Theta Agent & Endpoint Management

The Theta Agent (theta-agent) is a unified, 2-way Command & Control (C2) endpoint management daemon written in Go with native cross-platform binaries for Linux (x86_64, ARM64, ARMv7), Windows (x86_64, ARM64), and macOS (Intel, Apple Silicon M1/M2/M3/M4). It connects outbound via a long-lived WebSocket connection to the central SSO Manager (wss://<sso-host>/api/agent/ws), enabling real-time host telemetry, automated host discovery, and local-first administrative management.

Supported Architectures & Operating Systems

The agent is compiled for 7 target platform binaries with zero external runtime dependencies:

The install.sh script automatically detects uname -s and uname -m to download the exact binary for the host.

Enrollment

An agent is only real if the SSO issued its credential. Tokens the server did not issue are rejected at the WebSocket handshake.

There are two ways to get a host enrolled, and the first is the normal one.

Join key — install the agent and the host appears

Hand the machine a join key and nothing else. On first connect the SSO enrolls the host, issues it its own per-agent token plus the public key it must pin, and the agent writes both into its own agent.yml and blanks the join key. From then on it authenticates as itself.

curl -fsSL https://<SSO_HOST>/resources/theta-agent/install.sh | sh -s -- \
  --url "https://<SSO_HOST>" --join-key "tjk_..."

That is the whole procedure — no pre-registering the machine, no copying a public key by hand. setup.sh mints a key and configures the stack's own host this way automatically.

The join key is a bootstrap credential, not the host's identity. That distinction is what keeps one key convenient without making it a fleet-wide skeleton key: every host still ends up individually revocable, and a compromised host does not yield a credential that works anywhere else.

Revoking a join key does not disconnect hosts that already joined; they hold their own tokens by then. Revoke the agent itself to cut a specific host off.

Reuse. Yes — a join key is not consumed on use. AgentJoinKey.authenticate only checks revoked and expires_on; it never invalidates the key itself. Every use increments use_count and stamps last_used_on, but the key keeps working until you revoke or delete it (or it expires) — "one key works for as many hosts as you like" above is literal, not a figure of speech.

UI. The Install Agent modal (Directory → Install Agent → Join key tab) has a Manage join keys table below the mint/select dropdown: label, prefix, created date, hosts joined, status, and Revoke/Delete actions per key. Clicking a key's "N hosts" link expands the list of hosts that joined through it (name, online status, joined date, last seen).

Audit. Yes, both halves are logged as structured "component":"agent" lines, and the hosts-joined list in the UI above is queryable directly:

• Minting: action: "join_key_issued" records the acting admin (actor), label, and keyPrefix.
• Each enrollment through that key: action: "join" records agentId, agentName, remoteAddr, joinKeyLabel, and joinKeyPrefix.
• GET /api/agent/join-keys/:id/agents returns the same "which hosts did key X add" answer the UI shows — it matches on the trace Agent.enroll leaves in each agent's description ("Self-enrolled with join key <prefix>") rather than a stored foreign key, since a join key is exchanged for a per-agent token immediately and from then on the agent's own identity is what matters.

Pre-registering a host

When you want the agent bound to a specific Directory host up front, enroll it from Directory → Install Agent:

1. Give the agent a name and bind it to a host resource. The binding is what links telemetry, status and commands to a Directory entry.
2. Press Enroll & issue token. The SSO mints a 256-bit token, stores only its SHA-256, and shows the raw value once.
3. Copy the generated install command — it already carries the token and the server's public key.

A host that self-enrolls with a join key arrives unbound; bind it afterwards with PUT /api/agent/nodes/:id or from the Directory.

Or via the API:

curl -X POST https://<SSO_HOST>/api/agent/enroll \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <admin-api-token>" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"name": "web01", "resourceId": "<host-resource-uuid>"}'

The response contains token (once only) and publicKey.

Revoke, rotate and delete drop any live connection immediately — they do not wait for the agent to reconnect. Commands are addressed by agent id, never by token: a token is a credential and has no business in a URL or a log.

Enrollment, revocation, rotation, every command, and every rejected connection are written to the application log as structured "component":"agent" records with the acting user.

Lost the token? It cannot be recovered — only its hash is stored. Rotate the agent to issue a new one.

Core Functionality

1. Host Discovery & Inventory

Upon establishing a WebSocket connection, the agent immediately pushes a comprehensive discovery payload:

• Hostname & Network Interfaces: Hostname and all non-loopback IPv4 addresses and MACs.
• Operating System & Kernel: Linux distribution, platform, and kernel version.
• Hardware Specs: CPU model, total RAM (GB), and total root disk capacity (GB).
• Physical Location: Location identifier string (e.g. dc-01-rack-12) configured in agent.yml.

If the agent detects a network IP change, it automatically re-pushes an updated discovery payload to the SSO Manager.

2. Real-Time Telemetry Streaming

Every 30 seconds, the agent streams real-time performance metrics:

• CPU Load: System-wide CPU utilization percentage.
• Memory Utilization: RAM usage percentage and available memory.
• Disk Utilization: Root filesystem usage percentage.
• ZFS Storage Health: Health status of ZFS pools (e.g., ONLINE).
• NVIDIA GPU Load: GPU compute utilization percentage (via nvidia-smi).

Viewing in the SSO Manager

Agent status and telemetry live on the Directory page — there is no separate Agents page. For each host resource that has a connected theta-agent, the Directory shows a status dot in the row:

Red and grey used to be the same colour, which made an ordinary directory of hosts look like an outage. Because the enrollment now outlives the connection, "installed but down" is distinguishable from "never had an agent".

Opening a host's resource modal reveals a Metrics tab with the agent's live telemetry (CPU/RAM/disk/ZFS/GPU) and discovery info (OS, kernel, IPs, location).

An agent attaches to its host by its enrollment binding (resourceId), set when you enroll it or later via PUT /api/agent/nodes/:id. Agents enrolled without a binding fall back to matching their reported hostname against the resource name — the old behaviour, kept only as a fallback, because it silently failed whenever a Directory name differed from the machine's hostname and aliased two hosts that happened to share one.

Agent discovery feeds the Directory

A bound agent's discovery payload is written onto its host resource (os, kernel, cpu, ram_total_gb, disk_total_gb, ip), tagged with discovery_sources: ["theta-agent"] and an agentId back-reference. An agent runs on the host it describes, so it is the most authoritative source the directory has. An unbound agent goes through the normal discovery reconciler instead, matching like any other source.

Local-First Security & Capability Matrix

To protect hosts against unauthorized control, theta-agent enforces a strict, local-first capability matrix defined in /etc/theta42/agent.yml. Central SSO Manager requests are checked against local configuration before execution; permissions cannot be overridden remotely.

High-Risk Command Verification (Protocol v1.2.0)

High-risk management commands (reboot, service_restart, configure_ldap, arbitrary_bash, update_binary) are cryptographically verified using Ed25519 signatures:

1. The SSO Manager canonicalizes the command payload (sorted keys, no whitespace, no HTML escaping, signature omitted).
2. The payload is signed with the SSO Manager's Ed25519 private key.
3. The Base64 signature is appended to the message payload.
4. The agent verifies the signature against the configured public_key in /etc/theta42/agent.yml before executing the action.

The signing key is persistent. It lives in OpenBao at secret/agent/signing-key and survives restarts, so the public_key you pin in agent.yml keeps matching. (It used to be generated in memory at boot and changed on every restart, which made pinning impossible.) If the SSO cannot load or store a key it refuses to send high-risk commands rather than signing with one no agent has seen — GET /api/agent/nodes reports this as signingAvailable: false.

This requires the sso-broker OpenBao policy to grant secret/agent/*. Re-run ./setup.sh from theta-suite if you are upgrading.

Verification is fail-closed on the agent. An agent with no public_key configured rejects every high-risk command. Earlier versions logged "skipping signature verification" and executed them, so an agent installed without a key would run reboot, configure_ldap and arbitrary_bash unverified.

Secrets Engine — rendering OpenBao secrets to local files

The agent can render OpenBao secrets to local files that any process on the host — a bash script, a systemd unit, a Node app, whatever — reads like an ordinary env file. The agent never holds a Vault token: it asks the SSO for the values over its existing WSS channel, and the SSO fetches them from OpenBao using its own access, scoped so the agent can only ever read its own node's secrets.

Node scope. Every path an agent can request must start with secret/data/nodes/<this-agent's-id>/. The SSO enforces this server-side (POST /api/v1/agent/secrets); a request for any other node's path is rejected:

$ curl -sk https://sso.example.com/api/v1/agent/secrets \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer <agent-token>" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -d '{"paths":["secret/data/nodes/some-other-node-id/db"]}'
{"status":"error","message":"path outside node scope: secret/data/nodes/some-other-node-id/db"}

A compromised agent can therefore never reach another host's secrets, or anything outside secret/data/nodes/*.

Walkthrough: a 3rd-party app reads a secret the agent rendered

This walks through the whole path end to end, on a stack freshly brought up from theta-suite's own docs/fixtures.md demo data — the same steps work on any theta-suite install.

1. Enroll the host. Directory → Install Agent → mint a join key, run the install command on the target host as root.

On first connect the agent exchanges the join key for its own token + the SSO's public key and writes both back into /etc/theta42/agent.yml. Note the agent's id from GET /api/agent/nodes (or the Directory URL) — you need it for the next step.

2. Turn on the secrets capability and point it at a template. Add to the host's /etc/theta42/agent.yml:

secrets:
  - template: /etc/theta/templates/db.env.tpl
    target: /etc/theta/rendered/db.env
    reload: ""          # optional: e.g. "systemctl reload myapp"

capabilities:
  secrets: true

And the template itself, /etc/theta/templates/db.env.tpl — placeholders are {{ bao "secret/data/nodes/<agent-id>/<name>#<key>" }}:

DB_USER="{{ bao "secret/data/nodes/f9a30ab0-7d8a-4b77-a4c4-6a6383d084db/db#username" }}"
DB_PASS="{{ bao "secret/data/nodes/f9a30ab0-7d8a-4b77-a4c4-6a6383d084db/db#password" }}"

Restart the agent to pick up the config change.

3. Seed the secret. From theta-suite/ (theta-env), as the operator:

./setup.sh --seed-node-secret f9a30ab0-7d8a-4b77-a4c4-6a6383d084db db \
  username=demoapp password=CorrectHorseBattery42

This writes to secret/nodes/<agent-id>/db in OpenBao (the CLI path — the HTTP API the agent uses sees it as secret/data/nodes/<agent-id>/db, matched by the node-scope check above). It's idempotent: it skips silently if that path is already seeded.

4. Trigger the render. The Directory UI doesn't have a button for this yet — push it the same way any admin command goes out, POST /api/agent/nodes/:id/command. It's in the high-risk list, so the SSO signs it automatically:

curl -X POST https://sso.example.com/api/agent/nodes/f9a30ab0-7d8a-4b77-a4c4-6a6383d084db/command \
  -H "auth-token: <admin session token>" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"command": "render_secrets", "payload": {}}'

The agent logs Received command: render_secrets / Rendering secret templates... and atomically writes the target file at mode 0600:

$ cat /etc/theta/rendered/db.env
DB_USER="demoapp"
DB_PASS="CorrectHorseBattery42"

Back in the Directory, the host's Metrics tab shows Secrets lit up green among the reported capabilities:

5. Read it from a bash app on the same host. The rendered file is just an env file — no agent involvement needed to consume it:

#!/bin/sh
. /etc/theta/rendered/db.env
echo "DB_USER=$DB_USER"
echo "DB_PASS=$DB_PASS"

6. Read it from a Node app on the same host:

const fs = require('fs');
const env = fs.readFileSync('/etc/theta/rendered/db.env', 'utf8');
const db = {};
for (const line of env.split('\n')) {
  const m = /^(\w+)="(.*)"$/.exec(line.trim());
  if (m) db[m[1]] = m[2];
}
console.log('DB_USER=' + db.DB_USER);
console.log('DB_PASS=' + db.DB_PASS);

Both print the same values the template resolved — demoapp / CorrectHorseBattery42 in this walkthrough. theta-agent/demo/ in the theta-agent repo has these two scripts ready to run.

Alternative: calling the API directly

Rendering to a file is the normal path — it works for any app regardless of language, and the secret never touches an HTTP client the app itself controls. But an app can also fetch its node's secrets directly, bypassing the template engine entirely (useful for debugging, or a process that wants to hold the value only in memory). This uses the agent's own bearer token, not an admin token — the same node-scope enforcement applies:

curl -sk https://sso.example.com/api/v1/agent/secrets \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <agent-token>" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"paths":["secret/data/nodes/f9a30ab0-7d8a-4b77-a4c4-6a6383d084db/db"]}'

const token = process.env.THETA_AGENT_TOKEN; // from /etc/theta42/agent.yml
fetch('https://sso.example.com/api/v1/agent/secrets', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: { Authorization: 'Bearer ' + token, 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
  body: JSON.stringify({ paths: ['secret/data/nodes/f9a30ab0-7d8a-4b77-a4c4-6a6383d084db/db'] })
}).then(r => r.json()).then(d => console.log(d.secrets));

Both return:

{
  "status": "ok",
  "secrets": {
    "secret/data/nodes/f9a30ab0-7d8a-4b77-a4c4-6a6383d084db/db": {
      "username": "demoapp",
      "password": "CorrectHorseBattery42"
    }
  }
}

Installation & Deployment

Quick One-Liner Install

Run the following command as root on the target Linux host:

curl -fsSL https://<SSO_HOST>/resources/theta-agent/install.sh | sh -s -- \
  --url "https://<SSO_HOST>" --token "<ISSUED_TOKEN>" --public-key "<BASE64_PUBLIC_KEY>"

Both values come from enrollment. The Install Agent modal builds this line for you with them already filled in. Omitting --public-key leaves the agent able to report telemetry but unable to accept any high-risk command.

Custom Config Wizard

You can generate a Base64-encoded custom configuration using the Install Agent button on the Directory Management page in the SSO Manager UI:

curl -fsSL https://<SSO_HOST>/resources/theta-agent/install.sh | sh -s -- "<BASE64_ENCODED_CONFIG>"

Configuration File Example (/etc/theta42/agent.yml)

# /etc/theta42/agent.yml
server_url: "wss://sso.example.com"
# Issued by the SSO. Left empty when installing with a join key -- the agent
# fills it in itself once the server enrolls it.
auth_token: "c8181ce0e55bf7302b11d719a7ae39adcd7604de461e6e363f8bb4fadf126acb"
# Bootstrap credential. Used only while auth_token is empty, and blanked by the
# agent once it has its own token.
join_key: ""
location: "dc-01-rack-12"
# Base64 of the RAW 32-byte Ed25519 public key -- exactly the `publicKey` value
# from enrollment or GET /api/agent/nodes. Not a PEM body: a base64-decoded
# SPKI blob is 44 bytes, the agent requires 32, and it will refuse every signed
# command if this is wrong.
public_key: "D0cJB3iuStTzhXlu7tFDh/eEXFxRZwkuwQJJhFSqwlQ="

capabilities:
  telemetry: true
  configure_ldap: true
  reboot: false
  service_control: ["nginx", "docker", "sssd"]
  arbitrary_bash: false

Troubleshooting: agent is rejected (close 4001)

If the agent logs that the server rejected its token, the enrollment — not the network — is the problem. The SSO accepts the WebSocket upgrade and then closes with an application code:

The agent backs off for 5 minutes on 4001/4003/4004 rather than retrying every 5 seconds — a credential that is wrong will not fix itself, and hammering the SSO only floods its audit log.

An agent installed before protocol v1.2.0 carries a token generated in the browser that the server never recorded, so it will be rejected with 4001 until re-enrolled. The quickest fix is to put a join key in its agent.yml as join_key and blank auth_token — it will re-enroll itself on the next reconnect.

Troubleshooting: agent can't connect (dial tcp ... i/o timeout)

If the agent host logs Dial error: dial tcp <ip>:443: i/o timeout while connecting to wss://<sso-host>/api/agent/ws, the WebSocket path is usually fine — this is a network/NAT problem, not an agent or SSO bug. A host behind the same NAT that owns the SSO often cannot reach its own public IP (no hairpin/loopback NAT on many home routers), so the TCP dial times out even though the same address works from outside.

Fix options:

1. Point agent.yml server_url at an address the host can reach directly — e.g. the SSO host's LAN IP (http://<lan-ip> or http://<lan-ip>:3001 for a no-TLS direct path).
2. Enable NAT reflection / hairpin NAT on the router so LAN hosts can reach their own public IP:443.
3. Add a local route/firewall rule on the agent host for its public IP.

Note: on a deployment where the theta42 proxy fronts sso.suite.example, make sure the proxy has a persistent Host record for the real SSO domain — not just the localtest.me placeholder — so routing survives a proxy restart (an in-memory lookup cache can mask a missing Redis record for up to ~1h).