Johnathan Corgan
1c93fde672
The incoming-offer semaphore was global with no per-sender accounting and the permit was taken before any identity check, so one sender could hold every slot and deny rendezvous to everyone else. Each sender now has its own allowance with the global count kept as the outer bound. Note what this does and does not do: it raises the cost from one keypair to a small number of them, so a sender willing to spend throwaway identities can still saturate the pool at unchanged total offer rate. The signal freshness bound is only sound while the acceptance window stays strictly inside the replay window, or an offer evicted from the replay cache is still fresh enough to be accepted twice. The relation was stated in a comment and enforced nowhere. Config validation now rejects the bad combination at load, derived from the skew constant rather than a literal, and checked regardless of whether the feature is enabled so that turning it on later cannot surface an error at a surprising moment. The NAT lab config generator produced a combination the new rule rejects and is corrected in the same change. The punch-target filter shipped with no test that would fail if it were reverted. Loopback, link-local and multicast candidates and an oversized list are now covered, and the cap assertion is tightened from a bound to an equality. The private-range inclusion that LAN traversal depends on is pinned as a healthy path so a blanket ban cannot pass. Green: fmt, build, clippy and test --lib, 1533 passed.
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.