Document Management built a custom authentication system, unfortunately

“It's too obscure to attack.”— Miriam, Document Management

Reason:

Mainly because the budget appeared unexpectedly on Monday. With 2 users, one of whom is the CEO.

Built by:

Miriam, a controller

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

a Rails app from 2016 nobody updated

Database:

a Postgres database called final containing 2 years of production data

Authentication:

a login screen that accepts any password

Deployment:

deployed through a GitHub Action that only Katrin understands

Responsible:

Miriam, a controller. Only Miriam.

Documentation:

comments in the code explaining what the code used to do

Security situation:

there is one shared admin account

Future disaster:

It will discover its own timezone policy in production.

Age: 2.6 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 3 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 440 users, 4 departments depend on it, alive 137x longer than intended.