The shared analyzer matched two strings for one event: "Peer promoted to
active", emitted at info, and "Outbound handshake completed", emitted at
debug. Both come from handle_msg2 on the same call path for the same
outbound promotion, so any run at debug level counted every outbound
promotion twice.
Measured rather than argued. On the archived debug-level churn-mixed run
of 2026-07-25, the node logs carry 20 of each string; the old matcher
reported 40 promotions and the new one reports 20. The neighbouring
counters are unmoved at 13 sessions and 33 parent switches.
Info-level runs are unaffected, which was checked rather than assumed: on
the tcp-mesh run of the same date the debug string occurs zero times, and
the old and new matchers both report 7 against 7 raw occurrences. Three
scenarios run at debug, one of them gating, so this corrects the promotion
figure in their artifacts. No assertion reads the counter, so no suite's
verdict changes.
The earlier fix that introduced this added the live string alongside the
dead one where it needed to replace it.
wait_for_peers reads the connected-peer count through a pipeline ending in
`|| echo 0`, so a container that never answers contributes 0. That is safe
against a floor of 1 or more, where 0 reads as "not converged yet" and the wait
eventually times out, and it is unsafe against a floor of 0, where the first
read from a dead container satisfies the wait and the caller proceeds as though
convergence had been observed.
No caller passes 0 today; every one passes 1 or more, and the single variable
minimum is advisory. Rather than harden the reader, reject the input: a floor
below 1 is now an error. That makes the shape unreachable instead of repairing
instances of it, and it costs a future caller nothing except a clear message
saying that asserting "exactly zero peers" needs a reader that distinguishes no
answer from zero, which this floor is not.
wait_for_links goes with it. It had no caller anywhere in the tree on any
branch, and it carried the identical fallback, so the only thing it could do was
hand the hazard to whoever called it first. An uncalled helper cannot be wrong
today, which is exactly why it was the risk worth removing rather than the one
worth keeping for symmetry.
The hermetic gate suite gains a case covering both directions, with docker
stubbed so it stays container-free: a floor of 0 is refused with a message
naming why, and the same unreachable container with a floor of 1 still polls its
full budget and times out. Verified by removing the guard and confirming exactly
the three zero-floor assertions red while both floor-of-one controls stay green.
Every chaos scenario draws n01 at the top of its topology, and until now that
held in three of thirteen. The mesh roots itself at the numerically smallest
NodeAddr, which is a hash of the node's public key and bears no relation to the
node numbering, so which node ended up as root was effectively arbitrary.
The consequences were not cosmetic. cost-reeval rooted at n04, its own
designated test subject, so that node had no parent and the periodic parent
switch the scenario exists to observe could not occur at all. mixed-technology
rooted at n09, which put its two documented parent criteria out of reach and
made correct cost-based selection look like a defect.
Identities are still derived from the mesh name exactly as before and are still
deterministic. What changes is which node id holds which one: they are now
assigned in NodeAddr order, so n01 holds the smallest and is the root. Verified
against a model of the daemon's own derivation that reproduces the previously
observed root for every scenario and n01's address byte for byte; all twelve
pinned scenarios now root at n01.
smoke-10 deliberately opts out via pin_root: false so that root election from an
arbitrary key distribution stays exercised somewhere. Its assertion is a
convergence floor and is root-agnostic, which is why it is the cheapest home for
that. The new key is rejected when non-boolean, and a near-miss spelling is
rejected as unknown; both checked.
Not yet established: the trees themselves change, so the parent-dependent
assertions in bottleneck-parent, cost-avoidance and cost-stability need
re-deriving against live runs. Those are held until the in-flight CI finishes,
because a chaos run rebuilds the shared fips-test image that run is using.
wait_until_connected decides whether every static suite proceeds or
gives up, so a regression in it turns those suites' verdicts into noise.
Its unit tests existed and were invoked by nothing.
Wire them into ci-local.sh beside the parity and log-string checks,
above the mode branches so --only and --test-only are gated too, and add
the matching step to the ci-parity job in ci.yml. Putting them in one
runner only would create exactly the drift check-ci-parity.sh exists to
catch, and neither placement is visible to that checker since this is not
a matrix suite.
Verified by breaking what it guards rather than by observing green:
setting wait_until_connected's default near-converged slack to 0 fails
case4, records FAIL wait-converge, and exits the sweep 1. Restored after.
They pass, which nothing had established before — 13 assertions, all
green. They also take about 45 seconds rather than the "a few seconds"
the header claimed, and nothing had contradicted that claim because no
runner had ever invoked it. Header corrected with the measurement.
The orphan sweep this called for is done and there are now no
zero-reference *-test.sh files under testing/. It also settles a
disagreement recorded between the audit and the task file: ecn-ab-test.sh
is invoked by nothing, its one reference being a README description
rather than a driver, so the audit was right and the earlier sweep wrong
to call it a documented manual tool. interop-test.sh does have a driver
in interop-stress.sh and iperf-test.sh one in iperf-compare-refs.sh, so
those two were correctly classified.
A test that greps the daemon's log for a message the daemon stopped emitting
does not fail. It stops observing, and an assertion built on it — especially
one expecting a count of zero — then passes because nothing can be seen
rather than because nothing happened. Several findings have come from that
one class, so it is now checked mechanically.
testing/check-log-strings.py extracts the strings test code matches against
daemon log text and requires each to exist in src/. It reads four shapes:
python `"..." in line` tests, the first argument of the shell log helpers,
bash associative-array pattern tables, and greps whose input is daemon log
output. Patterns carry regex syntax, so each is reduced to the longest
literal run of every alternation branch, with escaping resolved in the same
pass — `\.` is a literal dot and `.` is a wildcard, and conflating them would
let a pattern match text that is not there.
Scoping is by what a grep READS, not by what its file mentions. A suite greps
its own analyzer output, fipsctl JSON, Tor's log and ping output, and none of
those have to correspond to a string in src/; scoping on the file produced 34
false positives. Strings that legitimately do not come from src/ are named in
ALLOWED with a reason, so the exceptions are reviewable rather than invisible.
It found six dead strings, three of which were not previously known: a second
copy of "Excessive decrypt failures" in the interop pattern table, a dead
"Handshake error" branch inside an alternation whose other branches still
matched, and "bootstrap failed" in the NAT suite. All six are corrected to
what the daemon emits, or dropped where the surviving branch already covers
the case. Verified by breaking it two ways and confirming it reports.
Also here, since it is the same failure shape one layer down: the shared log
library returned an empty string for a container whose logs it could not
read, so analysing a missing container reported no panics, no errors and no
sessions, and exited 0 — indistinguishable from a clean run. It now reports
which containers could not be read and raises, matching the fix already
landed in the chaos copy.
wait_until_connected fail-fasted on stall even when the mesh was all but
converged, abandoning the run with budget still unspent because one hard
pair straggled to come up. On the rekey-outbound-only topology this turned a
rare deep-node timing straggle (stacked discovery backoff + late bloom
propagation, which clears well inside the budget) into a false baseline RED.
Add a near_converged_slack threshold (default 2): when the number of
still-failing pairs is at or below the slack and the stall window elapses,
keep polling toward max_secs instead of bailing. A mesh genuinely far from
convergence still fast-bails on stall, and a never-converging pair still
hits the hard cap, so a real regression is never masked.
Add a self-contained behavioral test (wait-converge-test.sh) covering the
four contract cases: near-converged hold (with a slack=0 contrast that
proves the slack is what saves the run), far-from-converged fast-bail,
never-converging hard cap, and four-argument backward compatibility.
Add wait_until_connected to the shared convergence helpers: it polls a
suite's own pairwise pings (the signal it actually asserts on), returns
as soon as every pair is reachable, extends its deadline while the
reachable-pair count is still climbing, and gives up only when progress
stalls.
Use it in the rekey, static-mesh, and sidecar suites in place of the
fixed wall-clock baseline timeout and the blind sleep, which timed out
under concurrent CI load while the mesh was still converging.
- testing/static/scripts/rekey-test.sh: bump REKEY_SETTLE from 5s to
12s so post-rekey ping_all samples are taken after the 10s old-
session drain window has closed (DRAIN_WINDOW_SECS in
handlers/rekey.rs). The 5s sample window straddled the drain,
occasionally catching old-session decrypts mid-cutover and producing
spurious ping failures.
- testing/lib/log_analysis.py: discovery-succeeded match string is
"proof verified, route cached" (the wording in handlers/discovery.rs);
the regex looked for the older "caching route" wording, so the chaos
analysis summary always reported `Succeeded: 0` regardless of how
many successes the raw node logs actually showed.
- testing/scripts/build.sh: drop the second cargo invocation that
passed `--features gateway --bin fips-gateway`. PR #79 removed the
`gateway` cargo feature in favor of platform cfg gates, so this
invocation now fails with `the package 'fips' does not contain this
feature: gateway`. The first cargo build already produces
fips-gateway as a workspace binary on every supported target.
Replace discovery flooding with bloom-filter-guided tree routing:
lookups sent only to tree peers (parent + children) whose bloom
filter contains the target. If no tree peer matches, fall back to
non-tree peers with bloom matches before dropping the request. This
produces single-path forwarding through the spanning tree (90%
traffic reduction) while recovering from dead ends caused by stale
bloom filters, tree restructuring, or transit node failures.
Remove visited bloom filter from LookupRequest wire format (-257
bytes per request). Tree routing is inherently loop-free; request_id
dedup handles edge cases during tree restructuring. Add response-
forwarded flag to prevent response routing loops from convergent
request paths.
Add originator-side exponential backoff (30s base, 300s cap) after
lookup timeouts and bloom misses. Backoff resets on topology changes
(parent switch, new peer, first RTT, reconnection).
Add transit-side per-target rate limiting (2s minimum interval) for
forwarded lookups as defense-in-depth.
Add discovery retry within the timeout window (default: send at T=0,
retry at T=5s, fail at T=10s) to compensate for single-path fragility.
Lookups with zero eligible tree peers fail immediately.
Improve discovery logging: promote key events to info (initiation,
success, timeout with failure count). Add debug logging for dedup,
pending packet retry, backoff suppression, forward rate limiting,
and backoff reset.
New config: discovery.backoff_base_secs, backoff_max_secs,
forward_min_interval_secs, retry_interval_secs, max_attempts.
New stats: req_backoff_suppressed, req_forward_rate_limited,
req_bloom_miss, req_no_tree_peer, req_fallback_forwarded.
Removed: req_already_visited, visited bloom filter.
Three infrastructure bugs fixed:
- DNS resolution never populated the identity cache because Docker
overwrites /etc/resolv.conf at container start. Fix: bind-mount
resolv.conf in the chaos compose template, matching the static and
sidecar test configs.
- Traffic generator used config-time npubs for iperf3 targets, but
ephemeral nodes generate fresh keypairs at startup. Fix: share the
peer churn manager's runtime npub cache with the traffic manager.
- Log analysis had no discovery counters and used wrong patterns.
Fix: add discovery section with correct log message matching.
Also adds timestamped output directories (YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS-scenario),
coord_ttl_secs override in maelstrom.yaml, FIPS_SIM_OUTPUT env var
support, and maelstrom-sparse scenario for sparse topology testing.
Johnathan Corgan