Files
fips/docs
Arjen 9dab328bc9 feat(openwrt): enable mDNS rendezvous from fips-ap-setup
Phone FIPS apps cannot open raw-Ethernet sockets, so DNS-SD is how they
find the router's daemon — but node.rendezvous.lan defaults to off. Ship
the lan block commented in fips.yaml (consistent with the apN transport
entries) and have fips-ap-setup uncomment it when creating the access
SSID. The awk match is scoped to node.rendezvous because
transports.ethernet carries a 'lan' entry at the same indent. The switch
is daemon-wide, so 'remove' deliberately leaves it on rather than guess
whether other transports rely on it.
2026-07-21 15:21:06 +01:00
..

FIPS Documentation

FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System) is a self-organizing encrypted mesh network built on Nostr identities, capable of operating over arbitrary transports — local networks, the public internet, Tor, Bluetooth, or point-to-point links — without central infrastructure.

With FIPS, your machine becomes a node in the mesh with a self-generated cryptographic identity. There are two ways to deploy it.

As an overlay on top of existing IP networks, FIPS lets your node reach any other FIPS node wherever it sits — behind a NAT, on a different ISP, on a phone over cellular, on a laptop with only Bluetooth in range, or behind a Tor onion. The mesh forwards IPv6 traffic transparently and end-to-end encrypted, with no central VPN concentrator or coordinating server.

From the ground up over raw Ethernet, WiFi, or Bluetooth, FIPS provides a complete permissionless network without any pre-existing IP infrastructure, ISP, or DNS. Any node that joins the link gets routable IPv6 addresses, peer discovery, and a path to every other node automatically.

Either way, existing networking software runs over it unchanged: SSH, HTTP servers, file transfer, anything IPv6-native works the same way it would on a local network.

New to FIPS? Start with the Getting Started guide.

Documentation Sections

Tutorials

If you are starting from scratch and want a guided path to a working mesh, go here.

How-To Guides

If you have a specific task in mind — enabling a feature, deploying a component, diagnosing a problem — go here.

Reference

If you need to look up wire formats, configuration keys, command flags, or counter inventories, go here.

Design

If you want to understand how the mesh self-organizes, why FIPS makes the choices it does, or how the pieces fit together, go here.