feat(distributed): Add NATS JWT authentication and TLS/mTLS options#10159
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mudler
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Jun 3, 2026
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needs rebasing @richiejp |
Mint per-node NATS user JWTs at registration when LOCALAI_NATS_ACCOUNT_SEED is set, and connect workers with scoped credentials from the register response. Add optional LOCALAI_NATS_TLS_CA/CERT/KEY for private CA and mTLS alongside tls:// URLs, plus test-e2e-distributed and NatsJWT container e2e specs. Document JWT setup (nats-auth-setup.sh) and TLS env vars in distributed-mode. Assisted-by: Grok:grok grok-build Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>
The JWT-auth path added in 46467cc7 had several gaps that fail silently under LOCALAI_NATS_REQUIRE_AUTH: - Agent-worker minted JWTs did not allow the subjects the agent worker actually subscribes to (jobs.mcp-ci.new and nodes.<id>.backend.stop), so MCP-CI jobs and backend-stop session cleanup were silently dropped. Scope the agent permission set to those subjects. - NATS subscription permission violations were swallowed (Subscribe returned a live-but-dead subscription). Confirm subscriptions with a server round-trip so a denial surfaces synchronously, and log async permission errors. - The backend worker connected anonymously when given a JWT without its paired seed; reject the unpaired credential instead. - The documented service-user permissions in nats-auth-setup.sh omitted prefixcache.>, which the frontend publishes and subscribes; add it. Also: add a credential-provider hook to the messaging client (consumed by the follow-up credential-lifecycle change), drop the always-nil error from NatsMessagingOptions, run go mod tidy (jwt/v2 and nkeys are now direct), and gofmt the feature's files. Tests: an agent-JWT e2e spec that connects to the enforcing NATS server and exercises every subscription the agent worker makes, plus permission allow-list coverage unit tests. Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-8 [Claude Code] Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>
Workers fetched NATS credentials once at startup, which broke two cases under JWT auth: a worker that registered while still pending admin approval never received a minted JWT (it connected unauthenticated and gave up), and a long-running worker's 24h JWT expired with no way to renew it. Introduce workerregistry.NATSCredentialManager, built on idempotent re-registration (the frontend preserves the node row and mints a fresh JWT each call): - Acquire re-registers through admin approval until the node is approved and credentials are minted (or returns the first success when auth is not required, preserving anonymous-NATS behavior). - RefreshLoop re-registers before the JWT expires (~75% of its lifetime), updating the credentials served to the connection. - Both are bounded (default 100 attempts / consecutive failures) and return an error on exhaustion, so an unapprovable or unrenewable worker exits non-zero and surfaces the problem instead of hanging or drifting toward an expired credential. The messaging client gains WithUserJWTProvider, fetching credentials on each (re)connect so the connection transparently adopts a refreshed JWT when the server expires the old one. RegisterFull exposes the approval status and full response; Register delegates to it. Both the backend worker and the agent worker are wired to this: explicit env credentials are used as-is, minted credentials are acquired-with-wait and refreshed, and a permanent refresh failure shuts the worker down so it restarts and re-acquires. Tests cover Acquire (wait-through-pending, bounded give-up, context cancel), RefreshLoop (refresh-before-expiry, bounded failure, no-expiry exit) and jwtExpiry decoding. Docs updated in distributed-mode.md. Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-8 [Claude Code] Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>
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Description
Presently NATS is not authenticated so anyone with access to the NATS port can publish backend install messages or agent jobs. The biggest problem with this that I can think of is SSRF or if the port is accidentally exposed, so for defense-in-depth the user will want to enable this.
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