Security: Reject in-memory providers in production deployments

[vinayada1]

Summary

The UCP threat assessment identifies THR09 (In-Memory Storage or Secret Backend Used in Production): UCP supports in-memory backends for storage, secret, and queue providers. These backends offer no persistence, durability, or encryption. If accidentally configured in production, all resource data and credentials are lost on pod restart.

No startup validation currently prevents this misconfiguration.

Proposed Changes

1. Startup warning/guard: Add validation during UCP startup that logs a warning (or fails to start) when an in-memory provider is configured and a --production flag or environment variable is set.

2. Helm chart schema validation: Add JSON schema validation to values.yaml that prevents setting provider types to inmemory (or requires an explicit dangerouslyAllowInMemory: true override).

3. Health check annotation: Include the configured provider types in the health/readiness endpoint response so operators can verify production configuration.

Related

• UCP threat assessment: RAD.UCP.THR09
• Control catalog: RAD.UCP.CN12