feat(supervisor): add WebSocket message introspection middleware

Problem Statement

Supervisor middleware can inspect the HTTP request that upgrades a connection to WebSocket, but it cannot inspect messages exchanged after the upgrade. This leaves a gap for applications that carry sensitive or governed content in post-upgrade messages.

Subscription Codex uses WebSocket mode and sends prompts in post-upgrade messages. OpenShell can parse client-to-upstream text messages for built-in WebSocket policy and credential rewriting, but the current supervisor middleware contract exposes only HTTP_REQUEST/PRE_CREDENTIALS. Privacy Guard and other operator-run middleware therefore cannot inspect, redact, block, or annotate those prompts.

The same capability is needed by #2166 for realtime media carried in WebSocket text or binary messages. That issue also covers gRPC and broader media governance; this issue is limited to WebSocket message-level supervisor middleware.

Proposed Design

Add typed post-upgrade WebSocket message operations to supervisor middleware, corresponding to the WebSocketMessage/before_forward and WebSocketMessage/before_return hooks outlined by RFC 0009.

The middleware boundary should operate on complete logical messages, not raw RFC 6455 frames:

OpenShell remains responsible for the WebSocket protocol, including masking, fragmentation and reassembly, compression, control frames, message limits, ordering, backpressure, and reframing.
Each evaluation identifies the admitted destination and session, direction, text or binary message type, selected subprotocol, middleware configuration, and complete message content.
Middleware returns allow or deny, optional replacement content, audit-safe findings, and metadata using semantics aligned with the existing HTTP request hook.
A denied or invalid message terminates the WebSocket session with an appropriate policy-violation close instead of silently dropping the message.
Upstream-to-client messages can be inspected or transformed but never receive credential injection or credential placeholder rewriting.
Middleware selection and configuration remain policy-controlled. The gateway and supervisor validate that a registered middleware is authorized for the new operation and phase.
The session uses one consistent policy and middleware snapshot. Reload behavior must not mix generations within an active session.
OCSF events record decisions, limits, failures, and findings without logging message payloads, prompts, binary media, or credentials.

The implementation may use a bidirectional streaming gRPC operation so one middleware invocation can preserve session context, ordering, cancellation, and backpressure across messages. The exact protobuf shape should be finalized with the implementation, but it must keep WebSocket session processing distinct from the one-shot HTTP upgrade request.

Alternatives Considered

Inspect only the HTTP upgrade

The upgrade request does not contain prompts, media messages, or other application data sent after 101 Switching Protocols, so upgrade admission cannot govern message content.

Rely only on built-in WebSocket L7 policy

The existing policy path can evaluate supported client text messages, but it does not provide the external middleware contract, transformations, findings, or binary and return-path coverage needed by Privacy Guard and realtime media use cases.

Expose raw WebSocket frames to middleware

This leaks protocol mechanics into every middleware implementation and makes fragmentation, compression, control frames, and partial disclosure inconsistent. OpenShell should expose reconstructed logical messages and retain ownership of wire correctness.

Use opaque L4 passthrough

L4 passthrough carries bytes but cannot inspect, transform, deny, rate-limit, or audit individual WebSocket messages.

Agent Investigation

Reviewed the Slack thread where the subscription Codex and Privacy Guard gap was identified.
Reviewed feat: governed realtime media membrane #2166 and separated its WebSocket requirement from its gRPC and broader media scope.
Confirmed RFC 0009 defines only HTTP_REQUEST/PRE_CREDENTIALS in v1 and identifies future WebSocketMessage/before_forward and WebSocketMessage/before_return phases.
Confirmed the current WebSocket relay reconstructs and evaluates client text messages, while binary messages and upstream-to-client traffic do not pass through supervisor middleware.
Searched existing OpenShell issues and found no focused issue for WebSocket message-level supervisor middleware.

Definition of Done

Supervisor middleware defines typed post-upgrade WebSocket message operation and phase contracts.
The runtime evaluates complete logical text and binary messages without exposing raw frame mechanics to middleware.
Policy can select middleware for WebSocket message processing and validation rejects unsupported or unauthorized bindings.
Allow, deny, transform, findings, metadata, timeout, fail-open, and fail-closed behavior are defined for message processing.
Denials and invalid transformations close the session safely without forwarding the rejected message.
Session ordering, backpressure, cancellation, size limits, and reload snapshot behavior are deterministic.
Automated tests cover fragmented and compressed messages, text and binary messages, both directions, transformations, denials, middleware failures, and no-middleware behavior.
OCSF tests verify useful decision and failure events without payload or credential leakage.
RFC 0009, architecture documentation, published middleware documentation, and policy reference documentation describe the new hook.

Checklist

I've reviewed existing issues and the architecture docs.
This is a design proposal, not a "please build this" request.

🏗️ build-plan

Implementation Plan

Issue type: feat
Complexity: High
Confidence: Medium — all design decisions resolved; residual risk is concentrated in the RFC 6455 parser refactor

Summary

Add policy-selected supervisor middleware hooks for complete post-upgrade WebSocket messages in both directions, via a new bidirectional streaming gRPC operation. OpenShell keeps full ownership of RFC 6455 mechanics; middleware sees only complete logical messages. Delivered as two pull requests split at the return path, so the contract lands and gets exercised before the parser refactor begins.

Phase naming: this plan uses WEBSOCKET_MESSAGE/PRE_CREDENTIALS and WEBSOCKET_MESSAGE/PRE_RETURN rather than the RFC 0009 working names before_forward / before_return, to match the existing phase vocabulary and make the credential boundary explicit in the name. RFC 0009 gets updated to match.

Scope

PR 1 — contract and forward path (runs on the existing, already-reviewed client parser; no RFC 6455 work)

proto/supervisor_middleware.proto: bidirectional streaming EvaluateWebSocket, typed preflight / session_start / message / session_end request variants and their result variants
crates/openshell-supervisor-middleware/: binding-aware chain description, direction-scoped session runner, concurrency admission, deadline propagation
crates/openshell-supervisor-network/src/l7/: forward-direction text integration and preflight resolution at the upgrade-admission point
crates/openshell-server/src/grpc/, crates/openshell-supervisor-network/src/opa.rs: generalize manifest validation from the single hard-coded HTTP_REQUEST/PRE_CREDENTIALS pair to an allowlist

PR 2 — return path and binary

Direction-aware frame validation, binary reassembly, upgrade-response overflow routing
permessage-deflate stripping for inspected sessions, and the new extension mode it requires
Full OCSF coverage and user-facing documentation

No changes to the policy YAML schema, MiddlewareServiceFileConfig, or proto/sandbox.proto. Every limit introduced here is a platform constant; every option that would have required an operator field was deliberately deferred.

Implementation Steps

High-level failing test through the real relay, written in its final form including return-path assertions, ignored until PR 2. Fixture is controllably hostile from the start (slow, hanging, mid-message close, out-of-order, oversize) driven by simulated time
Generalize endpoint attachment across bindings, preserving host selection, global ordering, and all existing HTTP behavior
Extend the contract and registration; add max_message_bytes, deadline propagation, and the streaming RPC
Build the direction-scoped chain runner: preflight, sequencing, limits, failure modes, concurrency admission
(PR 2) Refactor RFC 6455 parsing around logical messages, both directions
OCSF coverage
Documentation, RFC 0009 update, and skill review

Test Plan

Unit: manifest and binding validation, envelope limits, sequencing, decision semantics, transformation validity, per-stage failure modes under both on_error settings, permit contention, chain budget expiry
Integration: full relay upgrade with an in-process streaming middleware — transformation, denial, all-skip preflight, mixed preflight, fragmented messages, control-frame interleaving, close-code correctness, credential-boundary ordering, and OCSF non-leakage using sentinel payloads
E2E: mise run e2e:docker, since this changes sandbox network infrastructure
Known gap: no fuzz or conformance coverage of the new parser at ship time. Filed as a follow-up rather than gating PR 2, since it likely needs the parser factored to run off a byte slice

Key Design Decisions

Resolved during review. Each of these was a genuine fork:

Compression: strip permessage-deflate when any stage inspects, rather than teaching the proxy to decompress and recompress. An upstream that selects a non-offered extension hard-fails the upgrade — every tolerant alternative hands the upstream a unilateral inspection bypass
Blocking model: middleware evaluation blocks its direction including control frames, keeping the existing sequential loop. Bounded by the per-message deadline plus a new total chain budget. Accepted rough edge: a long deadline can break peer keepalive, documented rather than engineered around
Close codes: middleware deny and middleware failure share 1008. Distinguishing them lets a workload detect when inspection is degraded, which under fail_open is exactly when its traffic goes unexamined. 1002 / 1009 / 1012 stay distinct because conforming clients need them
Disclosure posture: failure detail is opaque to the sandbox and precise in OCSF. reason_code is recorded, never surfaced to the workload
Oversize: closes 1009 regardless of on_error. Routing it through fail-open would let a workload escape inspection by exceeding a known threshold
Resource bound: a semaphore on the shared middleware registry admits one unit of work per message or per preflight fan-out. Permit wait is backpressure excluded from the deadline, so load can never manufacture a timeout. This is a concurrency and memory bound, explicitly not rate limiting

Risks & Open Questions

Parser surface. Upstream bytes go from an opaque copy to a parsed, attacker-reachable input. Mitigated by keeping parsing independent of middleware, preserving the raw fast path, and the fuzz follow-up
Behavior change. Binary messages between 4 MiB and 16 MiB relay fine today and will fail with 1009 once a WebSocket middleware is attached. Needs release-note treatment. Fix if anyone hits it is an operator-configured cap, which is additive
Trust assumption. fail_closed guarantees traffic is not forwarded when inspection fails. It does not guarantee every message is inspected, because a service may decline at preflight or allow a subprotocol it cannot parse. This needs to be stated plainly in the docs
Security exposure pending feat: authenticate OpenShell extension service connections #2430. Until peer authentication lands, this carries complete session content in both directions, in plaintext, over an unauthenticated channel, for the lifetime of every inspected session — materially larger than the shipped HTTP exposure because of volume, the new return path, and compression stripping. Treating feat: authenticate OpenShell extension service connections #2430 as a GA blocker for remote WebSocket middleware, not a blocker for shipping
Prerequisite. fix(supervisor-middleware): configure HTTP/2 keepalive on the middleware gRPC channel #2474 (HTTP/2 keepalive on the middleware channel) should land first. Pre-existing defect, currently bounded because tonic self-heals per request, but session-fatal once long-lived streams exist

Documentation Impact

rfc/0009-supervisor-middleware/ — phase naming and the WebSocket contract
architecture/sandbox.md, architecture/security-policy.md, architecture/gateway.md
docs/extensibility/supervisor-middleware.mdx, docs/reference/policy-schema.mdx, docs/sandboxes/policies.mdx, docs/security/best-practices.mdx
No docs/reference/gateway-config.mdx change — no gateway TOML keys, driver options, or defaults change
No SELinux or AppArmor impact — no change to process identity, execution, /proc access, or inter-process visibility
Skill review per the sync-agent-infra maintenance map: generate-sandbox-policy, openshell-cli, debug-openshell-cluster

Revision 1 — initial plan

PR1 is implemented in #2477.

Highlights:

Added the bidirectional WebSocket middleware contract and exact forward binding.
Added preflight, ordered text-message transforms/denials, limits, failure policy, shared admission, and safe OCSF telemetry.
Added a real tonic sample middleware that redacts an OpenAI response.create event; the relay test proves the upstream never receives the original secret-bearing payload.
Preserved raw relay for no-middleware/all-skip sessions and kept return-path/binary inspection deferred to PR2.

Validation completed:

mise run pre-commit
mise run ci
mise run e2e:websocket-conformance
mise run e2e:docker

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feat(supervisor): add WebSocket message introspection middleware #2428

Problem Statement

Proposed Design

Alternatives Considered

Inspect only the HTTP upgrade

Rely only on built-in WebSocket L7 policy

Expose raw WebSocket frames to middleware

Use opaque L4 passthrough

Agent Investigation

Definition of Done

Checklist

Implementation Plan

Summary

Scope

Implementation Steps

Test Plan

Key Design Decisions

Risks & Open Questions

Documentation Impact

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feat(supervisor): add WebSocket message introspection middleware #2428

Description

Problem Statement

Proposed Design

Alternatives Considered

Inspect only the HTTP upgrade

Rely only on built-in WebSocket L7 policy

Expose raw WebSocket frames to middleware

Use opaque L4 passthrough

Agent Investigation

Definition of Done

Checklist

Activity

pimlock commented on Jul 24, 2026

Implementation Plan

Summary

Scope

Implementation Steps

Test Plan

Key Design Decisions

Risks & Open Questions

Documentation Impact

pimlock commented on Jul 25, 2026

github-actions commented on Aug 8, 2026

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