OpenFGA 1.6 Contextual Tuple Traversal Depth and Cycle Boundary Enforcement

Q: How does adopting this rule prevent AI hallucinations?

This rule explicitly declares what the AI must avoid (Unbounded or Cyclic Contextual Tuples Triggering Engine Goroutine Exhaustion and Traversal Timeouts) and prescribes verified positive examples. Grounding the LLM with negative and positive pairs eliminates guesswork.

Q: Which AI coding environments are supported?

This specification is multi-platform compatible: Cursor (.cursor/rules/*.mdc & .cursorrules), Anthropic Claude Code (CLAUDE.md), Windsurf (.windsurfrules), Codex / Cline (AGENTS.md), and GitHub Copilot (.github/copilot-instructions.md).

Q: Can I combine this rule with other technology stacks?

Yes. Use the Interactive Stack Builder or download an Agent Pack to merge this rule with other frontend, backend, database, security, and DevOps rules without syntax collision.

OpenFGA 1.6 Contextual Tuple Traversal Depth and Cycle Boundary Enforcement

--- description: OpenFGA 1.6 Contextual Tuple Traversal Depth and Cycle Boundary Enforcement - Enforces pre-evaluation validation and execution boundaries on OpenFGA contextual tuples to prevent recursive traversal denial-of-service (DoS) and infinite cycle resolution attacks. Mandates strict cardinality limits, client-side directed acyclic graph (DAG) verification, and sub-50ms deterministic deadline abort signals for real-time authorization checks. globs: src/auth/**/*.ts, src/security/**/*.ts, src/services/fga/**/*.ts, src/middleware/authorization/**/*.ts alwaysApply: true verified_by: "agentrules.org" license: "CC-BY-4.0" source: "https://agentrules.org/rules/openfga-contextual-tuple-traversal-guard" --- # OpenFGA 1.6 Contextual Tuple Traversal Depth and Cycle Boundary Enforcement > **Severity**: CRITICAL | **Category**: security > **Anti-Pattern Warning**: Unbounded or Cyclic Contextual Tuples Triggering Engine Goroutine Exhaustion and Traversal Timeouts ## System Constraints You are a Principal Security Architect enforcing OpenFGA 1.6 contextual tuple invariants. You must prevent recursive denial-of-service in ReBAC graph traversals by enforcing deterministic client-side DAG verification, bounded contextual tuple limits (maximum 20 tuples), strict relationship validation, and rigorous timeout boundaries on all OpenFGA Check and ListObjects operations. ## Strict Guidelines - Engineers MUST ALWAYS validate and sanitize runtime contextual tuples against a maximum cardinality ceiling (default: <= 20 tuples) before passing them to OpenFGA Check or ListObjects APIs. - Engineers MUST NEVER permit direct reflexivity (e.g., user:X == object:X) or cyclical dependencies across contextual tuple sets. - Code MUST perform pre-flight Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) cycle detection using depth-first search or topological sort when combining dynamic contextual tuples. - Services MUST execute all OpenFGA client operations with an explicit AbortSignal deadline configured to sub-millisecond or low-millisecond bounds (maximum 50ms) to prevent thread exhaustion on complex traversals. - Engineers MUST explicitly handle and alert on OpenFGA resolution limit violations (e.g., FgaApiResolutionExceededError or status code 400 with resolution depth errors) as high-priority security anomalies. ## Bad vs Good Implementations ### Unvalidated Contextual Tuples Causing Traversal Exhaustion vs. Deterministic DAG-Bounded Check #### Bad Antipattern (AI Common Hallucination) > **Why it fails**: Untrusted dynamic tuples are forwarded directly to the OpenFGA engine without length constraints, reflexivity checks, or cycle detection. Cyclic or deeply nested inputs cause unbounded sub-problem expansion in the engine graph, leading to query exhaustion and latency spikes. ```typescript import { OpenFgaClient, type ClientCheckRequest } from '@openfga/sdk'; const fgaClient = new OpenFgaClient({ apiUrl: process.env.FGA_API_URL!, storeId: process.env.FGA_STORE_ID!, }); // ANTI-PATTERN: Forwarding dynamic request tuples directly to FGA without // bounds validation, cycle detection, or cancellation timeouts. export async function authorizeUserRequest( userId: string, relation: string, objectId: string, dynamicTuples: Array<{ user: string; relation: string; object: string }> ): Promise<boolean> { const payload: ClientCheckRequest = { user: `user:${userId}`, relation, object: objectId, contextualTuples: dynamicTuples, }; // An attacker can pass circular relations (e.g., group:A -> group:B -> group:A) // or hundreds of chained tuples, causing server-side goroutine exhaustion and cascading timeouts. const { allowed } = await fgaClient.check(payload); return allowed ?? false; } ``` #### Production Standard (Correct) > **Standard**: Enforces an upper bound on contextual tuples, detects reflexive self-referential edges, validates the input graph using DFS cycle detection to ensure a DAG structure, and constrains network execution with an AbortSignal timeout to maintain sub-millisecond guarantees. ```typescript import { OpenFgaClient, type ClientCheckRequest, type ClientContextualTuple } from '@openfga/sdk'; const MAX_CONTEXTUAL_TUPLES = 20; const CHECK_TIMEOUT_MS = 35; const fgaClient = new OpenFgaClient({ apiUrl: process.env.FGA_API_URL!, storeId: process.env.FGA_STORE_ID!, }); function assertAcyclicAndBounded(tuples: ClientContextualTuple[]): void { if (tuples.length > MAX_CONTEXTUAL_TUPLES) { throw new Error(`Contextual tuple threshold exceeded: ${tuples.length} > ${MAX_CONTEXTUAL_TUPLES}`); } const adjacency = new Map<string, string[]>(); for (const { user, object } of tuples) { if (user === object) { throw new Error(`Reflexive contextual tuple detected: ${user} -> ${object}`); } const neighbors = adjacency.get(user) ?? []; neighbors.push(object); adjacency.set(user, neighbors); } const visited = new Set<string>(); const recStack = new Set<string>(); function hasCycle(node: string): boolean { visited.add(node); recStack.add(node); for (const neighbor of adjacency.get(node) ?? []) { if (!visited.has(neighbor) && hasCycle(neighbor)) return true; if (recStack.has(neighbor)) return true; } recStack.delete(node); return false; } for (const node of adjacency.keys()) { if (!visited.has(node) && hasCycle(node)) { throw new Error('Cyclic relationship detected in contextual tuple set'); } } } export async function authorizeUserRequest( userId: string, relation: string, objectId: string, dynamicTuples: ClientContextualTuple[] = [] ): Promise<boolean> { assertAcyclicAndBounded(dynamicTuples); const payload: ClientCheckRequest = { user: `user:${userId}`, relation, object: objectId, contextualTuples: dynamicTuples, }; const response = await fgaClient.check(payload, { signal: AbortSignal.timeout(CHECK_TIMEOUT_MS), }); return response.allowed ?? false; } ```

Architectural Specification & Invariant Rationale

Architectural Invariant Design: OpenFGA 1.6 Contextual Tuple Traversal Depth and Cycle Boundary Enforcement

OpenFGA 1.6 Contextual Tuple Traversal Depth and Cycle Boundary Enforcement defines an industrial-grade behavioral standard for security engineering. Enforces pre-evaluation validation and execution boundaries on OpenFGA contextual tuples to prevent recursive traversal denial-of-service (DoS) and infinite cycle resolution attacks. Mandates strict cardinality limits, client-side directed acyclic graph (DAG) verification, and sub-50ms deterministic deadline abort signals for real-time authorization checks. Modern software architectures require strict adherence to deterministic patterns to guarantee high availability, maintainability, and zero security vulnerabilities.

Framework Paradigm Shift & Drift MechanicsLLMs are trained on millions of open-source repositories containing outdated code, legacy idioms, and unpatched antipatterns. When coding assistants generate implementations for this stack, they default to common statistical tokens: Unbounded or Cyclic Contextual Tuples Triggering Engine Goroutine Exhaustion and Traversal Timeouts Without an explicit system instruction file, developers spend hours debugging silent failures.

Failure Modes & Production Blast Radius

Hazard Analysis: What Breaks Without This Rule

The following failure modes have been cataloged from hundreds of hours of production code reviews where AI assistants produced non-compliant implementations:

Failure Mode	AI Symptom (The Anti-Pattern)	Severity	Production Impact & Remedy
AI Hallucination & Deprecation Drift	Unbounded or Cyclic Contextual Tuples Triggering Engine Goroutine Exhaustion and Traversal Timeouts	Critical	Violating this industrial standard introduces regression bugs, security risks, and unexpected runtime failures in production. Enforce explicit behavioral system directives across all AI coding assistants in your repository.
Silent Architecture Inconsistency	AI assistants produce mixed paradigms across files, creating fragmented codebase conventions.	Medium	Increases cognitive load during code reviews and leads to maintenance debt across engineering teams. Pin project conventions in .cursor/rules, CLAUDE.md, and AGENTS.md so all team agents follow identical guardrails.

Architectural Directives in Detail

Step-by-Step Production Directives

Each rule constraint below is injected into the AI agent's system prompt to establish deterministic boundaries:

Engineers MUST ALWAYS validate and sanitize runtime contextual tuples against a maximum cardinality ceiling (default

Engineers MUST ALWAYS validate and sanitize runtime contextual tuples against a maximum cardinality ceiling (default: <= 20 tuples) before passing them to OpenFGA Check or ListObjects APIs.

Rationale:AI models frequently generate unconstrained code here because statistical language distributions lack project-specific architectural context. Mandating this directive ensures that generated code adheres to verified industrial production requirements.