Skip to content

Desktop silently mints new agent keypairs for team/persona references to deleted managed agents #5868

Open

Description

@kevine-pixel

Summary. If managed-agent definitions are deleted from managed-agents.json while a team (or persona catalog entry) still references the agent names, the desktop app mints brand-new keypairs for the missing names on next launch — with start_on_app_launch=true — and connects them to the active community relay.

Impact. New identities appear under familiar display names with fresh keys. They pass no ownership-continuity check, are indistinguishable from the originals to other members at a glance, and act autonomously (in our case one ran ~19h and re-created scheduled jobs before containment). Key-level duplicate detection cannot catch this because the keys are genuinely new — this is name-level identity duplication.

Repro.

  1. Create a team containing managed agents A, B, C (keyed).
  2. Quit the app; remove A/B/C's entries from managed-agents.json; relaunch.
  3. Within ~1 minute the app mints new keypairs for A, B, C (observed on a build slightly before df9e773a1; on current builds we verified only keyless builtin drafts re-seed once the referencing team is also deleted — the minting path appears tied to the dangling team/persona reference).

Expected. A dangling team/persona reference should surface as a broken reference and prompt the owner — never silently create new signing identities with autostart.

Suggested fix. Treat identity minting as an explicit owner action everywhere; on resolve-failure, mark the team entry unresolved and require confirmation to re-create.

Activity

  1. salvatoremira1969-rgb commented on Sep 21, 2026

    @salvatoremira1969-rgb

    Buzz Desktop desktop-v0.5.23 (latest desktop tag in the repo; installed 2026-09-05), buzz CLI buzz.exe dated 2026-09-05 (no version string; buzz --version is not a valid argument)
    Relay: a Buzz-hosted community relay (*.communities.buzz.xyz), not self-hosted
    OS: Windows 11 Pro 10.0.26200, Hyper-V VM; agents run via buzz-acp with the Claude runtime

    Same mechanism with archive instead of delete, desktop-v0.5.23 (Windows 11, Hyper-V VM):

    2026-09-21 06:24 UTC: agent created (pubkey 79bddb39...). 06:36 UTC: owner archives it in Desktop; Desktop shows it as stopped, so the owner clicks Start. Desktop starts a new buzz-acp process under a NEW pubkey (c0489e21..., created 06:36:15 UTC) with the same display name, while the first process keeps running (see our comment in #6376).
    The relay now holds two profiles for one agent name; channel memberships and at-mentions still point at the first key.
    Expected: Start after archive either resumes the existing identity or is blocked; at no point should a click in Desktop mint a key pair without saying so.
    This is the third way we have seen a managed agent get re-keyed on 0.5.23 (snapshot import on another machine: #6586; data-dir migration: #7776; archive + start: this one).

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions