Autheory
Autheory is the identity layer for the Theory Cloud stack. Every identity concept — users, clients, tenants, workspaces, memberships, sessions, MFA enrollments, credentials — is persisted through TableTheory.
Autheory is the single largest consumer of TableTheory’s encryption primitive, and the canonical test of its fail-closed posture.
What Autheory persists through TableTheory
| Autheory surface | TableTheory primitives |
|---|---|
| Users | Single-table model, optimistic locking |
| Tenants & workspaces | Composite keys, tenant-partitioned |
| Memberships | Inverse-GSI for “who belongs where” |
| Sessions | TTL + optimistic locking |
| MFA enrollments | Encrypted fields, optimistic locking |
| Credentials | Encrypted fields, fail-closed reads |
| Refresh tokens | TTL + encrypted bound-secret |
| Audit log | Append-only writes, time-ordered sort keys |
The encryption test
Autheory is the reason TableTheory’s fail-closed encryption posture cannot soften. If a credential read silently returned plaintext when KMS was unavailable, every Autheory consumer downstream — meaning every Theory Cloud product — would silently lose secrecy. The refusal to weaken fail-closed is upheld for Autheory in particular.
Cross-runtime importance
Autheory itself is Go, but tokens it issues are validated by services in all three runtimes (Go, TypeScript, Python). The persistence layer’s cross-runtime parity is therefore directly on Autheory’s hot path — a bug where Python reads a session record differently than Go is a real-world authentication failure.
Why this matters for TableTheory stewardship
Autheory’s correctness depends on three TableTheory invariants holding simultaneously:
- Encryption fail-closed. Discussed above.
- Optimistic locking determinism. Session refresh races must produce one winner.
- TTL honor on read. Expired sessions must never return data on
Get.
Any of these regressing breaks Autheory. The contract scenarios cover all three on every commit.
Related
- Features · Encryption — fail-closed, no fallbacks
- Features · Optimistic Locking — session refresh semantics
- Features · TTL — session expiration semantics
- Autheory repository