[SoftTalker]

For every API you publish, do you verify that scoped API keys work as they should before you go live? If so, why would you not do the same for APIs you integrate with? It's all part of "your" system from the user's perspective.

[anon84873628]

I think the author is being deceptive with this part:

>3. CLI tokens have blanket permissions across environments.

>The Railway CLI token I created to add and remove custom domains had the same volumeDelete permission as a token created for any other purpose. Tokens are not scoped by operation, by environment, or by resource at the permission level. There is no role-based access control for the Railway API — every token is effectively root. The Railway community has been asking for scoped tokens for years. It hasn't shipped.

They're trying to make it sound like there was some misleading design around scopes, but the last sentence gives it away. They simply assumed that a scope would be enforced somehow, even though they never explicitly defined one like you would in a service that actually supports them. (Or worse, they actually knew all this ahead of time and still proceeded).

That said, I haven't used this service so I can't evaluate the UX. I know that in GitHub or cloud IAM there is no ambiguity about what you're granting. And if I didn't have full confidence in the limits of a credential then I sure as hell wouldn't give it to an agent.

[prng2021]

“why would you not do the same for APIs you integrate with?”

Who does that? Jira and Salesforce have hundreds of endpoints each. AWS has hundreds of services, and each may have hundreds of endpoints. Who on your team is testing key scopes of every endpoint? Do you do it for each key you generate? After all, that external system could have a bug at any moment in managing scopes. Or they could introduce new endpoints that aren’t handled properly. So for existing keys, how frequently do you re-validate the scope against all the endpoints?

[8note]

with amazon its pretty standard to scope permissions as an allow list.

if you want an llm to do any operations on your stuff, give it a role with access to only stuff you want it to be able to touch

[prng2021]

Yes but my original reply was to someone that seemed to imply that this founder was dumb not to verify that Railway’s API key that should have been limited to managing custom domains, truly was limited to managing custom domains. I’ve never used Railway but my pushback is that no one in the real world exhaustively verifies a key is scoped properly against all 3rd party endpoints. We trust vendors to document how they’re scoped and to actually do that.

[anon84873628]

I think it is meaningful that the author didn't say "there was a bug in scope enforcement" or "the UX is really misleading- look at these screenshots." In fact they even state this a long standing community FR. And they don't even say they only discovered this after the incident!

It actually seems like they knew ahead of time and proceeded anyway, but are just using this critique as a way to shift blame.