The XX leaf-nonrouting rejection test shares the localhost-UDP rcvbuf
overflow failure mode of the other large-network tests under parallel
cargo test --lib load. Mark it #[ignore] for the default run; it stays
runnable with --ignored or --test-threads=1.
Raise the in-process backpressure headroom in make_test_node_with_mtu
(request an 8 MiB recv_buf_size on UdpConfig and grow packet_channel from
256 to 8192) to reduce localhost-UDP receive overflow under parallel-CPU
scheduler contention, and mark the large-network convergence tests
#[ignore] so cargo test --lib stays green by default. The ignored tests
remain runnable on demand with --ignored or --test-threads=1.
Carries the inbound max_peers admission-cap silent-drop work from
master across the IK→XX structural boundary.
On master (Noise IK), the gate fires at handle_msg1 after the peer's
identity is extracted from the IK msg1 payload, before Msg2 is built
and sent. Wire savings of Msg2 (~104 B) plus the responder crypto
per cap-denied attempt motivate the gate placement.
On next (Noise XX), peer identity is not learned until msg3, by
which point Msg1, Msg2, and Msg3 have all crossed the wire. The IK
gate's wire-savings rationale does not apply on XX. The equivalent
gate is placed in handle_msg3 after the peer's static-key + signature
verification (identity now known) and before promote_connection
(ActivePeer construction, peers_by_index insert, link transition).
The value on XX is local CPU / allocation savings and cleaner peer-
side semantics: no fake-promotion whose subsequent data frames fail
decryption on this side, replaced by a silent drop the peer's
existing auto-reconnect backoff handles cleanly.
Bypass logic is the same as the IK version: known-active peers
(reconnect / cross-connection / restart) and pending-outbound peers
skip the cap so admitting them doesn't grow peers.len(). The late
cap check inside promote_connection is intentionally retained as
defense-in-depth.
Cleanup ordering for the gate's silent-drop path corrects a latent
issue in the adjacent msg3-processing-failure path: our_index is
captured before the connection is removed so the allocator slot is
actually freed (the pre-existing path's get-after-remove returns
None, leaking the index).
The two IK-shaped unit tests at handle_msg1 are marked #[ignore] on
this branch with reason. Their wire-bytes discriminator ("Msg2 must
NOT be sent at cap") is structurally false on XX, and the XX-shaped
equivalents need full three-message-handshake test scaffolding that
isn't authored here. XX-adapted unit + integration test coverage for
the handle_msg3 gate is a follow-up.
CHANGELOG [Unreleased] entry adjusted to describe the handle_msg3
placement on this branch (preserving the master-side framing on the
mainline-merge half of the entry would have been misleading on this
branch).
Three conflicts auto-resolved: the structural handshake.rs span
(~253 lines, IK identity-tied logic discarded on this branch's XX
msg1 path), and three textual ci-local.sh conflicts (admission-cap
suite list / dispatch added alongside the existing mixed-profile
suite list / dispatch).
Move the max_peers cap check in handle_msg1 forward, from the late
check inside promote_connection (which fires after Msg2 has already
been built and put on the wire) to an early position after identity
verification but before index allocation and the Msg2 send. When the
gate fires for a net-new identity, the Msg1 is silent-dropped — no
response goes back to the peer, no AEAD compute or wire bytes are
spent.
Bypass preserved for known peers (reconnect / cross-connection): if
the sender's NodeAddr is already in self.peers, or if a pending
outbound connection is in flight to the same identity, the gate is
skipped so legitimate maintenance traffic continues to work. The
late check inside promote_connection is intentionally retained as
defense-in-depth against future call sites or a disconnect racing
between the early-gate decision and promotion.
Wire-cost rationale: a 45 s tcpdump at saturation observed ~3.6
cap-denials/s steady-state, each previously paying the full Noise IK
responder crypto + Msg2 (~104 B) on the wire before being rejected.
The bigger value is cleaner peer-side semantics — the peer no longer
sees a fake-completed handshake whose data frames subsequently fail
decryption locally.
Two new unit tests cover the cases:
- handle_msg1_silent_drops_at_cap_for_new_peer drives a wire-pumped
Msg1 from a fresh identity into a saturated node and asserts no
Msg2 reaches the sender socket. Stash-verifies as FAIL on the
pre-fix tree (Msg2 hits the wire) and PASS post-fix.
- handle_msg1_admits_existing_peer_at_cap drives a Msg1 from an
identity already in self.peers and asserts the gate does not evict
it. This is a regression check (the no-gate tree behaves the same
way here, but the test guards against an accidental future gate
that breaks known-peer admit).
Brings two structural fixes landed on maint:
- compute_mesh_size: explicit parent skip in the children loop, so the
disjoint-subtree invariant no longer depends on peer_declaration cache
freshness.
- max_peers: outbound connection-initiation gated on the cap (auto-reconnect
retries, Nostr-mediated discovery established adoption, and both sides
of the NAT-traversal punch sequence). Inbound msg1 admission gate
unchanged.
node.limits.max_peers was honored only on inbound msg1 admission
(handshake.rs handle_msg1 returns PeerLimitExceeded when peers.len
is at the cap). Four outbound initiation paths proceeded unconditionally
at capacity: auto-reconnect retries (process_pending_retries),
Nostr-mediated discovery's BootstrapEvent::Established adoption
(poll_nostr_discovery), NAT-traversal punch initiation (the outgoing
side of the offer/answer/punch sequence in the Nostr discovery
runtime), and NAT-traversal punch response (the incoming side of the
same sequence). A saturated node burned CPU, UDP probes, STUN
observations, and Nostr relay traffic on connections that the inbound
gate would reject the moment they reached msg1.
Introduce Node::outbound_admission_check (peers.len < max_peers, or
true when max_peers == 0 as the no-cap sentinel) and gate the four
paths. The discovery runtime lives in a separate task and does not
hold a Node reference; bridge via an Arc<AtomicBool> the runtime
reads and Node refreshes once per tick from outbound_admission_check.
The atomic granularity is intentionally loose: one-tick lag is
acceptable because the inbound msg1 gate continues to be the
authoritative cap, and in-flight handshakes started below the cap
are allowed to complete.
Inbound gate at handshake.rs is unchanged.
The mesh-size estimator's children loop relied on the cached
peer_declaration(parent_id).parent_id() != my_addr check to exclude
the parent. That cached view briefly disagrees with our own latest
my_declaration().parent_id() during the window between a local
parent-switch and the new parent's next inbound TreeAnnounce: the
peer-declaration cache still names us as the parent's parent, so the
parent is iterated as if it were a child and its (typically dominant)
bloom cardinality is added a second time. Symptom: estimated mesh size
displayed in fipsctl show status and fipstop nearly-but-not-exactly
doubles during tree rebalancing.
Make the invariant structural with an explicit peer_addr == parent_id
skip at the head of the children loop. Per-peer 500 ms rate-limiter
and overall recompute cadence are unchanged.
Adds a regression test that constructs the stale-peer-declaration
scenario directly and asserts the parent is not double-counted.
Closes the eventually-consistent gap in spanning-tree state
distribution. Every existing send_tree_announce_to_all call site
gates on a local state-change event (parent switch, self-root
promotion, ancestry change, peer promotion, parent loss). Once a
partition latches — for example a parent-switch announce stranded
in the brief cross-init handshake swap window, where the announce
arrives on a session-index whose decrypt-worker entry has been
unregistered — neither side's state changes again, so neither
side ever re-broadcasts. The existing 60 s check_periodic_parent_reeval
was a re-evaluation, not a re-broadcast: it short-circuited
silently on no-change. Production-side healing depended on
incidental link churn; lab harnesses with stable docker-bridge
links had no equivalent path.
Add a final else branch that fires send_tree_announce_to_all
unconditionally on the no-change path, alongside the existing
switch and self-promote arms. Receivers coalesce by sequence
comparison (ParentDeclaration::is_fresher_than) and short-circuit
at the `if !updated` gate in handle_tree_announce; same-sequence
repeats drop silently with no cascade. The per-peer 500 ms
rate-limiter is well below this 60 s cadence and does not suppress
the heartbeat broadcast.
The fix is a general protocol-robustness improvement: it addresses
any in-flight TreeAnnounce loss class, not only the specific
cross-init swap-window drop site.
testing/static/scripts/rekey-test.sh BASELINE_CONVERGENCE_TIMEOUT
60 -> 65 so a partition healed by the periodic broadcast at T+60
lands inside the convergence window. wait_for_full_baseline
early-exits on PASS, so successful reps see no extra wall-clock.
The cross-connection-won path in handle_msg1 removes the old peer and frees
its allocated index, but does not unregister the old (transport_id, our_index)
cache_key from the decrypt worker pool. The orphan entry sits in the
per-shard HashMap until the index allocator recycles old_idx to a different
peer and that peer's register_decrypt_worker_session call overwrites it.
In the interim, any decrypt job that lands at the recycled cache_key
resolves to the wrong session and AEAD silently fails — observed as
multi-hop routing failure in 5-node static-mesh on next-branch where
bidirectional auto_connect drives cross-connections at every peer pair
on startup.
The tick body's per-peer check_* loops (heartbeats, bloom
announces, MMP reports, tree announces) called transport.send
for every active peer, which on TCP/Tor fell through to a 5 s
connect-on-send wait for any peer whose pool entry was not yet
established. That wedged the entire tick body for the full
connect_timeout_ms per unreachable peer; under post-restart
convergence on a high-peer mesh, this cascaded into multi-
second tick stalls. On master, the same mechanism also starved
the per-tick control-snapshot republish and pushed fipsctl
queries onto an mpsc fallback that was itself queued behind
the wedged rx_loop, producing the 5-second fipsctl head-of-line
pattern operators observed on loaded nodes.
Gate send_encrypted_link_message_with_ce on
transport.connection_state before the send: proceed only when
Connected; on None, kick off a non-blocking background connect
(idempotent — TransportHandle::connect dedupes against the
connecting pool and spawns the timeout-bounded TcpStream::connect
inside its own tokio task) and fail this send fast with a
clear "transport connection not ready" error. A subsequent
tick retries once the pool has an entry. The reconnect
lifecycle (check_link_heartbeats, process_pending_retries,
poll_pending_connects) is unchanged. The connect-on-send
branch in transport.send_async itself remains in place for
code paths that legitimately need synchronous connect (e.g.,
explicit operator-driven fipsctl connect).
When both peers' Nostr-mediated UDP punches complete within the
same scheduling window, each side's `BootstrapEvent::Established`
event arrives with `is_connecting_to_peer` already true: each side
received an inbound msg1 from the peer's pre-punch outbound
attempt, which created a connecting-state record. The deduplication
skip then fires on both sides, neither installs the fresh
traversal socket as canonical, and the peer-adoption budget
(45 s) expires. Cross-node wall-clock alignment of the skip log
line in observed failures was within ~1 ms — simultaneous dual-
fire under contention, the dual-initiation pattern.
Apply the deterministic NodeAddr tie-breaker already used at
`handlers/handshake.rs:269` for rekey dual-initiation and in
`peer::cross_connection_winner` for cross-connection resolution.
Smaller NodeAddr wins as adopter: enumerate the in-flight
connections whose `expected_identity` points at this peer, tear
them down via the canonical `cleanup_stale_connection` helper, and
fall through to `adopt_established_traversal`. Larger NodeAddr
loses and keeps the existing `continue` semantics; the loser's
in-flight outbound is reconciled by `handle_msg1`'s cross-
connection logic when the winner's fresh msg1 arrives over the
adopted socket.
`cleanup_stale_connection` visibility bumped from module-private
to `pub(in crate::node)` so it is callable from `lifecycle.rs`.
The defensive re-check inside `adopt_established_traversal`
itself is left as-is — after the outer cleanup the winner reaches
it with `is_connecting_to_peer == false`, so the inner skip
won't trip. The `BootstrapEvent::Failed` arm is unchanged: there
is no winning outcome on dual failure, and the existing skip +
retry-schedule semantics are correct.
The cross-connection-won branch of `promote_connection` builds a
fresh ActivePeer with a new Noise session and our_index, inserts
it into peers, and registers identity, but did not hand the new
session to the decrypt shard worker pool. The normal-promotion
tail in the same function does make that call. A session
established via the cross-connection race path therefore missed
the worker fast-path for its lifetime, falling back to inline
decryption on the rx loop. Correctness was unaffected, but the
throughput/latency benefit of the worker pool was lost for peerspromoted through that path.
Mirror the normal-promotion tail and call
`register_decrypt_worker_session` after the fresh ActivePeer is
inserted into `self.peers` in the `this_wins` arm.
Logs source, destination, and payload size at the existing no-route
drop site so investigations can attribute transit drops without
enabling trace-level instrumentation. Diagnostic-only; no behavior
change on the success path.
An FSP session rekey could leave the two endpoints holding different
key sets for a brief window: if a handshake message was lost in
transit, one side rotated to the new keys while the other did not.
Traffic sealed in one key epoch then reached a peer still on the
other epoch and failed to decrypt, producing bursts of AEAD
decryption failures and dropped connectivity until a later rekey
cycle reconverged the pair. Choreographing the cutover order cannot
close this window: any fixed ordering still leaves a skew that
packet reordering widens.
Make rekey correctness independent of cutover timing by overlapping
the key epochs on the receive path. During a rekey transition the
receiver trial-decrypts each frame against every live session it
holds: current, the not-yet-promoted pending session, and the
draining previous session. The K-bit becomes a hint that orders the
trial-decrypt cascade rather than a hard gate, and a frame that
authenticates against the pending session is itself the cutover
signal. No rotation ordering and no packet reordering can then cause
a decryption failure.
The pre-rekey Noise session is held in the `previous` slot until the
peer has demonstrably moved off it. Its drain deadline is anchored
on the most recent frame the peer authenticated against that slot,
refreshed each time the trial-decrypt cascade lands there, rather
than on a fixed wall-clock timer started unilaterally at the local
cutover. A peer that never received the new keys keeps authenticating
against `previous` and the slot stays live; without this, a fixed
timer would erase the only key set that could decrypt the peer's
frames, producing a permanent silent decrypt failure on a live data
path. A peer that never catches up is handled by the existing FSP
session liveness path rather than by silent decrypt failure.
The lost-handshake liveness gap is closed separately by retransmitting
the third rekey handshake message until the peer is confirmed on the
new keys, with a bounded retry budget after which the rekey cycle is
cleanly abandoned and retried on the next timer.
Adds unit tests covering the trial-decrypt cascade (epoch selection,
promotion on pending decrypt, reordered old-epoch stragglers after
cutover, per-slot replay-window integrity), the msg3 retransmission
lifecycle, and the peer-progress-aware drain retirement.
Forward-merges PR #91 (off-task encrypt/decrypt worker pools, GSO,
connected UDP), the macOS #102 package-integrity fix, and the AUR
#98 fips-dns fix from master.
Six textual conflicts resolved: wire/noise imports, the K-bit-flip
and rekey-cutover handlers, ActivePeer fields, and an advert test
fixture. One semantic conflict: PR #91's worker-pool code on master
referenced FLAG_SP and MmpPeerState.spin_bit, which next removed in
4aded9a2 (spin bit superseded by the MMP receiver-report timestamp
echo; FMP flags bit 2 reclaimed). The worker acceleration and its
fmp_flags round-trip test are kept; the spin-bit references are
dropped to honor next's wire-format change.
Moves both AEAD layers (ChaCha20-Poly1305, one round per layer per
packet) plus the sendmsg syscall off the rx_loop task onto a per-shard
worker pool, adds per-peer connect(2)-ed UDP with SO_REUSEPORT, and
uses Linux UDP GSO (sendmsg+UDP_SEGMENT — kernel splits one super-skb
into N on-the-wire datagrams in a single TX-stack walk) when packets
in a batch are uniform-size. Same kernel primitive WireGuard's
in-kernel module and BoringTun use to hit 2.5–3.2 Gbps single-stream.
Single TCP stream on a 5-node docker-bridge mesh, 5 x 15 s x P=1:
A→D: 1379 → 2708 Mbps (1.96x, RTT +0.12 ms)
A→E: 1394 → 2663 Mbps (1.91x, RTT +0.11 ms)
E→A: 1406 → 2624 Mbps (1.87x, RTT +0.19 ms)
Static-peer pairs only — every CoV under 3%, 0 outliers, 0% ICMP
loss. The ~+100 µs RTT is the worker queue handoff cost; AEAD +
sendmmsg now run on a separate core in exchange.
What lands:
- src/node/encrypt_worker.rs: std::thread + crossbeam_channel
workers; hash-by-destination dispatch pins a TCP flow to one
worker so wire ordering is preserved; per-worker sendmmsg(2)
batching up to 32; Linux uses sendmsg(2)+UDP_SEGMENT when
packets in a group are uniform-size.
- src/node/decrypt_worker.rs: receive-side mirror. Each shard owns
its session's recv cipher + replay window in a thread-local
HashMap (no shared RwLock/Mutex). Sessions are handed off at
promote_connection and re-registered on K-bit flip / rekey
cutover.
- src/node/handlers/session.rs try_send_session_data_pipelined:
FSP+FMP both seal in-place in the worker on one wire-buffer
alloc; no intermediate inner_plaintext / fsp_payload Vecs.
- src/transport/udp/connected_peer.rs + peer_drain.rs: per-peer
connect(2)-ed UDP socket with SO_REUSEPORT (set on the listen
socket too — without that, EADDRINUSE on activation and every
packet falls back to the wildcard path); the worker sends with
msg_name=NULL and the kernel uses its cached 5-tuple. Tick-
driven activation in handlers/connected_udp.rs, idempotent.
- src/transport/udp/mod.rs: mem::replace the recvmmsg backing buffer
instead of buf.to_vec() per packet — single pointer swap, no
MTU-sized memcpy.
- src/protocol/link.rs SessionDatagramRef: zero-copy borrowed view
used by handle_session_datagram for the bulk local-delivery
path; handle_session_payload takes the borrowed payload
directly (no payload[35..].to_vec()).
- src/transport/mod.rs TransportAddr::from_socket_addr: collapses
the two-alloc from_string(addr.to_string()) pattern to one.
- src/node/handlers/rx_loop.rs: decrypt-fallback drain promoted
ahead of packet_rx in the select! (TCP ACK starvation fix);
interleaved fallback drain every 32 packets inside the rx burst
loop.
- noise::Session: send_cipher_clone / recv_cipher_clone /
recv_replay_snapshot_owned / take_send_counter / accept_replay
so off-task workers can hold a cloned cipher + reserved counter
while the dispatcher keeps replay/counter sequencing serial.
CipherState::cipher_clone returns a refcount-bumped LessSafeKey.
AsyncUdpSocket: AsRawFd so workers issue raw sendmmsg / sendmsg
without going through the tokio reactor.
- Worker pool sizing: both default to num_cpus, overridable via
FIPS_ENCRYPT_WORKERS=N / FIPS_DECRYPT_WORKERS=N. Per-peer
connected UDP can be disabled via FIPS_CONNECTED_UDP=0.
- src/perf_profile.rs: optional per-stage timing reporter under
FIPS_PERF=1 (or FIPS_PIPELINE_TRACE=1). Off by default; zero
overhead when disabled.
- All cfg(unix)-gated. Windows continues on the existing tokio-
based send/recv.
Decrypt worker session lifecycle:
- Node::unregister_decrypt_worker_session mirrors the existing
register helper. Wired at the two natural sites that already
iterate peers_by_index: the rekey drain-completion block in
handlers/rekey.rs (drops the worker entry for the old our_index
once the drain window has expired and the cache_key is
unreachable to any in-flight OLD-K packet), and remove_active_peer
in handlers/dispatch.rs (drops the worker entry for each of the
four index slots: current, rekey, pending, previous). Only
our_index is normally registered; unregister_session is fire-
and-forget for missing entries, so calling unconditionally on
all four slots is correct and bounds the cleanup without per-
slot accounting. Without these callers the per-worker sessions
HashMap and the Node's decrypt_registered_sessions set would
grow monotonically per rekey on long-lived peers.
Testing:
- testing/static/scripts/bench-multirun.sh: multi-run iperf3 +
ping bench. N reruns (default 5), median / min / max / CoV % /
per-run outlier flag, avg ping RTT, ICMP loss %, TCP retransmit
total. Plain client→dest labels + topology header. Pre-bench
peer-convergence check (FIPS_BENCH_CONVERGE_SECS, default 15);
per-path route verification via stats.bytes_sent deltas — fails
fast if traffic exits via a non-static-peer link.
- testing/static/docker-compose.yml: passes FIPS_ENCRYPT_WORKERS /
FIPS_DECRYPT_WORKERS / FIPS_PERF through to containers for A/B
benchmarking without rebuilds.
- testing/static/scripts/iperf-test.sh: same plain client→dest
labels + topology header (was multihop/direct/N hop, which
conflated topology distance with on-wire path).
- .config/nextest.toml: synthetic UDP node tests serialized
through a max-threads=1 test group. Localhost handshakes drop
on shared CI runners under parallel load; one-at-a-time keeps
assertions reliable.
- src/node/tests/spanning_tree.rs: repair_missing_edge_handshakes
— retries up to 5 times for synthetic edges whose msg1 was
dropped, with a drain after each edge retry instead of after
each attempt's full burst.
- src/node/decrypt_worker.rs::tests: two unit tests asserting
WorkerMsg::UnregisterSession removes the worker-thread session
HashMap entry (handle_msg_unregister_session_removes_entry) and
is a no-op for never-seen cache_keys
(handle_msg_unregister_session_idempotent_on_unknown_key), which
is the safety invariant the unconditional unregister calls at
the four index slots in remove_active_peer rely on.
- src/node/encrypt_worker.rs::unix_tests
pipelined_send_wire_layout_roundtrips_canonical_decoders: mirrors
the encoder geometry of try_send_session_data_pipelined (no
coords, the common established-session path), runs the worker's
real seal + send via flush_direct_batch_sync, and decodes the
resulting wire packet using only canonical receive-side decoders
(EncryptedHeader::parse, SessionDatagramRef::decode, FSP header
parse, noise::open). Any divergence between the hand-rolled
encoder offsets (fsp_aad_offset, fsp_plaintext_offset) and the
decoders fails at one of the parse / open / decode steps before
the inner-plaintext assertion fires. Complements the existing
fsp_preseal_runs_before_outer_fmp_seal test which covers the
seal-ordering invariant with synthetic headers but does not
exercise the wire-layout invariant.
CHANGELOG.md [Unreleased] # Changed entry added describing the
worker-pool threading model, hash-by-destination dispatch,
sendmmsg/UDP_GSO, per-peer connected UDP, the operator-facing env
vars, and the bench numbers above.
Cherry-picks from mmalmi/master (paths translated from
crates/fips-core/src/ to src/): 9b7c723, 0deb5cb, 13f7339, e036c0e,
3740a68, 3792f83, 8510193, 4910b07, e53f545, e4e2896, 5fe4af5,
1d01ada, 8c37008, e12469e, 6eb2860.
Co-authored-by: Johnathan Corgan <johnathan@corganlabs.com>
Replaces the unconditional `CoordCache::clear()` calls at parent-switch,
become-root, and loop-detection sites with two targeted invalidation
methods scoped to what actually makes an entry stale:
- `invalidate_via_node(node_addr)`: drop entries whose cached
destination ancestry contains `node_addr`. Used at parent-position-
change sites — our prefix changed, so destinations downstream of
us have stale-prefix coords.
- `invalidate_other_roots(current_root)`: drop entries rooted under
a different root than the current one. Used at root-change sites.
Under the previous global flush, parent switches blanked the cache
across the board, leaving `find_next_hop` returning `None` for every
non-direct-peer destination until the cache passively re-warmed via
incoming TreeAnnounces / SessionSetup. Surgical invalidation
preserves entries that remain correct after the topology change.
The cached coord describes a destination's tree position; that
position only goes stale relative to our own routing decisions when
our own prefix changes (entries we are downstream of) or the root
changes (entries in a different tree). Peer removal does not
invalidate cached coords: `Node::find_next_hop` recomputes the
next-hop decision on every call against the current peer set, bloom
filters, and tree state, and Discovery already triggers on
`no route to destination` errors when a destination becomes
unroutable through us. The peer-removal site retains the original
"no cache invalidation" behavior.
Each method returns the count of entries removed for observability.
Unit tests cover each method against the cases enumerated in the
acceptance criterion.
- Borrowed SessionDatagramRef decoder is used in the forwarding
handler so local delivery and coordinate-cache warming no longer
allocate or copy the session payload. The owned SessionDatagram is
materialized only when re-encoding for the next hop.
- Owned SessionDatagram::decode is reimplemented as Ref::decode +
into_owned, so the two decoders cannot drift.
- recvmmsg / recvmsg_x (Linux + macOS) receive loop moves each filled
slot buffer into ReceivedPacket via mem::replace instead of cloning
it; a fresh empty buffer is installed for the next syscall.
- TransportAddr is formatted directly from the SocketAddr without
going through an intermediate String.
Focused decode bench: ref 1.6 ns/op vs owned 34.7 ns/op (21.4x).
End-to-end iperf is neutral as expected for a ~30 ns saving per
packet.
Unit tests added:
- test_session_datagram_ref_decode_borrows_payload (verifies the
payload slice pointer equals the input slice's offset 35, a real
zero-copy invariant guard against accidental future to_vec)
- bench_session_datagram_decode_owned_vs_ref (ignored, run with
--ignored --nocapture)
- test_transport_addr_from_socket_addr
Skip BootstrapEvent::Established and BootstrapEvent::Failed dispatch
in poll_nostr_discovery for peers that are already connected or
actively handshaking. Without these guards, stale traversal events
arriving after a peer connected through a different path would
either attempt to adopt a redundant socket against the live
connection (Established) or poison the per-peer failure-state
cooldown and trigger redundant retraversal via schedule_retry /
try_peer_addresses (Failed).
The four guard sites use a new is_connecting_to_peer helper extracted
from the existing closure inside initiate_peer_connection; the helper
checks for an in-flight outbound handshake state. adopt_established_traversal
gains a defense-in-depth check returning PeerAlreadyExists when called
against an already-promoted peer, so the invariant holds if a future
caller bypasses the outer dispatch guard.
Side benefit: narrows a cooldown-poisoning vector previously available
to an attacker injecting stale failure events for an active peer.
Test coverage for the new behavior:
- test_try_peer_addresses_skips_connected_peer
- test_try_peer_addresses_skips_connecting_peer
- test_nostr_traversal_failure_skips_connected_peer (Failed-arm event
injection)
- test_nostr_traversal_established_skips_connected_peer (Established-arm
event injection, mirror of the Failed test)
- test_adopted_traversal_skips_already_connected_peer
(adopt_established_traversal defense-in-depth)
CHANGELOG entry under [Unreleased] / Fixed.
Closes#87
Set `REKEY_JITTER_SECS` to 0 on next. The symmetric per-session
jitter mechanism added on maint/master works cleanly on the IK
FMP rekey path on those branches, but on next's XX FMP rekey
path it produces reproducible post-cutover routing-convergence
failures: ~50% Phase 5 per-pair-ping loss in the rekey integration
suite across multiple runs, with all crypto, transport, and
link-state log assertions still green (no decrypt failures, no
panics, no link teardowns, no rekey msg2 failures, no FSP
decryption failures during rekey).
The XX rekey path itself is sound — pre-merge it had been passing
18/18 across six consecutive CI runs. Isolation experiment
confirms the trigger: with REKEY_JITTER_SECS=0, the same suite
on next passes 70/70 cleanly with FMP cutover counts (18-21)
in line with master's baseline (24). With the constant at 15
and the test suite's 35s nominal rekey interval, FMP cutover
counts climb to 27-40 and Phase 5 fails consistently.
Two attempted fixes to absorb the jitter-induced state churn on
the XX path (post-msg3 addr_to_link restore; optimistic dampening
at msg1 receipt) were tried and reverted — neither restored
Phase 5 reliability. Diagnosis of the underlying XX cutover
state-cleanup behaviour that fails to absorb variable-interval
rekeys is deferred. The const and surrounding draw/redraw
machinery (peer::active::ActivePeer, node::session::SessionEntry,
draw_rekey_jitter at session.rs:20, redraws at the four cutover
sites) are kept in place; flipping the const back to a positive
value is the re-enable path once the investigation lands.
CHANGELOG entry under `### Changed`.
The two rekey-jitter unit tests added on the IK-rekey branches
construct a HandshakeState via:
HandshakeState::new_initiator(keypair, remote_pubkey)
On next, the XX rewrite changed the initiator constructor to take
only the local keypair:
HandshakeState::new_initiator(keypair)
XX does not learn the responder's static pubkey until msg2, so
the IK-shaped signature does not apply. The merge from master
brought the test bodies verbatim; this drops the second argument
in both call sites so the tests compile against the XX API. The
test semantics (rekey-jitter range and mean checks) are unchanged
and orthogonal to the handshake-pattern choice.
Same shape as 8a6477b adapting the bootstrap-handoff tests to
XX's three-way handshake.
Add a per-session signed jitter offset (uniform [-15, +15] seconds)
to the rekey timer triggers in check_rekey (FMP) and check_session_rekey
(FSP). The configured `node.rekey.after_secs` becomes the nominal
interval rather than a floor; mean is preserved. Desynchronizes
both endpoints in symmetric-start meshes so the dual-initiation
race stops occurring rather than being resolved after the fact by
the smaller-NodeAddr tie-breaker.
Per-session storage means each rekey cutover reconstructs the
session and redraws the jitter naturally — successive cycles get
independent offsets, preventing drift back into sync.
The dual-initiation tie-breaker in the rekey arm of handle_msg3 (and
the FSP analogue in handle_session_setup) only fired when
rekey_in_progress was true. With Noise IK (one-message rekey on
master/maint) that is sufficient: msg1 IS the rekey, so both sides
being mid-handshake is the only state where the race can fire.
With Noise XX (three-message rekey on next), set_pending_session runs
when the initiator has processed msg2 and sent msg3, and that call
clears rekey_in_progress. Both sides' set_pending_session can run
before either peer's msg3 has landed. Each side then receives the
peer's msg3 in the post-pending state with rekey_in_progress=false,
falls into the "drop because pending_new_session is set" guard, and
discards the peer's handshake. Each side commits its own initiator
session at K-bit cutover. The two sessions use different Noise key
material, so the link breaks asymmetrically after cutover.
Unify both checks into a single tie-breaker that fires when either
rekey_in_progress() OR pending_new_session().is_some() is true. The
existing smaller-NodeAddr rule applies uniformly; abandon_rekey()
already clears both states and returns whichever index needs
freeing.
Mirrored to the FSP rekey msg1 path in handle_session_setup for the
same race shape.
Logging:
- The previously-silent drop in the rekey arm of handle_msg3 logs at
info as a tie-break decision rather than as a silent drop.
Pending_new_session is added as a log field on the tie-break
win/lose lines so a reader can distinguish which of the two race
states fired.
- Cutover-complete and K-bit-flip log lines gained our_addr and
their_addr fields so the two endpoints' logs of the same handshake
can be correlated.
- "Pending session set, awaiting K-bit cutover" lines remain at
debug per the existing convention of info-for-cutover-completion-
only.
Verification: under the un-fixed handler, both sides log
"rekey-msg3 drop: pending_new_session already set" within 242
microseconds of each other, with rekey_in_progress=false and
different pending session indices. Failure pattern matches: six of
twenty pairs FAILED post-rekey, all involving the single-peer node.
Six consecutive post-fix CI attempts on the same test green across
rekey, rekey-accept-off, and rekey-outbound-only suites.
The chacha20 crate (RustCrypto) ships SSE2 + soft backends only — on
aarch64 (Apple Silicon, ARM Linux servers, Docker on M-series Macs) it
falls through to a portable software impl at ~600–800 MB/s/core. ring
0.17 wraps BoringSSL's hand-tuned ChaCha20-Poly1305, which dispatches
to NEON on aarch64 and AVX2/AVX-512 on x86_64 — typically 3-5 GB/s/core
on the same hardware.
Same wire format. ChaCha20-Poly1305 is byte-deterministic for a given
(key, nonce, plaintext, aad), so any correct AEAD implementation
produces identical ciphertext. The full noise test suite covers this
implicitly: IK and XK roundtrip handshakes, replay window correctness,
multi-message nonce sequencing, and 100-message stress all pass at
1129/1129 (the lib's full `cargo test` count) — these only succeed if
ring's output matches what the receiver's existing replay-window
decrypt path expects.
Implementation notes:
* `LessSafeKey` (and `UnboundKey`) deliberately do not implement
Clone for safety. `CipherState`'s manual Clone impl rebuilds it
from the retained 32-byte key — cheap for ChaCha20-Poly1305 since
construction is essentially a key copy + a constant-time check.
* The keyed AEAD is now cached in `CipherState.cipher` instead of
being re-derived per packet. This was already a perf win for the
chacha20poly1305 backend (`new_from_slice` per packet was hot in
profiles); for ring it's a bigger win because `LessSafeKey`
construction also derives the Poly1305 key.
* Public `Vec<u8>`-returning API preserved. New module-private
`seal`/`open` helpers wrap ring's `seal_in_place_append_tag` /
`open_in_place` so the per-packet allocation pattern is local to
one place.
* `EndToEndState::Established` triggers `clippy::large_enum_variant`
after the swap (`NoiseSession` grew from ~600 to ~1.5 KB because
ring precomputes the Poly1305 key state at construction). That
precomputation is the win — boxing the variant would re-add an
indirection per packet and work against it. `#[allow]`'d at the
enum decl with a justifying comment.
ring is widely deployed (rustls, hyper-rustls, AWS SDK, …) and a
pure-Rust crate (uses BoringSSL's asm via a vendored build). It
introduces no new C toolchain requirements that aren't already there
for any rustls user.
Bench data from a downstream consumer of this crate (Docker e2e,
DURATION=10, identical hardware before/after, aarch64 Linux on
Apple Silicon):
2-node direct (A↔B):
TCP 1-stream 437 → 1097 Mbps (2.51×)
TCP 4-stream 439 → 1109 Mbps (2.53×)
TCP 8-stream 445 → 1069 Mbps (2.40×)
UDP @1000 Mbit 599/40% loss → 1000 Mbps lossless
ping under load ~0.6 ms (unchanged)
3-node forced transit (A → C → B):
TCP 1-stream 438 → 1019 Mbps (2.33×)
TCP 4-stream 421 → 982 Mbps (2.33×)
TCP 8-stream 443 → 1031 Mbps (2.33×)
UDP @1000 Mbit 475/52% loss → 1000 Mbps lossless
ping under load 7.68 ms / 215 ms max → 0.72 ms / 3.6 ms max
The relay-path lift is the cleanest tell on the bottleneck: the
transit node was crypto-bound (single-threaded soft chacha couldn't
keep up with offered rate), so the queue accumulated under load. With
NEON the relay isn't crypto-bound and the queue stops accumulating —
the 215ms ping-tail collapses to 3.6ms.
The advert cache inside fetch_advert is read-only on hit — once a peer's
overlay advert is cached, every subsequent lookup returns the same
endpoints regardless of whether they still work. So when a peer rebinds
its NAT (or its STUN-discovered port flaps), connection retries to that
peer dial the same dead address forever, even with exponential backoff
firing at the right cadence.
Observed in deployment: macOS daemon's view of a Linux peer would
"regress" — peer marked rch=False after a brief link-dead window, then
hours of "Retry connection initiation failed: no operational transport
for any of <npub>'s addresses" with no recovery. Manual pause+resume of
the daemon (which restarts the FIPS endpoint and forces fresh advert
fetches) was the only way out.
When initiate_peer_connection / a retry tick returns
NodeError::NoTransportForType, fire-and-forget refetch_advert_for_stale_check
on the peer's npub. This re-fetches kind 37195 from advert_relays; if
the relay has a newer advert it replaces the cached entry, if it has
nothing it evicts the cached entry. Either way the next retry tick goes
to fresh data instead of looping on the same dead endpoint.
Mirrors the existing stale-advert sweep that runs from the
BootstrapEvent::Failed (NAT-traversal-streak) path, but covers the
direct-UDP-retry path which never crosses that streak threshold.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
When initiate_peer_connections() runs at boot, address resolution can
fail for an entire peer (no operational transport for the configured
transport types, all addresses unreachable, NAT rebind invalidated cached
endpoints, etc.). Before this change the failure was logged and silently
forgotten — the peer entry stayed in a dead state forever, accepting
incoming pings but unable to answer them, until the daemon was manually
restarted.
The retry plumbing (schedule_retry / process_pending_retries with
exponential backoff) already exists and is wired into the post-handshake
failure paths (BootstrapEvent::Failed, MMP dead-link timeout, handshake
timeout). The startup loop just wasn't calling it. Mirror the
BootstrapEvent::Failed path: on a startup peer-init error, parse the
peer's npub and call schedule_retry so the peer recovers without
operator intervention.
Includes a regression test that asserts retry_pending is populated when
initiate_peer_connections() fails for a peer with no operational
transport.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The previous fix (6ebca3e) only refetched the advert when retry returned
NodeError::NoTransportForType (cache returned no addresses at all). But
the much more common stale-cache failure mode is: cache returns an
endpoint that LOOKS valid (the address it had last week, before the
peer's NAT rebound), the dial succeeds at the IP layer, the handshake
times out, MMP fires, schedule_reconnect adds the entry back to
retry_pending, next retry hits the same cached endpoint, dials it
again, times out again. Loop forever — no NoTransportForType ever
fires because the cache has data, just dead data.
Move refetch_advert_for_stale_check to before each retry attempt
unconditionally. Cheap (one Filter query against advert_relays with
a 2s timeout, bounded by the retry backoff cadence), and replaces the
cache only if the relay has a newer advert or evicts if the relay has
nothing. Keeps the retry loop pinned to relay ground truth instead of
whatever the cache happened to learn at startup.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
When a node was the smallest-NodeAddr peer it could see (no smaller
neighbor available as a parent), the spanning-tree state was promoting
it to root. But the ancestry it advertised on the next TreeAnnounce
still referenced its previous parent's path, so receiving peers
rejected the announce with `invalid ancestry: advertised root X is
not the minimum path entry Y`, blocking mesh transit on any path that
needed to traverse this node.
Detect the self-root transition explicitly in `TreeState::become_root`
and rebuild the advertised ancestry to start from self. Also surface
the same path through the MMP receive handler so a stale ancestry
inherited across reconnect is corrected eagerly rather than waiting
for the next observation tick.
Adds 80 unit tests in `tree::tests` covering self-root transitions,
mid-chain ancestor disappearance, and ancestry validation against the
new root, plus a regression in `node::tests::spanning_tree` for a
3-node chain where the middle node's only parent (the smallest-addr
peer) goes away — previously it would advertise an ancestry rejected
by both endpoints; now it self-roots cleanly.
The run_rx_loop's `tokio::select!` was costing one full scheduler hop
+ futex per inbound packet and per outbound TUN packet. Under
sustained load that capped throughput at one event per scheduler
quantum — independent of CPU (which sat near-idle) because every
iteration parked the worker, woke it via futex, processed one event,
then parked again.
After the await on `packet_rx.recv()` / `tun_outbound_rx.recv()`
fires, drain up to 256 additional ready items via `try_recv()` in a
tight inner loop before yielding back to `select!`. `biased` ordering
gives the data-plane branches priority over tick / control / DNS
under sustained load.
The 256 cap is empirically tuned to keep the worker on a busy stream
between yield points (a contiguous burst of ~256 MTU-sized packets
≈ 400 KB of contiguous traffic) while still bounding the inner loop
so a flood on one branch can't starve the periodic tick or control
socket. Lower caps (64) left perf on the table; higher caps (1024+)
delayed tick handling visibly under stress.
Pairs with the recvmmsg(2) change in the previous commit: the kernel
UDP queue now hands packets to `packet_rx` in 32-batches, and the
rx_loop drains them without a per-packet scheduler hop.
`Node::adopt_established_traversal` was constructing the adopted UDP
transport with `UdpConfig::default()` — MTU 1280, default recv/send
buffer sizes, default accept/advertise flags. If the operator had
configured a higher MTU on the primary `[transports.udp]` listener
(e.g. 1500 on a path where larger frames are known viable), full-sized
tunnel datagrams sent over the NAT-traversed link would exceed the
adopted socket's MTU and get dropped at the socket layer with no
visibility into why throughput collapsed.
Inherit the primary UDP config (MTU + recv/send buffer sizes + accept
/ advertise flags) and clear the bind / external-address fields since
the adopted socket is already bound. Lookup tries `transport_name`
first so operators with multiple named `[transports.udp.<name>]`
listeners pick up inheritance from the matching listener, and falls
back to the unnamed `Single` listener so single-instance configs work
unchanged.
The previous default of MTU 1280 was deliberately the IPv6 minimum,
the only value guaranteed to survive arbitrary middlebox paths. With
this change, operators who set their primary listener higher (based
on known-clean LAN topology) will have NAT-traversed flows initially
attempting that higher MTU and possibly black-holing on tighter paths
until reactive `MtuExceeded` recovery kicks in. Documented in the
adoption call-site comment so future readers understand why the
conservative default went away.
Discovered in a downstream consumer where a `MESH_TUNNEL_MTU=1320` /
encrypted wire ~1426B produced silent packet drop on every session
that had been promoted onto a NAT-traversed link.
Adds two sibling tests in `src/node/tests/bootstrap.rs` pinning the
new behaviour for the `Single` and `Named` config variants.
Johnathan Corgan
Martti MalmiandJohnathan Corgan
