Project-SDE-WP-Suite/KNOWN-ISSUES.md

Known issues — Work Package Suite

Defects and limitations we know about and have decided not to fix yet. An entry here is a commitment to a decision, not a bug tracker: it says what is wrong, what it costs, why it is still open, and what closing it takes.

Anything genuinely urgent does not belong here — it belongs in the next deploy.

Close an entry by deleting it in the same commit that fixes it.

#	Issue	Severity	Raised	Status
1	XSS via SOP discipline names in the WP creator	Medium (internal), High if externally reachable	2026-08-05	Open
2	Archived projects: the two big apps don't grey out their own controls	Low	2026-08-05	Open

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1. XSS via SOP discipline names in the WP creator

Files: html/wp-creation-app.js lines 684, 723, 727, 729 · escaping helper at line 63 Predates: the 2026-08-05 archive/admin-console work. Not introduced by it.

What is wrong

Discipline names are rendered into inline event handlers escaped with esc(), which maps ' to '. That is correct for text and wrong here. The browser decodes entities in an attribute value before the JavaScript parser sees it, so ' becomes a bare ' inside the handler's string literal and closes it early.

// html/wp-creation-app.js:684 — esc() is not sufficient for a handler argument
onchange="toggleDiscipline('${esc(d)}',this.checked)"

Escaping for an inline handler has to happen in this order: backslash, then quote (for the JS string literal), then HTML (for the attribute carrying it). esc() only does the last part.

How it is reached

1. gov_disciplines (html/work-package-suite.html:219) is a free-text field. Its value is comma-split with no validation at work-package-suite-app.js:1224.
2. It is saved into sops.data and syncs to the server via ProjectData.pushSOP.
3. Every other member of that project pulls it with pullProject() and renders it in the WP creator — so this is stored and cross-user, and it fires on page load rather than needing the victim to click anything.

Any project_user on the job can set it while the SOP is a draft (after the SOP is marked complete it takes project_admin). The victim is anyone who opens the WP creator for that project, which includes administrators.

What it costs

The likely cost is a broken screen, not an attack. A discipline named Owner's Equipment — an ordinary thing to type — produces a syntax error in the handler, so the discipline pill and its scope-step buttons silently stop responding. No error message, nothing a field user can diagnose.

The security ceiling is project_user → admin. The session cookie is HttpOnly so the token cannot be read, but the injected code does not need it: it runs in the victim's page and can call any API the victim can, including POST /api/auth/users/{id}/role.

The project_super_user role (added 2026-08-05) widens the set of victims whose session is worth stealing, without raising the ceiling. Previously only an app admin's session could create accounts or change permissions; now a super user's can too, within the projects they administer. The ceiling is unchanged — it was already admin — but the odds of landing on a session that can mint an account go up, and a super user is likelier than an admin to be reading a WP creator on a live job. It is one more reason the accidental-breakage case is not the only one that matters.

Two controls that look like they would contain this do not:

• CSP does not mitigate it. nginx-wp-suite.conf:58 serves script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline', and 'unsafe-inline' is what permits inline event handlers in the first place.
• The CSRF gate does not mitigate it. _csrf_ok (server/app.py:67) only requires a same-origin Origin, and code running inside our own page is same-origin.

Why it is still open

The suite is internal, behind a login, on the corporate network, with a small set of named employee accounts and no anonymous input path. Exploiting it means an employee deliberately attacking colleagues, and the audit log carries their name on the SOP edit. The accidental-breakage case is far more likely to be met than the malicious one.

Re-rate this as High and fix it immediately if any of these become true: the suite is exposed outside the corporate network, accounts are issued to subcontractors or clients, or self-registration is added.

Note that the second of those got easier to reach without anyone deciding to: a Project Super User can now issue accounts on their own job without an app admin involved, so "accounts are issued to subcontractors" can become true by ordinary delegated use rather than by a policy change. Worth checking the directory occasionally against who is actually on staff.

What closing it takes

Small — roughly half an hour. The helper already exists; it was added to the SOP builder on 2026-08-05 for the same bug in custom constraint names:

// html/work-package-suite-app.js:1120
function escHandlerArg(v){ return escAttr(String(v==null?'':v).replace(/\\/g,'\\\\').replace(/'/g,"\\'")); }

1. Add the same helper to html/wp-creation-app.js alongside esc().
2. Use it at lines 684, 723, 727 and 729 in place of esc(d).
3. Sweep the other inline handlers in that file for the same pattern. The remaining ones interpolate server-generated ids that check_id() already constrains to a safe charset, or hardcoded enum values, so they are not currently reachable — converting them anyway keeps the pattern from coming back.
4. Confirm with a discipline named Owner's Equipment: the pill must respond to clicks and the name must display intact.

The equivalent fix on the admin side is jsq() in html/console-util.js (it moved out of html/admin.js on 2026-08-05 when the User Directory started needing it) — same ordering, same reasoning, worth reading before starting.

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2. Archived projects: the two big apps don't grey out their own controls

Files: html/wp-creation-app.js, html/work-package-suite-app.js Raised: 2026-08-05, with the project-archiving work.

What is wrong

Archiving a project freezes it server-side — every write returns 409 (see require_project_writable in server/app.py, and the Archiving a project section of DEPLOYMENT.md). The front end tells the user, but does not stop them: wp-chrome.js shows a read-only banner and sets data-wp-archived="1" on the document element, and nothing reads that attribute yet. So on an archived project the WP creator and the SOP builder still present working Save and Issue buttons.

What it costs

Low, and it fails safe — the server refuses the write, so nothing is corrupted and no data is lost. The cost is wasted effort and a confusing moment: someone deep- linked to an archived job can fill in a form and only learn it was refused when the sync indicator reports the change did not save.

Reaching an archived project at all takes a deep link or a stale tab, since it is gone from every picker, switcher and search — which is why this is a rough edge rather than a defect.

Why it is still open

Gating every control in two large single-page apps is materially bigger than the archive feature itself, and the server is the real enforcement boundary either way. The banner plus the sync indicator were judged enough for a first release.

What closing it takes

data-wp-archived is already on the document element for exactly this purpose. Either add [data-wp-archived] rules in wp-chrome.css that disable and dim the save/issue controls, or add a boot check in each app that disables them and shows a read-only notice inline. Decide separately how the embedded creator (wp-creation-index.html) surfaces it, since it runs in an iframe where the shared app bar — and therefore the banner — is deliberately skipped.