fix(run): mask the container's own AWS credential state - #56

Closes a gap where two external-cli-tools scenarios were false as shipped.

The asymmetry

run.sh already treats the AWS CLI credential cache as too sensitive to bring
in from the host. The scoped --aws mount excludes ~/.aws/credentials and
~/.aws/cli/cache (run.sh:394-395), and the spec restates it as an absolute:
"~/.aws/credentials and ~/.aws/cli/cache/ SHALL NEVER be mounted, even under
--aws."

The container's own /root/.aws then got none of that care. It sits on
claude-code-root — read-write, shared by every session — with no tmpfs mask.
grep -n -- '--tmpfs' run.sh returned three paths and AWS was not among them.
So the STS cache an --aws session wrote persisted after that session exited
and was readable by a later session that opted into nothing.

Two scenarios were consequently false:

The cause is structural. Credentials opt-in states the desired end state
for /root/.aws; masking is actually specified by In-container gh login persists only under --gh, which was written for the three CLIs that have an
in-container login flow, so AWS was never added to it. The spec asked for an
outcome that no requirement provided a mechanism for. The EROFS claim looks
carried over from the --glab scenario, where the whole config directory is
bind-mounted :ro so the claim holds by construction; under --aws only
config (a file) and sso/ are mounted, leaving the directory itself on the
read-write volume.

Not overstated: that cache only ever holds short-lived SSO/STS-derived
material — the long-lived credentials file was never in the container — so
anything in it expires shortly after the session that wrote it ends. This is a
break in the opt-in boundary, not a live credential leak. It earns a fix
because the mask is two lines and the spec already required the behaviour.

The fix

AWS is masked in both directions; only the scope changes. Without --aws, the
whole directory. With it, just cli/cache, so the :ro host mounts at
/root/.aws/config and /root/.aws/sso stay visible to the session that asked
for them. Unlike gh, there is no in-container login to preserve, so there is
no unmask state.

"does not exist" becomes "is empty": a tmpfs makes a path exist-but-empty,
which is already how the glab-cli and terraform.d lines in that same
scenario read, and literal non-existence is not something a mount can express —
the original wording was never satisfiable by the mechanism the rest of the
scenario relies on.

Why the test reads run.sh instead of asserting in a container

This is the part worth reviewing. smoke/smoke.sh does not invoke run.sh
— it re-implements the mask list, and its own comment says "mirrors run.sh". A
mask missing from run.sh therefore could not fail the smoke suite, because the
harness would simply not add it either. The suite tests the mirror.

Separately, assert-in-container.sh does check that a non-granted opt-in's
config path is absent or empty, but its AWS entry points at /root/.aws/config
— a file absent without --aws whether or not a mask exists — so that assertion
passed vacuously and the credential cache beside it went unexamined.

Both halves worked as written; neither could observe this. So tests/test_masks.py
(the first test of any kind over the mask set) asserts against run.sh itself,
and additionally that the mirror still matches it, so the two cannot drift apart
silently again. The mask set is checked by equality, so a mask added without
a spec delta fails here rather than shipping unreviewed.

I verified the new test fails against the unfixed run.sh — a mask test
that passes before the fix tests nothing. Two of the six fail on HEAD:run.sh;
the other four pass.

One risk worth a reviewer's eye

The --aws cache mask is the only mask that must stay writable — the CLI
writes derived STS into it, and entrypoint.sh's chown walk uses find -xdev,
so it never descends into a tmpfs and cannot fix ownership there. That should
hold on Docker's default --tmpfs mode, but I could not verify it here without
a daemon, so assert-in-container.sh now asserts the write succeeds rather than
assuming it. CI's smoke cell going green is the confirmation.

Out of scope (named in the proposal, not silently skipped)

The host ~/.aws/sso bind-mount is conditional on that directory existing
(run.sh:399), so where it does not, an in-container aws sso login still
caches on the volume. That state is masked from every non---aws session either
way, so the boundary this PR is about holds; what remains is persistence between
two --aws sessions, which is inside the trust boundary that flag grants. The
conditional-on-host-state pattern appears elsewhere in run.sh and deserves its
own change.

Checks

• shellcheck --severity=warning (CI's threshold) — clean. Note it is not
  installed in the dev image and there is no root or pip there;
  uv tool run --from shellcheck-py shellcheck works.
• python3 -m unittest discover -s tests — 106 tests, all pass.
• openspec validate mask-aws-container-state --strict — valid, then archived
  with the specs synced, per CONTRIBUTING.md step 5.
• bash -n on every edited script.
• Not run: docker build plus the smoke cell — no Docker daemon available
  here, so it is left to CI's docker-build job. Archived with that task open
  rather than ticked.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code