Identification Failures in Chi with Cockroachdb

An Identification Failure in the context of Chi with Cockroachdb occurs when an application fails to properly establish, assert, and enforce the identity of a request or actor across the Chi middleware stack and the Cockroachdb session. Because Chi is a lightweight, composable HTTP router and Cockroachdb is a distributed SQL database, the vulnerability arises at the intersection of stateless HTTP routing and stateful, distributed data access.

Chi provides a request context (context.Context) that can carry values across handlers. If identity information—such as a user ID, role, or tenant—is placed into the Chi context but never validated against the authoritative source in Cockroachdb, an attacker can supply arbitrary identifiers. When subsequent handlers forward that identifier directly to SQL queries, the database may return data that belongs to another user or tenant. This is effectively an Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) or Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA) pattern enabled by an incomplete or missing identity verification step.

In a distributed Cockroachdb deployment, SQL sessions are often long-lived and connection-pooled. If identity is set once when a connection is acquired and reused across multiple requests without revalidation, a confused deputy scenario emerges. One request may authenticate correctly and populate the context, but a subsequent request on the same connection may reuse the same context values without confirming the current request’s credentials. This is particularly risky when using session-based or JWT-based identity stored in Chi context without a corresponding check on every Cockroachdb query.

Real-world attack patterns include enumeration of numeric user IDs by iterating responses, or manipulating tenant identifiers in URL parameters to access cross-tenant data. Because Cockroachdb supports complex queries and joins across tables, an attacker who influences an identifier placed into a WHERE clause can pivot from viewing one user’s records to another’s if authorization is not enforced at the data plane. The OWASP API Top 10 category A01:2023 (Broken Object Level Authorization) aligns with this failure mode, and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 and GDPR highlight the need for explicit identity-to-data mapping checks.

middleBrick detects this class of risk by correlating OpenAPI/Swagger spec definitions (with full $ref resolution) against runtime behavior. It checks whether authentication and identity assertions in Chi handlers are consistently validated before Cockroachdb queries are constructed, looking for missing authorization checks on object-level attributes and tracing how identifiers flow from HTTP parameters into SQL conditions.

Remediation centers on ensuring that identity is derived from authenticated context on each request and enforced at the point of data access. Avoid storing identity only in Chi context without validating it against Cockroachdb on every operation. Use request-scoped contexts and parameterized SQL to prevent injection and enforce tenant or user boundaries.

1) Validate identity on each request and bind it to the request-scoped context:

// Chi middleware that extracts and verifies identity before proceeding
package main

import (
	"context"
	"net/http"
	"github.com/go-chi/chi/v5"
)

type identity struct {
	UserID string
	Tenant string
}

func authMiddleware(next http.Handler) http.Handler {
	return http.HandlerFunc(func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
		// Example: extract token and validate against Cockroachdb
		token := r.Header.Get("Authorization")
		if token == "" {
			http.Error(w, "unauthorized", http.StatusUnauthorized)
			return
		}
		// Verify token and fetch identity (pseudo-code)
		id, err := verifyTokenAndFetchIdentity(r.Context(), token)
		if err != nil {
			http.Error(w, "invalid token", http.StatusUnauthorized)
			return
		}
		ctx := context.WithValue(r.Context(), "identity", id)
		next.ServeHTTP(w, r.WithContext(ctx))
	})
}

func verifyTokenAndFetchIdentity(ctx context.Context, token string) (*identity, error) {
	// TODO: implement actual verification against Cockroachdb users table
	return &identity{UserID: "u-123", Tenant: "acme"}, nil
}

2) Use the identity from Chi context in Cockroachdb queries with parameterized statements to enforce tenant isolation:

// Example handler that safely uses identity for row-level security
func getUserProfileHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
	ident, ok := r.Context().Value("identity").(*identity)
	if !ok {
		http.Error(w, "internal error", http.StatusInternalServerError)
		return
	}

	// Safe: identity from verified context, parameterized query
	query := `SELECT id, email, tenant FROM profiles WHERE id = $1 AND tenant = $2`
	row := db.QueryRow(r.Context(), query, ident.UserID, ident.Tenant)

	var profile Profile
	if err := row.Scan(&profile.ID, &profile.Email, &profile.Tenant); err != nil {
		http.Error(w, "not found", http.StatusNotFound)
		return
	}
	// respond with profile
}

3) Avoid connection pool identity bleed by ensuring per-request validation and not caching identity at the database connection level:

// Do NOT do this: setting identity on a global or reused connection handle
// Instead, keep identity in request context and pass it explicitly to queries.

4) Leverage Cockroachdb’s built-in capabilities where applicable (for example, use tenant-aware indexes and enforce foreign key relationships that include tenant ID):

-- Cockroachdb schema example with tenant-aware constraints
CREATE TABLE profiles (
	id UUID PRIMARY KEY,
	tenant STRING NOT NULL,
	email STRING NOT NULL,
	CONSTRAINT ensure_tenant CHECK (tenant IS NOT NULL)
);
CREATE INDEX idx_profiles_tenant_id ON profiles (tenant, id);

By combining Chi context discipline with strict, parameterized SQL that references identity on every query, you mitigate Identification Failures and reduce the risk of IDOR/BOLA across distributed Cockroachdb deployments.