Schulcloud-MCP/docs/AUTH.md

Authentication

What this server uses

The jwt cookie from a logged-in browser session, sent verbatim as Authorization: Bearer <token>. That is the whole mechanism.

This was worth confirming rather than assuming, because the obvious reading of "it's a cookie" leads somewhere much more complicated. Verified live:

Authorization: Bearer <jwt>  → 200    # what this server does
Cookie: jwt=<jwt>            → 200    # also works
(no auth)                    → 401

connect.sid, SERVERID and isLoggedIn are not needed — there is no cookie jar. There is a session to keep alive, though not in the way the cookies suggest; see the next section.

Token lifetime, and the thing that actually kills it

Two clocks govern the token:

Clock	Value	Notes
Session — a whitelist entry in Valkey, jwt:{accountId}:{jti}	JWT_TIMEOUT_SECONDS = 7200 s	Sliding: every authenticated request re-sets it
Hard expiry — the JWT's own exp claim	30 days	Cannot be extended

JwtStrategy.validate() calls JwtWhitelistAdapter.isWhitelisted(), which reads the key, throws 'Session was expired due to inactivity - autologout.' if it is gone, and then re-sets it with a fresh TTL. The legacy Feathers implementation does the same. So the window really does slide with use, and a keepalive holds a session up to the 30-day ceiling.

But a browser tab will log this server out

The trap is not a clock at all. The jwt cookie you copy is the browser's own session token — same jti. This server and that tab share one session, and the tab will end it:

1. On login the front end starts a purely client-side timer: sessionTimeoutTimestamp = Date.now() + JWT_TIMEOUT_SECONDS. It is reset only on route change — watch(router.currentRoute, startTimer) — never by API activity, and never read back from the server's real TTL. (nuxt-client/src/modules/data/application/application.store.ts)
2. After JWT_SHOW_TIMEOUT_WARNING_SECONDS (3600 s) remain it shows the "Sitzung verlängern" dialog. (AutoLogoutWarning.vue)
3. At zero it calls autoLogout() → location.replace('/logout?auto-logout=true').
4. That route, in the legacy client, issues POST /api/v3/logout (schulcloud-client/controllers/login.js:439) → removeJwtFromWhitelist(jwt) → the shared key is deleted.

An idle tab therefore revokes this server's token about two hours after login, no matter how diligently the server refreshes it. Measured exactly that way: a keepalive pinged successfully at t+0/30/60/90 and was dead by t+120, ~2 h after login, while exp still had 29 days left.

Note the timer is client-side and reset only by navigation. That is why the dialog appears after an idle hour even in a tab you consider "in use", and why no amount of API traffic prevents it.

So: close the tab

After copying the jwt cookie, close the Schulportal tab — all of them; the front end also syncs logout across tabs over a BroadcastChannel. Closing a tab runs no logout itself (autoLogout fires only from the expiry timer), so the session survives on the server with nothing left to revoke it.

The tidiest recipe is a private/incognito window: log in there, copy the jwt, close the window. That session is separate from your normal browsing, and POST /api/v3/logout only ever removes its own jti, so your everyday session and this server cannot end each other.

With no tab attached, the keepalive holds the session to the 30-day hard expiry, and replacing the token becomes the monthly chore it looked like at first.

Replacing the token without a restart

schulcloud token set (paste at a hidden prompt, or pipe it in) and the server's /token page both send a fresh token to PUT /api/token, behind the bearer check. core/session-token.ts then:

1. Cleans the paste. A bare value, jwt=…; Path=/, quotes and newlines all work.
2. Checks before it swaps. A malformed or expired token is refused without asking Schulcloud; otherwise GET /api/v3/me must succeed with the new token, and for the same userId the current one carries. A refused token changes nothing. Switching accounts stays a deliberate act — change TSC_JWT_COOKIE and restart.
3. Swaps it in place. Every request reads config.jwt at the moment it is sent, so the next one uses the new token; nothing caches a copy.
4. Restarts the keepalive, which stopped for good on a 401. Its pings carry a generation number, so one still in flight with the old token cannot stop the new cycle when its 401 arrives.
5. Saves it to STATE_DIR (0600, written beside itself and renamed). At startup the newer of the saved token and TSC_JWT_COOKIE wins, by exp — unless they belong to different accounts, when the environment does.

The token appears in no log line and no response; /api/token reports only the expiry, where the token came from, and the keepalive's state. The claims are decoded, never verified — Schulcloud verifies, this only reads dates.

The cookie is HttpOnly, so no script — no bookmarklet, no page on another origin — can read it out of the browser. The DevTools copy is the one manual step, and it cannot be automated away short of a headless browser holding the Schulportal password (see below).

There is no longer window available

config/default.schema.json documents JWT_EXTENDED_TIMEOUT_SECONDS (2629746 s ≈ 1 month), reachable in the legacy stack via a privateDevice login flag. On the current NestJS server that is vestigial: privateDevice has no references in apps/server/src, and generateJwtAndAddToWhitelist calls addToWhitelist with no TTL override. A "remember me" login buys nothing.

How this server stays alive

src/keepalive.ts calls POST /api/v3/authentication/refresh-session every 30 minutes (KEEPALIVE_INTERVAL_MS; 0 disables it), from both entry points and independently of whether any MCP client is connected — the session expires on wall time, not on usage. It logs the budget each time:

[schulcloud-mcp] keepalive: session extended, 7200s (120 min) of budget left

A plain GET would also slide the TTL today. refresh-session is used anyway because it states the intent contractually rather than relying on a side effect of an unrelated read — upstream has refactored this whitelist twice in 2026, and a GET-based keepalive would fail silently if extend-on-check ever went away. The budget readout also turns "is the session healthy" into something the log answers directly.

It is the one non-GET request in the server. No body, touches only the caller's own session, cannot read or modify user data, and is not exposed as a tool — so no model-driven call can ever be a POST, and the property that matters is intact: nobody reaching this endpoint can act as the user in Schulcloud.

A transient failure retries in 5 minutes. A 401 stops the keepalive permanently and says what to do, because a deleted whitelist entry cannot be revived by retrying — and if it happens roughly two hours after login, suspect an open tab before anything else.

Two ways to check that a token is holding:

• npm run keepalive-status reads the running container's logs and summarises its extensions. It makes no API call on purpose — any authenticated request slides the TTL, so a checker that talked to Schulcloud would be keeping the session alive itself and could not tell you whether the keepalive works.
• npm run session-diagnose calls refresh-session every 10 minutes for ~2.5 h and logs the budget, for when there is no container to read logs from.

Operational consequence: if the container is down for over two hours the session lapses on its own, and restarting will not recover it. The startup log says so immediately:

[schulcloud-mcp] keepalive: token rejected (401). The session is gone …

Why not username + password

The instance's login redirects to Keycloak (realm TIS) with a redirect_uri pointing back at Schulcloud's own server, so the authorization-code exchange happens server-side with a client secret only Schulcloud holds. A third party cannot replicate that flow. POST /api/v3/authentication/local exists but is for accounts with local credentials, which federated school accounts do not have.

Given a keepalive that holds a session to its 30-day ceiling, the pasted-JWT approach is the right trade: one manual step a month against re-implementing an OAuth client whose secret we cannot hold. If that monthly step ever becomes unacceptable, the honest options are a service account issued by the school's IDM, or driving the Keycloak login with a headless browser — not a reimplementation of the code exchange. A headless browser would have to hold the Schulportal password, which unlocks far more than this account's school files, so it is not done here.

Protecting this server's own endpoint

Distinct from the above, and just as important. The MCP endpoint is reachable from the public internet by construction: Claude's connectors call it from Anthropic's cloud, not from your machine. It is protected by MCP_AUTH_TOKEN, a shared secret checked in constant time on every /mcp request (src/http/auth.ts), accepted as either Authorization: Bearer … or X-Api-Key. /healthz is deliberately open and reveals nothing.

Generate one with openssl rand -hex 32. If it is unset the server logs a loud warning and serves unauthenticated — only acceptable bound to localhost.

Rotating it: change MCP_AUTH_TOKEN in .env, restart the container, update the connector in Claude. Nothing else stores it.

Blast radius

Every path in this server is a GET, including the api_get escape hatch, which rejects anything not starting with /api/ and anything carrying a scheme or host. Someone who obtained both the endpoint URL and MCP_AUTH_TOKEN could read this account's Schulcloud data; they could not post, submit, delete, or otherwise act as the user. With MCP_AUTH_TOKEN they could also call PUT /api/token, but it accepts only a live token for the same account, so the most it can do is hand the server a session the owner already has. Keep it that way — adding a single write tool would change that property entirely.