The sidecar chain test intends node-a to be a standalone root ("node-a: no
outbound peers"), but started node-a without clearing FIPS_PEER_*, so it
inherited the external peer default from testing/sidecar/.env (a real public
mesh node, test-us01.fips.network) and auto-connected to the live mesh. The
whole a-b-c chain then attached under an external root, inflating tree depth and
breaking test isolation; this also produced spurious multi-hop failures.
Set FIPS_PEER_NPUB/FIPS_PEER_ADDR empty for node-a, matching how node-b and
node-c already get explicit inline peers, so the suite is hermetic regardless of
the .env default. Validated against the unmodified .env: node-a comes up with a
single link to node-b, no external attachment, multi-hop passes 18/18.
Before bf77ece (Fix DNS responder silent-drop on systemd-resolved
deployments, 2026-04-29) the daemon defaulted dns.bind_addr to "::"
(wildcard, accepted v4 traffic too), so the macOS pkg's resolver shim
of `nameserver 127.0.0.1` reached the daemon fine over v4 loopback.
That commit tightened the default to "::1" — IPv6 loopback only,
which on Linux/macOS does not accept v4-mapped traffic — to defuse a
mesh-interface filter / IPV6_PKTINFO bug that was silently dropping
.fips queries on systemd-resolved hosts. The Linux side was updated
in the same commit: fips-dns-setup now writes [::1]:5354 in every
backend, and the gateway's DEFAULT_DNS_UPSTREAM moved to [::1]:5354
with an inline comment about the v4/v6 mismatch.
The macOS resolver shim in packaging/macos/build-pkg.sh was missed in
that sweep. Since 2026-04-29, every macOS install has shipped
/etc/resolver/fips with `nameserver 127.0.0.1` while the daemon
listened on `::1`, so .fips hostnames don't resolve via getaddrinfo
(ping6, curl, etc.) even though `dig @::1 -p 5354 …` works.
The mismatch is easy to miss: mDNSResponder swallows the timeout,
VPN clients that hijack DNS (NetworkExtension match-domain : *) mask
it entirely, and the symptom looks like "discovery hasn't found the
peer yet". Switch the shim to nameserver ::1 to match the daemon.
A node with a single tree peer has its periodic parent re-evaluation
disabled (it needs at least two peers for a meaningful comparison), so
it depends entirely on its peer pushing a TreeAnnounce for it to attach.
That push happens once at promotion time plus on the parent's slow
periodic no-change re-broadcast. If the one-shot attaching announce is
lost, the single-uplink node falls back to self-root and cannot recover
until the next periodic re-broadcast (reeval_interval_secs later),
stranding it out of the tree and unreachable end-to-end in the interim.
Make tree-position exchange self-healing on the receive path: when an
accepted TreeAnnounce advertises a root strictly worse (higher NodeAddr,
since election is smallest-wins) than our own, echo our current
declaration back to that peer. A stranded self-root node's announce now
provokes its better-rooted peer to re-push its real position immediately,
so the node re-attaches within a round-trip instead of waiting for the
periodic cadence.
Echo only in that one direction. If the peer's root is lower (better)
than ours, we are the stale side: the peer would ignore our worse root
anyway and we converge via the parent re-evaluation that follows, so
echoing back is pure waste and would double announce traffic in the
learning direction during a root change or partition merge. Equal roots
are already converged. The echo is bounded by the existing per-peer
500 ms tree-announce rate limiter and is a no-op once the peer adopts our
root, so it adds no traffic in a converged mesh.
Add a spanning-tree unit test that drives a converged child back to
self-root with its peer-ancestry view of the root cleared (modelling the
lost attaching announce), and asserts the root re-pushes on the
resulting root disagreement and the child re-attaches.
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.
Ignore duplicate or counter-regressed ReceiverReports before updating
RTT, loss, goodput, or ETX, so a delayed or reordered report can no
longer poison link metrics. Compute the RTT-from-echo sample with
checked timestamp arithmetic and reject zero, negative, or out-of-range
results instead of risking wrap or underflow on untrusted wire values.
On the sender side, when receiver dwell time overflows the u16 wire
field, suppress the timestamp echo (send 0) and saturate dwell to
u16::MAX rather than truncating, so a bogus small RTT cannot be formed.
Adds duplicate, out-of-order, wrapped-add, and future-dated (checked_sub)
sample tests, asserts loss and goodput stay unchanged on a dropped
duplicate, and covers the dwell-overflow echo suppression. Documents the
behavior in the MMP design note and CHANGELOG.
Co-authored-by: Johnathan Corgan <johnathan@corganlabs.com>
The interop harness only tested a full mesh, where every pair is a direct
one-hop FMP link. That left multi-hop forwarding, routing, coordinate
handling, and mesh-size estimation untested across versions.
Add an opt-in multi-hop topology and three new checks:
- generate-configs.sh: FIPS_INTEROP_EDGES selects an explicit undirected
edge list instead of the full mesh, with symmetric peering, connectivity
validation (no isolated node, graph connected), and per-node degree plus
edge metadata in nodes.env. Unset means full mesh, unchanged.
- interop-test.sh: a --topology flag with a built-in multihop-3v-cycle
(six nodes, two of each version, one cycle, two leaves). The per-node
peer check now expects each node's adjacency degree rather than N-1, and
the all-pairs ping now also exercises cross-version forwarding over
non-adjacent pairs. Adds a control-differential data-plane continuity
stream across the rekey window (Phase 5b) and a strict plus/minus 25
percent mesh-size convergence check (Phase 7).
- interop-stress.sh: forward --topology through to the per-rep driver
(mutually exclusive with a positional node-spec).
Phase 1 makes the strict retrying ping authoritative. The convergence
detector (one fully-clean, no-retry sweep of every directed pair) is now an
advisory settle-wait whose timeout is non-fatal; the strict retrying ping
decides pass/fail, matching how the post-rekey phases already work. Under
packet loss a clean no-retry sweep of a large mesh is statistically unlikely
even when the mesh is healthy (30 pairs at 2 percent loss leaves only about
55 percent of sweeps clean), so the detector otherwise falsely failed runs
whose strict ping reported full reachability. CONVERGENCE_TIMEOUT is now
env-overridable and defaults to 90s for larger meshes under loss.
Full-mesh runs are unaffected. Validated end-to-end with the
multihop-3v-cycle topology across three versions: all 30 directed pairs
reachable including multi-hop routed pairs, zero data-plane loss through
both rekey cutovers, and mesh-size converging to the true node count on
every node.
Brings the OR-union mesh-size estimator fix and the per-peer / capacity-cap
log-level demotions forward to next.
Conflict resolution: kept next's XX handshake structure and re-applied the
intent at next's own sites. compute_mesh_size auto-merged (next already
carries the config() accessor). The K-bit cutover promotion log demotion
applied to next's richer index-bearing form in encrypted.rs.
master's log changes lived in handle_msg1's IK-only identity/promotion
blocks, which have no XX equivalent there (next defers identity and
promotion to handle_msg3). next's equivalents were demoted in place:
"Connection promoted to active peer" and "Peer restart detected (epoch
mismatch)" info -> debug, and the duplicate "Inbound peer promoted to
active" removed. The two XX-only restart variants ("during FMP rekey" and
"during promotion") were also demoted info -> debug so the restart-detected
class is uniformly at debug on next.
Brings the maint-line OR-union mesh-size estimator fix and the
per-peer / capacity-cap log-level demotions forward to master.
Conflict resolution: compute_mesh_size resolved to master's config()
accessor form carrying maint's OR-union rewrite (drop the stale summing
`total`); the log-level demotions auto-merged into master's handler
versions. The equivalent master-only log "connected UDP socket installed"
(connected_udp.rs, a file that does not exist on maint) was demoted
info -> debug as part of this merge so the connected-UDP path matches the
rest of the per-peer lifecycle logging.
On a saturated public-mesh node the connection-lifecycle and capacity-cap
events fire continuously and drown out the genuinely notable INFO/WARN
lines. Demote them to debug and drop a redundant duplicate:
- FMP K-bit cutover promotion (encrypted): info -> debug
- "Connection promoted to active peer" (handshake): info -> debug, and
remove the duplicate "Inbound peer promoted to active" line that
shadowed it on the inbound path
- "Peer restart detected" (handshake): info -> debug
- "Peer removed and state cleaned up" (dispatch): info -> debug
- "Rejecting inbound TCP connection (max_inbound_connections reached)"
(tcp): warn -> debug
- "Congestion detected, CE flag set on forwarded packet" (forwarding):
warn -> debug
- "Removing peer: link dead timeout" (mmp): warn -> debug
These are expected, high-frequency conditions on a busy public node (new
and reconnecting peers, ECN CE marking, the inbound connection cap, and
link-dead churn), not operator-actionable signals.
The mesh-size estimator summed the per-filter cardinality of the parent
filter and each child filter, which assumes those filters are perfectly
disjoint. When they overlap -- a stale or oversized parent filter, or a
routing loop -- the sum over-counts and inflates the reported mesh size
to as much as several times the true size.
Estimate the cardinality of the OR-union of the contributing filters
(self + parent + children) once instead. OR is idempotent, so any
overlap is deduplicated: the result equals the old sum in the disjoint
case and stays correct under overlap. The union is seeded from a clone
of a contributing filter so it keeps that filter's size class, and a
filter whose size class does not match is skipped rather than panicking.
The refuse-to-estimate behavior on a saturated or above-cap filter is
preserved.
Add a regression test with overlapping parent and child filters where
the naive sum over-counts and the union estimate tracks the distinct
member count.
The transport layer used Mutex::lock().unwrap() at ten sites across the
UDP, BLE, and Ethernet code. A std mutex poisons if a thread panics
while holding it, after which every lock().unwrap() on that same mutex
also panics, turning one fault into a cascade. These critical sections
only perform short HashMap/Vec operations on locally constructed values
and are not reachable from peer input, but the idiom is fragile against
any future in-section panic. Replace each with
lock().unwrap_or_else(|e| e.into_inner()), which recovers the guarded
data and removes the cascade with no new dependency and no call-graph
change.
Also replace four self.local_addr.unwrap() calls in the UDP start and
adopt paths with a sentinel fallback. The value is provably set just
above each log line today, but the unwrap is brittle against a future
reordering; logging an unbound sentinel is harmless and cannot panic.
Linux source builds pull in rustables, whose build script runs bindgen
to generate nftables bindings for the LAN gateway. bindgen needs
libclang.so on the build host, so a clean source build fails with
'Unable to find libclang' unless libclang-dev (or llvm) is installed.
The prerequisite text in README.md and CONTRIBUTING.md previously
listed only the optional BLE dependencies, and packaging/README.md had
no source-build prerequisite list at all. Document libclang-dev as a
mandatory Linux build dependency, distinct from the optional BLE deps,
and note that it is build-time only so pre-built .deb installs are
unaffected.
Two next-line entries had been left describing states that a later commit
reverted. Collapse the XX max_peers early-gate add/remove churn into its
net final state: on the XX handshake an over-cap inbound connection is
rejected solely by the late promotion check (no early gate), logged at
debug. Replace the stale "rekey jitter disabled on next" note with the
actual state: jitter is re-enabled (REKEY_JITTER_SECS = 15) and the three
XX rekey-path divergence defects that had blocked it are fixed
(authenticated-decrypt cutover instead of bare K-bit, msg3 retransmission
with per-link rekey serialization, and a jitter-aware handle_msg3
session-age partition). Merged-in IK-line entries are left untouched.
Record the changes that landed since the last changelog update: the
dual-auto_connect traversal-session election, the FMP link-layer rekey
reliability fixes (bounded msg1 retransmission with rekey-aware
heartbeat, and authenticate-before-cutover), the in-process loopback
test transport and progress-aware convergence wait that remove CI flake
classes, the local/GitHub CI suite-parity and single-source toolchain
selection, and the packaging change shipping the config as an example
that postinst seeds when absent.
Installing /etc/fips/fips.yaml as a live dpkg conf-file collides with a
configuration-management-rendered or operator-edited config on upgrade:
dpkg either prompts interactively (keep/replace), stalling unattended
upgrades, or clobbers the local file. Ship the default config as
/usr/share/doc/fips/fips.yaml.example (mode 644) and drop it from
conf-files. postinst now seeds /etc/fips/fips.yaml from the example only
when it does not already exist (mode 600), yielding to any existing
config without a prompt or clobber. Add ConditionPathExists for the
config to the service unit so a missing config skips the unit cleanly
rather than crash-looping.
A busy node opens roughly three file descriptors per established UDP peer
(a connect()-ed socket plus a 2-FD drain self-pipe), so the default 1024
soft RLIMIT_NOFILE is exhausted near 320 peers and further peer admission,
handshakes, and discovery fail with EMFILE. Document the FD budget, the
symptom, and the systemd (LimitNOFILE drop-in) and OpenWrt (procd nofile)
procedures to raise it, plus how to verify the per-peer ratio is bounded.
Link the new guide from the how-to index.
Bring the local runner (testing/ci-local.sh) and GitHub CI into agreement
on two axes.
Suite coverage: the admission-cap integration suite ran only locally, so a
regression in it could never turn the GitHub gate red. Add an admission-cap
leg to the integration matrix, add testing/check-ci-parity.sh (wired as
'ci-local.sh --check-parity') to diff the two suite sets and fail on
unexpected drift, and document the deliberate local-only (live-Tor) and
granularity-only differences in a comment block atop both runners.
Toolchain selection: every CI and packaging job installed its toolchain
with dtolnay/rust-toolchain@stable, but the rust-toolchain.toml channel pin
overrode it for all compilation, wasting an install and printing a
misleading rustc version. Switch the stable call sites to
actions-rust-lang/setup-rust-toolchain, which reads rust-toolchain.toml as
the single source of truth. Keep the explicit cache steps (cache: false on
the new action), set rustflags empty so the action does not impose a global
-D warnings the previous setup never applied, fold the macOS cross-compile
target into the action input, and leave the OpenWrt nightly Tier-3 leg on
dtolnay/rust-toolchain@nightly.
At the inbound peer cap the XX FMP handshake had two cap checks: an early
gate in handle_msg3 and the late promote_connection check. On XX the
peer's identity is not known until the third handshake message, by which
point all three messages have already crossed the wire, so the early gate
saved no wire bytes and governed exactly the same net-new-peer set as the
late check (known and pending-outbound peers return earlier via the
cross-connection paths). Remove the early gate and rely on the promotion
check, and log the resulting MaxPeersExceeded rejection at debug instead
of warn so a cap'd node under sustained inbound pressure does not emit
WARN spam for expected policy rejections.
Re-enable the two previously-ignored inbound-cap unit tests, rewritten to
drive a full XX three-message handshake and assert the path-agnostic
invariant (no promotion over cap, peer count unchanged, no
connection/link/index leak) plus the known-peer reconnect bypass.
Update the admission-cap integration suite's enforcement-event
discriminator to match: drop the removed early-gate string and count the
new debug-level promotion-cap rejection.
When two peers each auto_connect to the other, each runs both an
initiator and a responder NAT-traversal session and binds a separate
UDP socket per session. Each side adopts only the first Established
event and drops the loser session's socket; when the two sides adopt
mismatched sessions, each sends its Noise msg1 to a peer port the peer
has already stopped draining, and both handshakes stall.
Deterministically keep the session initiated by the smaller NodeAddr,
decided on the responder path: decline an incoming offer only when we
also have an in-flight outbound initiator for the same peer and our
NodeAddr is smaller. The peer's redundant initiator then times out,
leaving a single matching socket pair on both ends. Asymmetric
(one-sided) auto_connect has no co-active initiator and is never
suppressed, so connectivity is preserved; an undecidable NodeAddr falls
through to answering.
Reuses the NodeAddr tie-breaker convention already used by the
cross-connection and rekey dual-init paths. Adds a unit test for the
election helper.
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.
Add a Loopback variant to TransportHandle backed by an unbounded
in-process channel and a shared address-to-receiver registry, so
node-level multi-node tests deliver packets directly between nodes
instead of over real localhost UDP sockets. This removes the kernel
UDP receive-buffer overflow that dropped handshake packets when many
tests ran in parallel under CPU contention, and lets the large-network
convergence tests run reliably in the default suite again (their
parallel-load ignore markers are removed).
The new transport and its enum variant are cfg(test)-gated, so the
daemon build is unaffected.
The FMP rekey msg1 resend driver retransmitted indefinitely with no cap
and no abandon, so a rekey that never completed kept resending msg1
forever. Give it a retransmission budget: cap resends at
handshake_max_resends with exponential backoff and abandon the rekey
cycle cleanly once the budget is exhausted, mirroring the FSP session
rekey msg3 driver.
With the cap in place the link-dead heartbeat can safely become
rekey-aware: check_link_heartbeats now suppresses teardown while a rekey
is in progress with msg1 budget remaining, instead of reaping a link
that is still actively carrying rekey-handshake traffic. The suppression
terminates deterministically (the budget abandons on exhaustion, cutover
clears the in-progress flag), so a genuinely dead link is still reaped on
the next cycle.
Adds a rekey_msg1_resend_count counter on ActivePeer reset at every
rekey-clear and cutover site, msg1 resend-budget unit tests, and two-node
heartbeat suppression/resume/regression integration tests.
Re-enables the rekey timer jitter on the XX FMP rekey path
(REKEY_JITTER_SECS 0 -> 15), which had been disabled because it produced
reproducible post-rekey routing loss (~50% Phase-5 ping failure) with no
crypto errors. The failures were session divergence: under jitter the two
directions of a link rekey close together in time, and three distinct
defects in the FMP rekey state machine could leave the two endpoints
committed to different Noise sessions, starving the receiver until the 30s
heartbeat dead-timer tore the link down (tree parent loss -> routing
failure). All three are fixed here.
1. Promote on authenticated decrypt, not the bare K-bit. The K-bit-flip
handler promoted whatever pending session existed the instant the header
bit flipped; under interleaved rekeys that could be a stale pending from
an earlier epoch. Trial-decrypt the inbound frame against the pending
session and promote only if it authenticates, mirroring the FSP cutover
discipline; deliver that plaintext through the canonical path and leave
the pending untouched otherwise.
2. Retransmit FMP rekey msg3 until confirmed. FMP sent msg3 once; a lost
datagram left the responder without the new session. Retain the msg3
payload and resend over the existing link until a peer frame
authenticates against the pending or post-cutover current session,
abandoning after the configured handshake-resend budget (mirrors FSP).
Also serialize per-link rekeys: do not start a new rekey while one awaits
cutover or is still retransmitting msg3.
3. Partition the handle_msg3 paths by rekey age. An inbound msg3 on a
different link took the initial-handshake cross-connection tie-breaker
when the session was under a fixed 30s old, otherwise the rekey
responder. A rekey resets the session-age clock, so under jitter a
rekey-aged session is frequently under 30s and its concurrent rekey msg3
was swallowed by the cross-connection branch, which discarded the peer's
rekey session with no pending slot while the peer cut over to it anyway.
Bound the cross-connection branch by the same jitter-aware age floor the
responder uses, so the two paths partition with no overlap.
Verified at jitter=15: rekey integration suite 70/70 across repeated runs
locally and on GitHub CI, rekey-accept-off 71/71, rekey-outbound-only
75/75; lib 1369/0, clippy and fmt clean. At zero jitter the acceptance
floor equals the previous 30s constant, so default-cadence behavior is
unchanged.
Bring the immutable-state single-store change onto the Noise XX line.
The shared NodeContext is now the sole store; this merge applies the
next-only adaptations the master-side change couldn't carry:
- Remove node_profile from the Node struct (next-only field) so it lives
solely in NodeContext; migrate its readers (tree/bloom/discovery/
handshake negotiation) onto the node_profile() accessor. The two FMP
negotiation sites hoist node_profile() into a local to avoid borrowing
&self while a connection is mutably borrowed.
- leaf_only sets both is_leaf_only and node_profile via the context swap.
- Preserve the XX handshake/rekey structure (no identity-in-msg1; XX/XK
initiator/responder constructors) while applying the startup_epoch()
accessor migration.
- Tests: route profile selection through a make_test_node_with_profile
helper (profile is immutable, set via Config flags) instead of poking
the removed field.
cargo test --lib 1369/0; clippy -D warnings and release build clean.
Remove the duplicated immutable fields (config, identity, startup_epoch,
started_at, is_leaf_only, max_connections/peers/links) from the Node
struct so the Arc<NodeContext> bundle is the single source of truth.
Previously Node owned these fields and a parallel context copy, kept in
lockstep by rebuild_context() at every mutation site — pure overhead that
existed only because of the duplication.
- Replace rebuild_context() with replace_context(): a clone-edit-swap of
the whole Arc. The per-instance context stays immutable; mutation swaps
the Arc. This is the sole runtime mutation path (constructors, leaf_only,
update_peers).
- Add Copy-returning accessors startup_epoch() and max_connections()/
max_peers()/max_links(); migrate the remaining direct field readers onto
the accessors. node_addr()/npub()/Debug now read identity/is_leaf_only
from the context.
- update_peers reads the pre-update peer set from the live context Arc
before building a fresh Config + context and swapping — preserving the
read-before-write ordering its mutation-window test depends on.
- Remove the test-only set_max_* setters; tests set the limits on Config at
construction instead (new make_node_with_max_peers/links helpers).
- Add a ci-local guard that fails if the Node struct re-declares a bundled
field, so the single-store invariant can't silently regress.
cargo test --lib 1291/0; clippy -D warnings and release build clean.
Store node counters in an atomic metric registry read through &self, and
introduce a shared NodeContext bundle holding the effectively-immutable
fields (config, identity, startup epoch, node profile, capability limits).
Source the immutable config and identity reads across the receive hot
path, the XX handshake/session/rekey state machines, and the discovery,
tree, bloom, retry, and lifecycle modules through the context accessors.
Includes the bloom delta/full/NACK/resize and byte-total counters in the
registry. The Node fields and the context are rebuilt in lockstep at every
mutation site.
Store node counters in an atomic metric registry read through &self, and
introduce a shared NodeContext bundle holding the effectively-immutable
fields (config, identity, startup epoch, capability limits). Source the
immutable config and identity reads across the receive hot path, the
handshake/session/mmp/encrypted state machines, and the discovery, tree,
bloom, retry, and lifecycle modules through the context accessors rather
than direct field reads. The Node fields and the context are rebuilt in
lockstep at every mutation site.
Johnathan Corgan
ArjenandJohnathan Corgan
Martti MalmiandJohnathan Corgan