Secret rotation / secret loss recovery

[clarfonthey]

I've run into issues like #1851 in the past and didn't realise it was due to the SECRET_KEY changing when recreating a config. It would be nice if we could somehow add some mitigations to this.

Recovery from secret loss

If the secret is changed without access to the previous secret, and things like 2FA secrets can't be decrypted, then there should be some easy way to mitigate this. Right now, the only solution is to delete the corrupted rows in the DB manually.

A few potential options:

• A gitea doctor command to delete 2FA data, potentially notifying users who had 2FA enabled
• A flag on users in the database to prompt them to reconfigure 2FA on login

Proactive secret rotation

If the user wishes to proactively change the secret, there should be an option to include (at least) two secrets in the config: the new secret for future operations, and the old secret for past operations.

A few options here:

• Secrets could be configured in optional pairs, where there's a "primary" secret and a "backup" secret. The backup secret is exclusively for decryption, and anything decrypted with it should be re-encrypted with the primary secret.
• There could also be the option for more than one backup secret.
• A gitea doctor command to re-encrypt things encrypted with a backup secret.
• A cron job to re-encrypt things encrypted with a backup secret.
• The ability to automatically remove the backup secret once all its data is updated.

The actual action upon rotation of the secret depends on the reason for the rotation. If there's some kind of breach of security, things that were protected by the secret like 2FA keys should be regenerated. So, a few options here:

• Secrets could be able to be marked as compromised, and this could also be used with the user flag mentioned in the first section, prompting users to reconfigure 2FA on login.
• This could potentially up the priority on the cron job for re-encrypting things, putting it to a high priority.

[NotNite]

For any people unfortunate enough to be frantically Googling this at 11 PM like I was: I was moving my infrastructure to Nix, and the NixOS module for Gitea automatically generated a secret key for me, and so I couldn't log in because it wasn't using the default.

In case anyone needs it, the default secret key is here.

[Renderer6060]

id also like to be able to change this from the default

[techknowlogick]

An approach we could take is what minio does where they will take old and new key as config option to rotate

[clarfonthey]

Note that this is included in the original description, albeit probably not clearly enough. I'll take another pass through it and see what I can do to make that clearer.

EDIT: I've updated the original post to use bulleted lists wherever possible, so that it's hopefully clearer to skim and see the potential tasks people could work on. IMHO we should probably create separate issues for the individual pieces.

[r10r]

I have a similar issue after upgrading an installation from the gitea helm chart. In the installation the SECRET_KEY was not set and so values in the database are not encrypted. But after an
upgrade the helm chart generated a fresh non-emptySECRET_KEY resulting in the error when trying to access /admin/auths

...s/web/admin/auths.go:53:Authentications() [E] auth.Sources: failed to decrypt by secret, the key (maybe SECRET_KEY?)

Setting theSECRET_KEY to an empty value works - but how can I start using a non-empty SECRET_KEY now ?

[3bbbeau]

For me I was getting this issue on every runner following a restored PostgreSQL dump for Gitea:

level=error msg="failed to fetch task" error="unknown: rpc error: code = Internal desc = pick task: GetSecretsOfTask: failed to decrypt by secret, the key (maybe SECRET_KEY?) might be incorrect: AesDecrypt invalid decrypted base64 string: illegal base64 data at input byte 1"

I removed the secrets for the org/repo (simply updating them did not work), re-added them, and then the error went away and CI jobs ran as expected.

[Brawl345]

For any people unfortunate enough to be frantically Googling this at 11 PM like I was: I was moving my infrastructure to Nix, and the NixOS module for Gitea automatically generated a secret key for me, and so I couldn't log in because it wasn't using the default.

In case anyone needs it, the default secret key is here.

And what needs to be set? Copied my old gitea data where there is no SECRET_KEY inside the app.ini. I tried setting the SECRET_KEY to the default value but it still doesn't work, still getting this AesDecrypt error. Can't login anymore, this is very frustrating and undocumented...

EDIT: "Fixed" it by deleting the relevant entries from the two_factor database table and regenerating the 2FA token...