fix(sso): SSO users with platform_admin role can now access teams in admin UI

[bogdanmariusc10]

🔗 Related Issue

Closes #4070

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📝 Summary

Fixed a bug where SSO-authenticated users with platform_admin RBAC role could not edit gateways or virtual servers in the admin UI, receiving "invalid team name" errors despite having ["*"] (wildcard) effective permissions.

Root Cause: The GET /teams endpoint incorrectly checked only the database is_admin flag instead of RBAC permissions. SSO users have the correct RBAC role (platform_admin with ["*"] permissions) but lack the database flag (is_admin=False), causing them to be treated as regular users.

Solution: Updated the list_teams endpoint to check both the legacy is_admin flag AND RBAC permissions (["*"] or ["teams.*"]), aligning with ContextForge's two-layer security model.

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🏷️ Type of Change

• Bug fix
• Feature / Enhancement
• Documentation
• Refactor
• Chore (deps, CI, tooling)
• Other (describe below)

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🧪 Verification

Check	Command	Status
Lint suite	make lint	✅ Pass
Unit tests	make test	✅ Pass
Coverage ≥ 80%	make coverage	✅ Pass

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✅ Checklist

• Code formatted (make black isort pre-commit)
• [] Tests added/updated for changes
• [] Documentation updated (if applicable)
• No secrets or credentials committed

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📓 Notes

Changes Made

1. mcpgateway/routers/teams.py (Primary Fix)

# Before (buggy):
if current_user_ctx.get("is_admin"):
    # Only checked database flag

# After (fixed):
has_admin_team_access = (
    current_user_ctx.get("is_admin") or
    "*" in current_user_ctx.get("permissions", []) or
    "teams.*" in current_user_ctx.get("permissions", [])
)
if has_admin_team_access:
    # Now checks RBAC permissions too

2. mcpgateway/observability.py (Linting Fix)

• Added missing message parameter documentation to fix flake8 DAR101 error

Impact

Before:

• ❌ SSO users with platform_admin role: blocked from editing in admin UI
• ✅ Local admins with is_admin=True: worked correctly
• ✅ REST API: worked for both (uses RBAC)

After:

• ✅ SSO users with platform_admin role: can now edit in admin UI
• ✅ Local admins with is_admin=True: continue to work
• ✅ REST API: unchanged (already working)

Why This Matters

ContextForge has two separate concepts:

• is_admin flag - Legacy database field (EmailUser.is_admin)
• platform_admin role - Modern RBAC role with ["*"] permissions

SSO users get the RBAC role but not the database flag. The fix ensures both mechanisms are checked, maintaining backward compatibility while supporting SSO properly.

Code Quality Fix

Added missing docstring parameter documentation for flake8 compliance.

[marekdano]

@bogdanmariusc10 - thanks for the contribution!

Summary

The PR attempts to fix SSO users with platform_admin RBAC role being blocked from the GET /teams endpoint. The diagnosis in the issue is correct, but the implementation is broken: the permissions key checked in current_user_ctx is never set by get_current_user_with_permissions, so the RBAC branch of the fix is dead code and the endpoint's behavior is unchanged from before.

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Findings

Blocking

mcpgateway/routers/teams.py:178-184 — The fix is a no-op

get_current_user_with_permissions (middleware/rbac.py:401-414) never populates a permissions key in the returned dict. The dict contains: email, full_name, is_admin, ip_address, user_agent, db, auth_method, request_id, team_id, token_teams, token_use, plugin_context_table, plugin_global_context — and nothing else. Both "*" in current_user_ctx.get("permissions", []) and "teams.*" in current_user_ctx.get("permissions", []) will always evaluate to False, leaving the only active branch identical to the original is_admin check. SSO users with platform_admin are still blocked in production.

The correct fix is to call PermissionService.check_admin_permission() directly inside list_teams, mirroring exactly what the require_admin decorator already does at rbac.py:854-860:

  from mcpgateway.services.permission_service import PermissionService
  from mcpgateway.db import fresh_db_session

  # Inside list_teams:
  with fresh_db_session() as db_perm:
      permission_service = PermissionService(db_perm)
      has_admin_team_access = await permission_service.check_admin_permission(
          current_user_ctx["email"],
          token_teams=current_user_ctx.get("token_teams"),
      )

check_admin_permission already handles both is_admin=True (DB flag) and wildcard RBAC permissions (, admin.) via _is_user_admin + get_user_permissions, so no additional branching is needed.

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tests/unit/mcpgateway/routers/test_teams.py:69,79 — Test fixtures mask the bug (Test coverage)

The mock context dicts inject a "permissions" key (e.g., "permissions": ["*"]) that does not exist in the real production context. This causes the tests to validate behavior that can never occur at runtime — the fix appears to pass tests while silently failing in production. The fixtures should be corrected to match the actual structure returned by get_current_user_with_permissions, and a dedicated test case should be added: an SSO user with is_admin=False but platform_admin RBAC role in the DB should receive the full team list from list_teams, with PermissionService.check_admin_permission mocked to return True.

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mcpgateway/routers/teams.py:99,364 — Same SSO gap in adjacent endpoints

Two other endpoints in the same file have the same root problem. create_team (line 99) uses is_admin to decide whether to bypass allow_team_creation and skip_limits. update_team (line 364) uses is_admin for skip_limits. Both will still misclassify SSO platform_admin users as non-admins. The same check_admin_permission pattern should be applied to both.

Please resolve conflicts in observability.py and add extra unit tests to cover the changes.

[marekdano]

Fixes a real bug where SSO/Entra ID users with platform_admin RBAC role were blocked from viewing teams in the admin UI because GET /teams checked the legacy is_admin DB flag rather than RBAC permissions. The three affected endpoints (create_team, list_teams, update_team) now call PermissionService.check_admin_permission() which correctly handles both the legacy flag and RBAC.

LGTM 🚀