Security identity access

Security Identity Access

Use this companion overlay with security when the task involves auth stacks, session systems, identity flows, invitation models, or multi-tenant organization boundaries.

Focus areas

• session creation, storage, refresh, invalidation, and revocation behavior
• password reset, email verification, recovery, and callback URL trust
• MFA enablement, verification, backup-code storage, and trusted-device flows
• OAuth/OIDC, SAML/SSO, account linking, passkeys/WebAuthn, device trust, and identity-provider callback handling
• invitation, membership, role, active-organization, and tenant-scoping logic
• origin checks, CSRF defenses, trusted origins, and cross-domain auth flows

Not For

• generic user-model changes where auth or tenant boundaries are not the main risk
• routine login or signup implementation work with no security review or hardening goal
• generic RBAC discussions detached from actual session, identity, or tenant behavior

Workflow

1. Map the auth surface: session transport, cookies or tokens, reset and verification endpoints, MFA state, invitation paths, active-org or tenant context, and privileged roles.
2. Identify trust assumptions: which origins are trusted, which callbacks are accepted, who can invite, promote, switch orgs, revoke sessions, or recover accounts.
3. Review boundary failures: account takeover paths, authz gaps, tenant-boundary leaks, stale-session risks, missing session revocation, insecure reset flows, and MFA bypasses.
4. Check secure defaults: absolute callback URLs or strict origin validation, bounded invitation lifetime, email verification where appropriate, session revocation on password reset, org or membership limits, and encrypted or hashed MFA recovery material when supported.
5. Report by boundary: state the impacted identity or tenant boundary, required attacker capability, and whether the issue leads to takeover, privilege escalation, or cross-tenant access.

Review rules

• require explicit authorization on role changes, tenant switches, invitation acceptance, and privileged member-management actions
• inspect whether active-organization or tenant context is server-enforced, not only client-selected
• prefer short-lived, single-use recovery artifacts and invalidate older sessions after password reset when the platform supports it
• verify callback and redirect handling with absolute URLs or trusted-origin checks; do not trust inferred origins in split frontend/backend deployments
• treat MFA backup codes, OTP storage, and trusted-device markers as sensitive credentials

False-positive guards

• do not flag a client-selected org or tenant switch if the server re-derives and enforces tenant scope on every sensitive action
• do not flag every redirect or callback as unsafe when the code enforces a strict allowlist or trusted-origin validation
• do not treat session persistence itself as a flaw when rotation, revocation, and transport protections match the deployment model