fix(api): bound what a forged CF-Connecting-IP can buy
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Code review, both findings valid.

The design doc claimed Cloudflare "replaces the header, so a browser
cannot forge it", and that only the X-Forwarded-For fallback was
forgeable. That is true only for traffic that actually passed through
Cloudflare, and nothing in this process can verify that it did. Reaching
the origin directly, both headers are equally attacker-controlled — and
rotating CF-Connecting-IP mints a fresh rate-limit bucket per request,
defeating per-client limits on every endpoint including the
DataFrame-heavy /api/schools. Against abuse that is worse than the
shared bucket it replaced, which at least capped everyone together.

So the ceiling comes back. I dropped it earlier arguing it belonged at
Cloudflare; that argument assumed the keying was sound, and it is not.
GlobalRateLimitMiddleware counts all /api/ traffic in a fixed window
against a total, independent of client identity, outermost so it refuses
before any work happens. Written by hand because slowapi cannot express
a global cap: default_limits and application_limits are both keyed by
key_func, and the latter needs middleware this app does not install.

It does not make the header trustworthy — it makes trusting it
survivable. The real fix is Authenticated Origin Pulls or an origin
firewall, now documented in DEPLOY.md as the open gap it is.

127.0.0.1 is exempt: the healthcheck curls localhost from inside the
container, and starving it would restart the container and turn a load
spike into an outage loop. Keyed on the peer address, never the Host
header, which the caller sets.

Second finding: suggest_schools_typesense promised "never raises" while
the parsing loop sat outside the try, so int(None) on a malformed
document would have made a keystroke a 500. The loop now skips bad rows
rather than dropping the whole list — and a hit with no document no
longer becomes a suggestion pointing at /school/0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
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TudorandClaude Opus 5 committed 2026-08-26 20:56:32 +01:00
1 parent d2115364ae
commit 0fa1a292c7
8 files changed
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@@ -126,3 +126,32 @@ def test_the_response_is_cacheable(monkeypatch):
res = _client(monkeypatch, [_HIT]).get("/api/suggest?q=breck")
assert "s-maxage" in res.headers.get("cache-control", "")
assert res.headers.get("etag")
def test_a_malformed_urn_does_not_raise(monkeypatch):
"""The docstring promises "never raises"; the parsing loop sat outside the
try, so int(None) or int("abc") would have turned a keystroke into a 500.
Typesense declares urn as int32, so this should be unreachable — but the
contract is what the caller relies on, and a search index is a separate
system that can be reindexed by something other than this code.
"""
_use(monkeypatch, _FakeClient([{"urn": None, "school_name": "X",
"local_authority": "Y", "postcode": "Z"}]))
assert data_loader.suggest_schools_typesense("x") == []
def test_a_malformed_row_does_not_discard_the_good_ones(monkeypatch):
# One bad document must not blank the whole dropdown.
_use(monkeypatch, _FakeClient([
{"urn": "not-a-number", "school_name": "Bad", "local_authority": "Y",
"postcode": "Z"},
_HIT,
]))
out = data_loader.suggest_schools_typesense("x")
assert [r["urn"] for r in out] == [100010]
def test_a_hit_with_no_document_does_not_raise(monkeypatch):
_use(monkeypatch, _FakeClient([{}]))
assert data_loader.suggest_schools_typesense("x") == []