2026-03-12: Security Model

Note

With release v5.2.0, SlideRule has overhauled and tighted its security model to prevent misuse of its public services.

Overview

SlideRule Earth leverages GitHub authentication and account membership status within the GitHub SlideRuleEarth organization to authorize access to SlideRule services. Credentials are provided by users using a JSON Web Token (JWT) issued by the SlideRule Earth login service (login.slideruleearth.io). A user’s JWT contains claims used and verified by SlideRule services to allow access.

Model Components

Roles

• Owner - SlideRuleEarth owner with administrator access to all services

• Member - SlideRuleEarth member with nominal access to all services

• Collaborator - External affliate of the SlideRuleEarth team with access to designated services

• Guest - Authenticated user with access to public services

• Anonymous - Unauthenticated

Services

• Certbot - manages SSL certificates for the service domain.

• Authenticator at https://login.slideruleearth.io – delegates authentication to an external identity provider (IdP), and performs authorization based on the authenticated identity.

• Provisioner at https://provisioner.slideruleearth.io – manages cluster lifecycle operations, including deployment, status, and tear-down

• Cluster at https://{cluster}.slideruleearth.io - provides low-latency science data processing (the primary application under the SlideRuleEarth project)

• Runner at https://runner.slideruleearth.io – provides batch job processing orchestration and status

Requests

• Unauthenticated Requests - No credentials are supplied in the HTTP request

• Authenticated Requests - Bearer token provided in authorization header of HTTP request

  • Users must use one of the authorization flows provided at login.slideruleearth.io to obtain a JWT

  • The JWT must be provided as a bearer token in each request to a SlideRule service: Authorization: Bearer <JWT>

• Signed Requests - EdDSA signature provided in custom SlideRule header of HTTP request

  • Users must create an Ed25519 public/private key pair and store in a well-known file in their home directory: ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f .sliderule_key.

  • The public key .sliderule_key.pub must be provided to the SlideRuleEarth development team

  • Each request must be signed using the .sliderule_key private key.

  • The signature is calculated over the canonical message {path_b64}:{timestamp}:{body_b64} where path_b64 is the base64 encoded string of the full path to the endpoint including the hostname of the service (e.g. provisioner.slideruleearth.io/info), timestamp is the unix system time expressed as seconds since epoch rounded to the nearest integer, and body_64 is the base64 encoded string of the body of the request.

  • The ASCII encoded string of the timestamp is provided in the x-sliderule-timestamp: {timestamp_str} header, and the base64 encoded string of the signature is provided in the x-sliderule-signature: {signature_b64} header.

Permissions

• sliderule:access - nominal access to cluster services

• sliderule:admin - administrative access to cluster services

• provisioner:access - access to provisioner services

• runner:access - access to runner services

• mcp:tools - access to mcp server

• mcp:resources - access to mcp server

• monitor:access - access to cluster monitor

Authorization Flows

Flow	Endpoints	Allowed Highest Roles	Allowed Permissions	Notes
OAuth2.1 Web	/auth/github/register, /auth/github/login, /auth/github/callback, /auth/github/token	Owner	all	preferred method for web applications
Device	/auth/github/device, /auth/github/device/poll	Owner	sliderule:access, sliderule:admin, provisioner:access, runner:access	preferred method for python client
PAT Key	/auth/github/pat	Member	sliderule:access, provisioner:access, runner:access	used for CI/CD pipelines
Basic Web	/auth/github/basic/login	Member	monitor:access	returns JWT via cookie

Security Rules

Expirations

At different stages of the authorization flows there are time limits imposed to reduce the risk of compromised credentials.

Element	Time Limit	Notes
SlideRule JWT	12 hours
OAuth2.1 Web Authorization Session	12 hours	Once a client is dynamically registered it must complete all authorization requests within this time
OAuth2.1 Web Authorization Code	2 minutes	Once a client receives an authorization code it has this long to exchange it for a token; after its first use the code is no longer valid
GitHub HTTP Requests	15 seconds	All requests to GitHub APIs must complete promptly
GitHub Authentication Session	1 minute	Once the SlideRule server initiates the authentication flow with GitHub it has this long to complete the authentication
Signed Request	1 minute	All signatures on signed requests must be timestamped within this amount of time (+/-) of the signature verification

Cluster Access

Members of the SlideRuleEarth organization have permission to deploy, access, and destroy private clusters namespaced to the organization teams they belong to. Owners within the organization can deploy, access, and destroy any cluster with a valid namespace (obeying url rules and AWS cloud formation stack name restrictions). Both members and owners are restricted to node capacity and time-to-live constraints imposed by the the provisioner.

Role	Max Node Capacity	Max TTL
Owner	100	1 year
Member	50	12 hours

Web Client Restrictions

When logging into SlideRule using the SlideRule Web Client, the client restricts the user permission set to sliderule:access, and provisioner:access. This prevents a leaked token from being used for administrator access or for access to any of the other services

Third Party Redirects

When a third party application is granted access to SlideRule services, a reduced set of permissions are enforced. Any authorization attempt that requests permissions not in the reduced set will be rejected. Currently, the only allowed permissions for third party applications are: mcp:tools, mcp:resources.

MCP Exclusivity

When MCP resources are requested (either via the scope or resource field of the authorization request), all permissions that would have been granted in the JWT are dropped and only the mcp:tools and mcp:resources permissions are provided. This is to limit third party agents from broad access to SlideRule resources.

Request Signing

The following services require request signing:

• All requests to the Provisioner when the user provides a JWT that identifies them as an Owner.

• All requests to the Runer regardless of the role of the user.

• Requests to the Cluster (public or private) that route to the Arbitrary Code Execution (ace) and Container Runtime Environment Execution (execre) endpoints.

Flow Diagrams

Basic Web Flow (OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code)