Johnathan Corgan
6a564e26ac
Everything the release needs except the version number, which stays at 0.5.0-dev until the tag. The changelog entry covers only the work that is new on this line. The point release's forty-six entries arrived under their own heading with the forward merge and are left alone; the twenty that remained are regrouped by topic and eight more added for changes no entry covered. Three of those eight matter to someone upgrading. Five root modules and four re-exports left the public library surface and Node::connections narrowed, none of it recorded anywhere; the entry names what to use instead and distinguishes the removed connection-phase enum from the Noise type of the same name, which is a different type that still exists. Tracing targets moved, so an existing RUST_LOG filter stops matching rather than erroring. And the handshake resend interval key no longer governs the first resend, which is now a constant, though it still governs later ones. Seven more entries cover the work that landed after the first content pass was written: the experimental native datagram API, the fipsctl probe diagnostic, per-instance transport addressing, the app-owned UDP socket seam, and the connect, disconnect and path-MTU fixes. The four bug fixes among them all reach the deployed line, so the release notes no longer claim this release carries exactly one fix for a shipped bug; it carries four. There is no security section, because after the split every security entry belongs to the point release. The release notes say so plainly rather than leaving a reader upgrading across both releases to conclude this one carries no security work. The notes are organized by audience, since the release spans OpenWrt routers, embedders, FreeBSD, and the existing platforms, and a single list serves none of them. The native datagram API is given a section of its own rather than folded into the embedding seam: it is a client-facing API rather than a way to host a node, and its one rule with no Berkeley-socket counterpart, that the v1 wire carries no half-close, needs to be somewhere a client author will read it. FreeBSD is advertised as supported on x86_64 only, stated wherever the platform appears. Android is advertised as an embedding seam and not as a supported platform: a compile-gated library surface with no artifact and no host application guide. The configuration table rename is carried through every shipped file that taught the old spelling: nine documentation files, the OpenWrt sample config and a test generator, twenty-two sites in all. Guides written this same cycle were among them, which is how the omission was found. The documentation that arrived with the native API was checked for the same omission and was already clean. The compatibility tests keep the old spelling deliberately, since they exist to test the fold. The changelog section is the fold of master's [Unreleased], not a snapshot of it. An earlier version of this commit took a copy that then drifted, so each section ended up holding a bullet the other did not and re-folding them would have picked a winner silently. Both causes were fixed on master instead — the NixOS module had never been recorded there, and the pre-release batch of fixes was new — so [Unreleased] is a strict superset and this is a copy rather than a merge. [0.5.0] carries all forty-six bullets byte for byte, [Unreleased] is empty, and [0.4.2] is untouched, checked by hashing it against master's copy. The BLE work landed after the content pass and gets one summary entry in the changelog and one section in the release notes rather than nine bullets: the ble_available gate replacing target_os = "linux", packet-boundary recovery for stream-oriented backends, peer recognition by node identity instead of a rotating link address, the L2CAP PSM moving into the backend seam and onto the advertisement, the embedder-supplied Android radio, bounded probe retry, and inbound handshakes moved off the accept loop. The two release-notes copies no longer share their link paths. Relative links resolve from one directory only, so the seven written for docs/releases/ all 404ed from the root copy. The root copy now uses paths from the repository root and the versioned copy keeps the ../ form; both sets were resolved against the tree. The same two links are broken the same way in the v0.4.0 through v0.4.2 notes, left as shipped history. The contributor tallies are re-derived against maint..HEAD rather than adjusted: twenty commits from outside the project and 171 from me, with Arjen at fifteen and fr34aky at two. An earlier count of twelve and 138 was carried from a measurement taken three days before this content was written, and the BLE branch widened the gap after it. Arjen's NixOS flake module, the UDP sin6_scope_id fix and most of the BLE rework were uncredited, as was fr34aky's L2CAP PSM seam. They want one last re-derive at tag time if anything lands before the tag. A sweep of all 99 tracked markdown files against the tree corrected fifty-three of them. Four told the reader to run a build.sh that does not exist; the only harness builder is testing/scripts/build.sh. The BLE build prerequisites were described as optional on the strength of a probe that build.rs does not perform, and bluez was named a build prerequisite when libdbus-sys asks only for libdbus-1-dev and pkg-config and bluez is the runtime daemon. Link cost is the primary sort key in next-hop ranking, not reserved for future use; Ethernet runs on macOS as well as Linux; the BLE MTU is the L2CAP CoC MTU rather than a negotiated ATT_MTU; effective Ethernet MTU is 1497; the LAN discovery subsystem is src/mdns and eight citations still named a src/discovery that never existed here. The connectivity states in three tutorials were invented, and their jq filters matched nothing including healthy peers. One command filtered on a literal fd97: address prefix, which only the first byte of fixes, so it returned empty for all but one reader in 256 and every later step using the variable failed silently. transports.tor.advertise_on_nostr was undocumented despite being validated against node.rendezvous.nostr.enabled. The transport design document gains the BLE section it never had, written from the source: the backend cascade and its compile_error tripwire, the platform gate, the PSM advertisement wire layout and the byte budget that forces a 16-bit service-data key, and the probe and admission bounds. Three source files carried the same class of staleness and are corrected with the documentation: the OpenWrt ipk usage line and Makefile error text both named a packaging/openwrt that does not exist, and chaos.sh parsed --subnet without listing it. Folded in with the content commit, having been prepared alongside it: The three GitHub Action pins that had gone stale. Every third-party action is pinned to a commit SHA, nothing reports that a pin has aged, and re-resolving all ten against their tags found dorny/test-reporter@v2, taiki-e/install-action@v2 and vmactions/freebsd-vm@v1 had moved. The three install-action@nextest references stay unpinned, since that action reads the tool to install from the ref name. check-action-pins.sh passes at 75 references and all nine workflow files parse. The lockfile refresh, which is the mutating half of the dependency sweep. Thirty-six packages move to their latest semver-compatible versions and every one is transitive; nothing declared in Cargo.toml changes version. No advisory forces any of them. It was taken before the validation battery, because a gate run against a lockfile that later moves proves nothing about what ships. The sha2 0.10 to 0.11, hkdf 0.12 to 0.13 and bech32 0.11 to 0.12 majors, three of the four deferred at v0.4.0 for change surface rather than security. All three land with no source change. sha2 and hkdf must move together, since both depend on digest 0.11, and neither changes an algorithm. That matters because the chaining-key KDF in the Noise handshake is built on Hkdf::<Sha256>, where an output change would be a wire break rather than a compile error; no known-answer vectors exist for that path, so the wire-compatibility gate is what covers it. secp256k1 0.31 is deliberately absent, since nostr's own requirement would leave two copies of the ECC library in the tree. The README support matrix, rebuilt as one feature table broken out by Linux variety. A single Linux column hid that Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and NixOS are one glibc build differing in packaging, that OpenWrt is musl and drops BLE, and that Android is not a daemon platform. Transport rows sort by how many platforms carry them. A Native API row reads its platform set from the cfg gates. The installer row becomes a package format row naming the artifact, and only the .deb is exercised per release. Four changelog and release-note gaps the BLE re-walk found: a Bluetooth LE bullet stranded inside the released 0.4.2 section, a missing Fixed entry for the scan and probe loop counting a pool-refused connection as an established link, the unnamed embedder call that installs an application-owned radio, and the fact that stopping the transport now stops scanning as well as advertising. Three release-document gaps found walking the unsurveyed commits: the UDP reuse-flag fix stated in the direction opposite to the one it was made, with the silent second-daemon bind it prevents left unsaid; the corrected native-API socket paragraph carried into both release-note copies, which still named SOCK_SEQPACKET on FreeBSD and two kernels where three are handled; and the coordinate-cache hardening, which shipped with no text anywhere despite adding four operator-visible status fields. That last entry states plainly that the checks are mitigations and not a closure, since the coordinate is still not authenticated. Also folded in, the documentation pass that followed the content commit: A stage-pipeline diagram for the probe, embedded in the fipsctl reference under the five-stage list. It draws the five stages left to right with each stage's failure reasons below it, and the bypass that skips both lookup stages when the coordinates are cached or the target is a direct peer. Its branches come from the probe state machine rather than from the report, so the path stage is drawn as the one failure that does not stop the probe. A rewrite of the README's "What FIPS does" section. It now opens with what a machine running FIPS gets, rather than with the two deployment modes, and gives the self-organizing and permissionless property its own paragraph since it holds for both modes. A regrouping of the README's feature list into the mesh, getting traffic onto it, and running a node, with a bullet added for the native datagram API, which had none despite sitting in the support matrix. The Quick start now leads with the released packages rather than a source build. It also fixes a real defect: the package enables fips.service and fips-dns.service and starts neither on a fresh install, so .fips name resolution was silently dead until the next reboot and neither page said to start the service. A rewrite of the release notes. They opened with seven subsections of upgrade caveats and reached the first feature two hundred lines in; they now open with a summary of the release and elaborate below it in the same order. Android is stated as supported through an embedded crate rather than as a standalone daemon, consistently across all three documents. The OpenWrt pair is corrected: it is 802.11s between routers with FIPS supplying encryption, authentication and routing, plus a convention of an open !FIPS SSID a client joins over WiFi, not meshing over a router's own radios. The probe's path output is described as the least-common-ancestor walk, which is the worst-case fallback route rather than the route a packet takes. Detail that did not change what a reader does was cut from the notes and kept in the changelog.
Static Docker Network Test Harness
Multi-node integration test for FIPS using Docker containers with fixed topologies. Multiple topologies are provided: a sparse mesh (5 nodes, 6 links), a linear chain (5 nodes, 4 links), a gateway topology (3 nodes plus a non-FIPS LAN client), and three rekey variants. All exercise the full FIPS stack including TUN devices, DNS resolution, peer link encryption, spanning tree construction, and discovery-driven multi-hop routing.
Prerequisites
- Docker with the compose plugin
- Rust toolchain (for building the FIPS binary)
- Python 3 (for identity derivation; stdlib only, no packages required)
Quick Start
Build the binaries and images, then generate the node configs:
./testing/scripts/build.sh
./testing/static/scripts/generate-configs.sh mesh
build.sh is the shared harness builder and is run from the repo root; it
does not generate configs.
Start the mesh (default topology):
docker compose -f testing/static/docker-compose.yml up -d
./testing/static/scripts/ping-test.sh mesh # 20/20 expected
./testing/static/scripts/iperf-test.sh mesh # bandwidth test
docker compose -f testing/static/docker-compose.yml down
The mesh profile is activated by default via .env. To use a different
topology, specify the profile explicitly:
docker compose -f testing/static/docker-compose.yml --profile chain up -d
./testing/static/scripts/ping-test.sh chain
docker compose -f testing/static/docker-compose.yml --profile chain down
Topologies
Mesh
Five nodes with 6 bidirectional UDP links forming a sparse, fully connected graph. Not all nodes are direct peers -- non-adjacent pairs require discovery-driven multi-hop routing to establish end-to-end sessions.
The spanning tree is rooted at node A, which has the lexicographically
smallest NodeAddr (the first 16 bytes of SHA-256(pubkey)). Tree edges
are highlighted in blue in the diagram above.
The ping test exercises all 20 directed pairs (5 nodes x 4 targets each), covering both direct-peer and multi-hop paths.
| Link | Type |
|---|---|
| A -- D | tree edge (D's parent is A) |
| A -- E | tree edge (E's parent is A) |
| C -- D | tree edge (C's parent is D) |
| B -- C | tree edge (B's parent is C) |
| D -- E | non-tree link |
| C -- E | non-tree link |
Chain
Five nodes in a linear chain: A -- B -- C -- D -- E. Each node peers only with its immediate neighbors. Multi-hop communication (e.g., A to E) requires the discovery protocol to find routes through intermediate nodes.
The ping test covers:
- Adjacent hops: A->B, B->C (1 hop each)
- Multi-hop: A->C (2 hops), A->D (3 hops), A->E (4 hops)
- Reverse: E->A (4 hops)
Gateway
Three FIPS nodes: a gateway (a) with a LAN interface, and two mesh
destinations (b, c) directly peered with it. A non-FIPS client container
attaches to the gateway's LAN interface. Two destinations are required so the
multi-client phase of gateway-test.sh can allocate distinct virtual-IP
mappings, one per LAN client. Identities are derived deterministically from
the mesh name gateway-test.
Rekey
Same sparse mesh as the mesh topology (5 nodes, 6 links). Configs are
post-processed to use aggressive rekey timers (35s) for CI testing. The
rekey-test.sh script handles config injection and multi-phase verification.
Rekey-Accept-Off
The rekey topology with transports.udp.accept_connections: false set on
node B, the single-peer node auto-connected to C. Pins the regression where a
rekey msg1 arriving at an auto-connect initiator with accept off was dropped
by the Node-level admission gate.
Rekey-Outbound-Only
The rekey topology with transports.udp.outbound_only: true on node B, whose
peer-C address is also rewritten to the Docker hostname (node-c:2121). Pins
the regression where the hostname-versus-numeric mismatch made the
addr_to_link lookup miss and the admission carve-out fall through.
Configuration Management
File Structure
testing/static/
├── docker-compose.yml # Service definitions for all topologies
├── docker-compose.gateway-external-net.yml # Gateway on an external network
├── .env # Default compose profile
├── configs/
│ ├── node.template.yaml # Template for all node configs
│ ├── gateway-resolv.conf # LAN client resolver config
│ └── topologies/
│ ├── mesh.yaml # Mesh topology definition
│ ├── chain.yaml # Chain topology definition
│ ├── gateway.yaml # Gateway integration test (3 nodes)
│ ├── rekey.yaml # Rekey integration test (5 nodes)
│ ├── rekey-accept-off.yaml # Rekey with accept_connections off
│ └── rekey-outbound-only.yaml # Rekey with outbound_only
├── generated-configs/ # Auto-generated, run-scoped (gitignored)
│ ├── npubs.env # NPUB_A=..., NPUB_B=..., etc.
│ ├── mesh/
│ │ ├── node-a.yaml ... node-e.yaml
│ └── chain/
│ ├── node-a.yaml ... node-e.yaml
├── scripts/
│ ├── generate-configs.sh # Generate node configs from topology
│ ├── ping-test.sh # Connectivity test
│ ├── iperf-test.sh # Bandwidth test
│ ├── iperf-compare-refs.sh # Bandwidth comparison across refs
│ ├── bench-multirun.sh # Repeated benchmark runs
│ ├── gateway-test.sh # Gateway integration test
│ ├── rekey-test.sh # Rekey integration test
│ ├── admission-cap-test.sh # Peer admission cap test
│ └── netem.sh # Network impairment
├── docker-mesh-topology.svg # Mesh topology diagram
└── docker-chain-topology.svg # Chain topology diagram
The container image definition (Dockerfile), its entrypoint and the
resolv.conf that points at the FIPS resolver are shared with the other
harnesses and live in testing/docker/. The identity-derivation helper is
testing/lib/derive_keys.py.
Topology Files
Each topology file in configs/topologies/ defines:
- Node identities: nsec (hex) and npub (bech32) for each node
- Addresses:
docker_ipfor Docker-managed nodes,external_ipfor remote nodes not managed by Docker - Peer connections: which nodes peer with each other
docker_host(optional): the composehostname:this node answers to, when that is notnode-<id>. Only the gateway topology needs it
Generated peer addresses use the docker hostname, not docker_ip.
fips-net requests no subnet, so docker assigns one from its own pool and two
concurrent CI runs can bring the topology up at the same time instead of one
of them failing with Pool overlaps. docker_ip is retained as documentation
of the topology's shape and as the internal/external discriminator; an
external node keeps its external_ip in peer blocks, its address not being
ours to assign.
Example entry:
nodes:
a:
nsec: "0102030405060708..."
npub: "npub1sjlh2c3..."
docker_ip: "172.20.0.10"
peers: [d, e]
External nodes use external_ip instead of docker_ip. Config generation
skips external nodes (they run outside Docker) but includes their identity
in peer blocks and the npubs environment file.
Generating Configs
./testing/static/scripts/generate-configs.sh <topology> [mesh-name]
This reads the topology definition and generates:
- Per-node YAML config files in
generated-configs/<topology>/ generated-configs/npubs.envwith all node npubs as environment variables
Under ci-local.sh the directory is generated-configs-<run-id>, so
concurrent runs cannot overwrite each other's node configs; the compose file
and every test script read the same FIPS_CI_NAME_SUFFIX and follow it. A
bare invocation leaves the suffix unset and writes the plain path.
The npubs.env file is sourced by the test scripts and injected into
Docker containers via env_file in docker-compose.yml.
testing/scripts/build.sh compiles the binaries and builds the images; run
generate-configs.sh separately afterwards.
Adding a New Topology
- Create
configs/topologies/<name>.yamlfollowing the format ofmesh.yaml - Add corresponding service definitions to
docker-compose.ymlwithprofiles: ["<name>"] - Run
./testing/static/scripts/generate-configs.sh <name>to generate configs
Deterministic Mesh Identity Derivation
When running multiple test meshes that may peer with the same external node,
each mesh needs unique node identities to avoid key conflicts. The optional
mesh-name parameter generates deterministic per-mesh identities:
./testing/static/scripts/generate-configs.sh mesh my-mesh-1
./testing/static/scripts/generate-configs.sh chain my-mesh-1
How It Works
For each Docker node (those with docker_ip), the identity is derived as:
nsec = sha256(mesh_name + "|" + node_id) # e.g., sha256("my-mesh-1|a")
npub = bech32("npub", secp256k1_pubkey(nsec))
External nodes (those with external_ip) always keep their hardcoded
identity from the topology YAML, since they represent real nodes outside
the test environment.
Without a mesh name, the identities from the topology YAML are used as-is (the original behavior).
The derive_keys.py Script
The derivation is performed by testing/lib/derive_keys.py, a standalone tool
with no external dependencies (pure Python stdlib: hashlib for SHA-256,
manual secp256k1 scalar multiplication, and BIP-173 bech32 encoding):
$ python3 testing/lib/derive_keys.py my-mesh-1 a
nsec=<64-char-hex>
npub=npub1...
The npubs.env File
Every run of generate-configs.sh writes generated-configs/npubs.env
containing all node npubs, whether derived or from the topology YAML:
NPUB_A=npub1...
NPUB_B=npub1...
NPUB_C=npub1...
NPUB_D=npub1...
NPUB_E=npub1...
This file is:
- Sourced by test scripts (
ping-test.sh,iperf-test.sh) to resolve node identities for DNS lookups - Injected into containers via the
env_filedirective indocker-compose.yml, making$NPUB_Aetc. available as environment variables inside each container
Performance Testing
./testing/static/scripts/iperf-test.sh [mesh|chain]
./testing/static/scripts/iperf-test.sh mesh --live # show live iperf3 output
Runs iperf3 with:
- Duration: 10 seconds (
-t 10) - Parallel streams: 8 (
-P 8) - Protocol: TCP over IPv6
For before/after measurements across commits or branches:
./testing/static/scripts/iperf-compare-refs.sh origin/master HEAD mesh
The comparison script builds each ref into a separate Docker image, runs the
same topology and iperf3 settings for both images, and prints a bandwidth
summary. Override DURATION, PARALLEL, SETTLE_SECONDS, IPERF_TIMEOUT,
or RUNS in the environment when needed. RUNS is the total number of
measurements per ref; for example, RUNS=3 runs each ref three times and
prints both per-run and aggregate tables.
Network Impairment
The netem.sh script simulates adverse network conditions using tc/netem
on all running containers:
./testing/static/scripts/netem.sh [mesh|chain] <apply|remove|status> [options]
Options
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
--delay <ms> |
Fixed delay in milliseconds |
--jitter <ms> |
Delay variation (requires --delay) |
--loss <percent> |
Packet loss percentage |
--loss-corr <percent> |
Loss correlation for bursty loss |
--duplicate <percent> |
Packet duplication percentage |
--reorder <percent> |
Packet reordering probability (requires --delay) |
--corrupt <percent> |
Bit-level corruption percentage |
Presets
| Preset | Parameters |
|---|---|
lossy |
5% loss, 25% correlation |
congested |
50ms delay, 20ms jitter, 2% loss |
terrible |
100ms delay, 40ms jitter, 10% loss, 1% dup, 5% reorder |
Examples
# Apply 50ms delay with 5% packet loss
./testing/static/scripts/netem.sh mesh apply --delay 50 --loss 5
# Use a preset
./testing/static/scripts/netem.sh chain apply --preset congested
# Check current rules
./testing/static/scripts/netem.sh mesh status
# Remove all impairment
./testing/static/scripts/netem.sh mesh remove
Rules are applied to egress on each container's eth0 interface. With all
containers impaired equally, both directions of every link see the effect.
The script uses tc qdisc replace so it can be re-run safely without
removing rules first.
Container Configuration
- Base image: debian:bookworm-slim
- Capabilities:
CAP_NET_ADMIN(for TUN device creation) - Devices:
/dev/net/tunmapped into each container - DNS: FIPS built-in resolver on
127.0.0.1:53 - Transport: UDP on port 2121 (MTU 1472) or TCP on port 8443
- TUN:
fips0interface, MTU 1280
Each node resolves <npub>.fips DNS names to FIPS IPv6 addresses via its
local DNS responder, which primes the identity cache for session establishment.
Background Services
Each container runs the following services alongside FIPS:
| Service | Port | Description |
|---|---|---|
| SSH | 22 | Root login with no password (test only) |
| iperf3 | 5201 | Bandwidth testing server (-s -D) |
| HTTP | 80 | Python HTTP server serving /root/index.html |
All services bind to IPv6 (::) and are accessible over the FIPS overlay
using <npub>.fips hostnames:
# HTTP over FIPS
docker exec fips-node-b curl http://$NPUB_A.fips
# SSH over FIPS
docker exec fips-node-b ssh $NPUB_A.fips
# iperf3 over FIPS
docker exec fips-node-b iperf3 -c $NPUB_A.fips
Troubleshooting
Stale images after code changes: Docker compose may cache old layers. Force a clean rebuild:
docker compose -f testing/static/docker-compose.yml build --no-cache
Check node logs:
docker logs fips-node-a
docker logs -f fips-node-c # follow
Verify DNS resolution inside a container:
docker exec fips-node-a dig AAAA <npub>.fips @127.0.0.1
Verify binary is up to date: Compare hashes between the local build and the binary inside the container:
md5sum testing/docker/fips
docker exec fips-node-a md5sum /usr/local/bin/fips
Increase convergence time: If tests fail intermittently, the 5-second
convergence wait in ping-test.sh may be insufficient. Edit the sleep
value at the top of the script.
Missing npubs.env: If test scripts fail with "npubs.env not found", run
./testing/static/scripts/generate-configs.sh mesh (or your topology) first.