURS, default 24.
• Token in path, not query — GET /magic/v1/{token} so the secret stays out of Referer headers.
• 302 immediately on success — the URL is replaced in the address bar before the user can navigate away or screenshot it.
• Optional resource target — resource_type + resource_id columns, with a CHECK ((resource_type IS NULL) = (resource_id IS NULL)) constraint to make the two-or-neither rule explicit.

User-profile visibility rule (GET /api/users/{id})

The endpoint is the cornerstone of the share modal's "who is this person" rendering. Its visibility rule is intentionally narrow, evaluated in this order:

1. Self — caller asks for their own profile.
2. Shared-grant relationship — caller and target share at least one access grant in either direction. Applies to internal AND external callers; this is what lets a recipient resolve the granter's name/photo in the SharedWithMe view.
3. External lockout — if the caller is external and rule 2 did not match, stop and return 404.
4. Directory exposure — if the target is internal AND OXICLOUD_EXPOSE_SYSTEM_USERS=true, return the target.
5. Admin — admins can always look up any user.
6. 404 — otherwise. Same response as "user does not exist" (anti-enumeration).

A per-caller sliding-window rate limit (60 req/minute) guards against an attacker iterating UUIDs against rule 2 with a stale JWT. The visibility rule alone is sufficient defence-in-principle; the rate limit makes the attack uneconomical.

Audit events

Every denial or rejection in the magic-link path emits a structured event on the audit tracing target. Operators tail target=audit for compliance and incident response.

Event	Reasons (subset)	Where it fires
authz.denied	permission missing	AuthorizationEngine::require
auth.login	user_not_found, bad_password, account_deactivated	AuthApplicationService::login
auth.magic_link_send	sent, no_account, has_credential, account_deactivated, malformed_email, rate_limited_ip, rate_limited_email	MagicLinkInviteService::send_login_link and the handler
auth.magic_link_redeem	redeemed, token_not_found, token_used, token_expired, account_deactivated	MagicLinkInviteService::redeem
user_profile.rejected	external_no_relationship, target_external_hidden, target_hidden	AuthApplicationService::get_user_profile
grants.email_invite	rate_limited	grant_handler::create_grant
authz.external_user_blocked	internal_only_surface	require_internal_user_layer (CalDAV / CardDAV / WebDAV)
auth.nc_basic_rejected	external_user	basic_auth_middleware (NC Basic-Auth surface)
auth.app_password_create_rejected	external_user	create_app_password
groups.search_rejected	external_user	search_groups

The convention (see CLAUDE.md § Authorization) is: any branch that denies or rejects a request must emit an audit event before returning the user-facing response. Anti-enumeration is preserved at the API surface (uniform response shape, 404 not 403), and the true reason is recorded only in the audit channel.

Rate limits

Three caps protect the magic-link surface. Each is a moka sliding-window counter; the keys differ.

Cap	Keyed on	Default	Env var	Visible on hit?
Per-sharer email-invite	caller_id	50 / hour	OXICLOUD_MAGIC_LINK_INVITE_PER_CALLER_PER_HOUR	yes (429 + Retry-After)
Per-target-email send	normalised email	5 / hour	OXICLOUD_MAGIC_LINK_SEND_PER_EMAIL_PER_HOUR	no (uniform 200)
Per-source-IP send (backstop)	trusted client IP	200 / hour	OXICLOUD_MAGIC_LINK_SEND_PER_IP_PER_HOUR	no (uniform 200)

Two distinct visibility regimes:

• Authenticated callers see 429 when they hit a cap, because their own rate-limit state leaks nothing about other accounts. The invite cap is in this regime.
• Anonymous callers never see 429 on the send endpoint — the status itself would become an enumeration oracle ("this email has been probed recently → probably has an account"). The two send caps are silently absorbed: the response stays the uniform 200, and the real reason is recorded in the audit channel.

An authenticated caller resending to themselves bypasses both send caps. The bypass signal is "presence (not validity) of an Authorization header or access cookie" — a stale-cookie holder gets a 401 from any other endpoint they touch, so the worst-case bypass is narrow.

The per-IP backstop respects OXICLOUD_TRUST_PROXY_CIDR for client IP resolution: behind a reverse proxy, the upstream IP from X-Forwarded-For (leftmost) is used; without a configured trusted CIDR, the proxy's IP would be used and the backstop would effectively become a single bucket.

Defence-in-depth boundary protections

External users are a new principal kind, and several pre-existing surfaces would over-share once they appeared. The protections fall in two layers — service-level filters that every surface inherits, and route-level layers that close protocol surfaces with no semantic meaning for externals.

Service-layer filters (every surface inherits these)

1. Subject groups reject external members. subject_group_service.rs::add_member short-circuits if the candidate user has is_external = TRUE. Otherwise an admin could add alice@example.com to "Engineering", which later receives a grant on internal-only resources — silent privilege escalation. Mirrors the no-external-admins enforcement.
2. System contacts hide externals by default. auth_service.list_users and auth_service.search_users take include_external: bool, defaulting to false. The share modal autocomplete (via /api/address-books/system/contacts) therefore never surfaces external users to internal callers, and external users never see internal users at the address book layer.
3. External users are excluded from the Internal virtual group. pg_acl_engine.rs::expand_user no longer inserts INTERNAL_GROUP_ID for users with is_external = TRUE. The group's name finally honours its semantics; every grant addressed to "all internal users" is now genuinely internal-only.

Route-level lockouts (close protocol surfaces upfront)

External users have no calendar, no address book, no home folder, and (by design) no persistent credential. The protocol surfaces that assume those things are closed to them at the middleware layer — before any handler runs:

4. /caldav/*, /carddav/*, /webdav/* are wrapped with require_internal_user_layer in main.rs. The layer runs after auth_middleware, reads the populated CurrentUser from request extensions, calls require_internal_user once per request, and 403s + audit-logs on rejection. PROPFIND / REPORT / OPTIONS — every DAV verb is closed.
5. NextCloud /remote.php/* and /ocs/* are gated inside basic_auth_middleware: after a successful app-password match, a follow-up lookup checks is_external and returns 401 if true. This is belt-and-braces — externals can't create app passwords in the first place (next item) — but it covers users who later flip to is_external after creating one.
6. POST /api/auth/app-passwords is closed. App passwords are persistent credentials; the magic-link-eligibility rule (has_login_credential) assumes externals have no other credential configured. Letting an external mint an app password would break that invariant and would also be the only way to authenticate them on the NC surface. 403 + audit on rejection.
7. GET /api/groups/search is closed. Group names aren't strictly secret, but externals have no legitimate use for the share-dialog autocomplete (they can't be added to groups anyway).

Pre-existing safeguards from the user-lifecycle work continue to apply: the DB CHECK constraints users_external_not_admin and users_external_no_storage, and the HomeFolderLifecycleHook short-circuit that skips home-folder provisioning for externals.

Why protocol-level instead of handler-level

The route layer is one require_internal_user_layer per nest rather than one check per handler. Three reasons:

• Coverage. Every DAV verb (and every NC OCS endpoint) is gated in one place. New handlers added under the same nest inherit the protection automatically.
• Cost. The layer hits the DB once per request (already cached in moka under the hood); a per-handler check would do the same work without the reuse.
• Auditability. A single audit event (authz.external_user_blocked with the request path) covers the whole subtree. Operators can grep one event= value across all DAV traffic.

Kill switches and feature scoping

Knob	What it does
OXICLOUD_ALLOW_EXTERNAL_USERS=false	Coarse off-switch. POST /api/grants rejects email-typed subjects for unknown emails; send endpoint returns the uniform stub without issuing a token. Pre-existing externals continue to function.
OXICLOUD_EXTERNAL_EMAIL_DOMAINS=…	Fine-grained allowlist of accepted domains for new external users. Empty = no restriction. Exact-match (case-insensitive) on the post-@ part — partner.com does NOT match eng.partner.com.
OXICLOUD_SMTP_* unconfigured	The whole magic-link feature is unavailable. Endpoints that depend on it return 503 Service Unavailable with a clear message.
OXICLOUD_MAGIC_LINK_TTL_HOURS	Token lifetime. Default 24 hours. Shortening it raises the resend rate; lengthening it raises the window for token theft.

The send endpoint does return 503 (not the uniform 200) when SMTP is entirely unconfigured: the absence of the feature is visible from any other /api/auth/magic-link/* route anyway, so hiding the 503 leaks nothing the attacker could not learn elsewhere.

What is deliberately out of scope

These are intentionally deferred. Each has a clear future trigger; none block the present design.

• auth.user_auth_methods side-table. Replaces the placeholder-string smell. has_login_credential() is the single migration point.
• Email-locale routing. v1 ships English-only invitation templates. A future PR adds recipient-locale detection (Accept-Language at send time, or stored preference) and a template engine.
• MX-record validation at share time. Regex is the only pre-send check; bad domains surface via SMTP bounce.
• Dormant external user sweeper. Purges users with no last_login_at for 13+ months. The GDPR-purge variant in UserLifecycleHook::on_user_deleted is its hook entry point.
• OXICLOUD_EXTERNAL_USERS_CAN_RESHARE=false. Forbids externals from being a grant's granted_by. Today an external with Permission::Share can mint more externals — a soft policy worth tightening but not load-bearing.
• Differentiated session TTL for externals. Uniform across all users today. Future env: OXICLOUD_EXTERNAL_REFRESH_TOKEN_EXPIRY_DAYS.
• session_kind on sessions emitted from magic-link. Enables scoped sessions ("magic-link session can only access granted resources, not the user's own folders"). External users have no own folders so the practical exposure is small.
• Admin-list-users that includes externals. Today list_users filters externals by default. A future admin UI for managing externals (rename, deactivate, view their grants) will need an include_external query param.
• Open Cloud Mesh (OCM) federation. A separate path for external identity; ExternalIdentityLifecycleHook::on_user_created accommodates a source discriminator (magic_link / oidc / ocm).
• WebAuthn / passkey enrolment. Distinct future feature; magic-link is the bootstrap.
• Bounce tracking. No webhook listener for SES-style bounce notifications. A future on_email_bounce event would surface "this user's email is dead" in admin UI.

Related documents

• User lifecycle — the hook framework that fires on user creation and the deletion modes.
• ReBAC Authorization — how grants are evaluated against auth.users rows (including external ones).
• Share Integration — how the public-share-link flow relates to the email-invite flow (both create access_grants rows; only the former lives in storage.shares).
• Environment Variables — the full set of OXICLOUD_* knobs.