PolicyEngine / PolicyEngine/policyengine-household-api
Add cache-invalidation strategy for rotated JWKS keys
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- Dominant language
- Python
- Stars
- 1
- Forks
- 3
- Avg merge
- 6h 34m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 8
Description
Summary
#1471 added lazy-retry for the JWKS fetch, so a failing fetch at boot no longer caches None indefinitely. But there is no cache-invalidation strategy once a successful JWKS is cached — if Auth0 rotates signing keys between fetches, tokens signed with the new key will fail validation until the process restarts or a manual cache-clear runs.
What goes wrong
- After a successful fetch,
_jwks_cache[issuer]is held for the process lifetime. - Auth0 rotates signing keys periodically;
PyJWKClienthas a 5-minute internal cache but the outer_jwks_cachewrapper doesn't expire successful fetches at all. - Result: a rotation event causes every token signed with the new kid to 401 on this API until pods restart.
Suggested fix
Add a success-cache TTL consistent with rotation cadence (Auth0 default is days; conservative is 1 hour):
_JWKS_SUCCESS_TTL_SECONDS = 3600
def _fetch_jwks(issuer: str) -> PyJWKClient | None:
cached = _jwks_cache.get(issuer)
now = time.monotonic()
if cached is not None:
fetched_at, client = cached
if client is not None and now - fetched_at < _JWKS_SUCCESS_TTL_SECONDS:
return client
# success older than TTL → re-fetch
# … rest of fetch logic
Alternatively, because PyJWKClient already handles per-kid lookup + its own short cache, let it handle rotation internally and simplify the outer wrapper to just cache the client instance (not the JWKS itself) forever — the client will refetch individual kids on miss.
Severity
Medium — no active incident, but rotation-day outages are silent and self-healing only after restarts.
Relates to
Fixes #1471 (merged), #1468 (merged).
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by locating _fetch_jwks and the _jwks_cache wrapper, then inspect how PyJWKClient is used for issuer lookups. Compare the proposed success-cache TTL with delegating rotation handling to PyJWKClient. Done means a newly rotated signing key can validate without a process restart, with coverage for cached and expired-client behavior.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- python
- Domain
- authentication, backend, security
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 52/100