Provenance had no system-level owner: ownership was only per-tree
(TreeMembership), so a self-hosted instance had no operator account and no
instance-admin surface. This adds one, declared by environment per the project's
twelve-factor rule.
- OWNER_EMAIL (comma-separated): the account(s) named here are instance owners.
Derived at request time — no DB column, no migration, can't drift from the env,
survives DB resets. is_instance_owner()/InstanceOwner dependency in api/deps.py.
- Ownership requires a VERIFIED email (independent of REQUIRE_EMAIL_VERIFICATION).
Registration is open, so without this an attacker could seize the role by
registering the owner address first; verification ties it to inbox control.
- GET /api/v1/admin/instance (owner-only): operational status — version, env,
user/tree counts, configured AI providers. Deliberately exposes no tree data
or PII: instance ownership is an operator role, NOT a privacy-engine bypass.
- /users/me reports is_instance_owner; frontend gains an owner-only /admin page
and a conditional sidebar link (server-enforced, not just client-hidden).
Found-and-fixed by an adversarial security review before merge: the
verified-email land-grab (above) and a frontend null-deref where the admin page
crashed on 401/5xx instead of failing closed.
Docs: .env.example + ARCHITECTURE (notes the not-a-privacy-bypass boundary and
the verified-email requirement). Tests: owner matching, the land-grab guard,
/users/me, and owner-only /admin. Suite 96 passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Signed-off-by: Justin Paul <justin@jpaul.me>
