Martti MalmiandJohnathan Corgan
5cda4a9a55
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.
FIPS: Free Internetworking Peering System
A self-organizing encrypted mesh network built on Nostr identities, capable of operating over arbitrary transports without central infrastructure.
FIPS is under active development. The protocol and APIs are not yet stable. See Status & roadmap below.
What FIPS does
A machine running FIPS becomes a node in the mesh with a self-generated cryptographic identity (a Nostr keypair). There are two equally-supported deployment modes.
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.
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.
Features
- Self-organizing mesh routing. Spanning-tree coordinates with bloom-filter-guided discovery; no global routing tables, no flooding.
- Multi-transport. UDP, TCP, Ethernet, Tor, and Bluetooth (BLE L2CAP) ship today; transports compose on a single mesh and a node may run several at once.
- Two-layer encryption. Noise IK between peers (hop-by-hop) and Noise XK between mesh endpoints (independent end-to-end), with periodic rekey for forward secrecy.
- Nostr-native identity. secp256k1 / schnorr keypairs as node addresses; self-generated, no registration, no central authority.
- IPv6 adapter. A TUN interface maps each remote npub to an
fd00::/8address, so unmodified IPv6 software reaches mesh peers as<npub>.fips. Built-in.fipsDNS resolver, with optional static name mapping via/etc/fips/hosts. - Nostr-mediated discovery and NAT traversal. Peers publish endpoint adverts on public Nostr relays, exchange candidates via NIP-59 gift-wrapped offers and answers, and establish direct paths through NATs using STUN-assisted hole punching.
- LAN gateway. Optional
fips-gatewayservice folds an entire unmodified LAN into the mesh: outbound (LAN clients reach mesh destinations through a DNS-allocated virtual IPv6 pool and nftables NAT) and inbound (LAN-side services exposed to the mesh through 1:1 port forwards). - Per-link metrics. RTT, loss, jitter, and goodput on every hop, plus mesh-size estimation, via the Metrics Measurement Protocol.
- ECN congestion signaling. Hop-by-hop CE-flag relay with RFC 3168 IPv6 marking and transport kernel-drop detection.
- Operator visibility.
fipsctlCLI for control and inspection,fipstopTUI for live status, and a JSON-line control socket on each binary for direct programmatic access. - Reproducible builds with toolchain pinning and
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
Quick start
The shortest path on Debian / Ubuntu:
git clone https://github.com/jmcorgan/fips.git
cd fips
cargo install cargo-deb
cargo deb
sudo dpkg -i target/debian/fips_*.deb
sudo systemctl start fips
This installs the daemon, CLI tools (fipsctl, fipstop), the
optional fips-gateway service, systemd units, and a default
/etc/fips/fips.yaml you can edit before starting.
For macOS, Windows, OpenWrt, the systemd tarball, or a from-source build, see docs/getting-started.md for the full multi-platform installation guide.
To join a live mesh and reach your first peer, follow the new-user tutorial progression starting at docs/tutorials/join-the-test-mesh.md.
Building from source
cargo build --release
Requires Rust 1.85+ (edition 2024). Linux, macOS, and Windows are supported; transport availability varies by platform.
| Transport | Linux | macOS | Windows | OpenWrt |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UDP | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| TCP | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Ethernet | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Tor | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| BLE | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
On Linux, BLE requires BlueZ and libdbus
(sudo apt install bluez libdbus-1-dev on Debian / Ubuntu) and is
gated on a build-script probe — install the dependencies first and
the cargo build line above picks it up. The OpenWrt ipk omits
BLE because libdbus is not available on the target.
Documentation
docs/ is organised by reader purpose:
- Tutorials — hand-held walk-throughs from a fresh install through to a participating mesh node, plus advanced deployments (gateway on OpenWrt, hosting services, ground-up two-device mesh).
- How-to guides — operator recipes for specific tasks: firewall activation, Nostr discovery, Tor onion service, Bluetooth peering, LAN gateway deployment and troubleshooting, MTU diagnostics, host aliases, persistent identity, unprivileged-user setup, UDP buffer tuning.
- Reference —
fips.yamlconfiguration, wire formats, control-socket protocol, CLI references for each binary, security posture matrix, Nostr events catalog, transport statistics inventory. - Design — protocol-level architecture and layer specifications. Start with fips-concepts.md for the framing, then fips-architecture.md for the protocol stack.
If you want to contribute, see CONTRIBUTING.md and testing/README.md.
Examples
- examples/sidecar-nostr-relay/ — Run a strfry Nostr relay reachable exclusively over the FIPS mesh. The relay container shares the FIPS sidecar's network namespace and is isolated from the host network.
- examples/k8s-sidecar/ — Run FIPS as
a Kubernetes Pod sidecar. The sidecar creates
fips0in the Pod's shared network namespace so every other container in the Pod gets mesh access without modification. - examples/wireguard-sidecar-macos/ —
Reach the FIPS mesh from a macOS host through a local Docker
container over a WireGuard tunnel. Only traffic destined for
fd00::/8transits the sidecar; regular internet traffic continues to use the host network.
Project structure
src/ Rust source: library + fips, fipsctl, fipstop, fips-gateway binaries
docs/ Documentation: tutorials, how-to, reference, design
packaging/ Debian, macOS .pkg, Windows ZIP, OpenWrt ipk, AUR, systemd tarball
examples/ Deployment examples (Nostr relay, K8s sidecar, macOS WireGuard)
testing/ Docker-based integration test harnesses + chaos simulation
Status & roadmap
FIPS is at v0.3.0-dev. The core protocol works end-to-end over
UDP, TCP, Ethernet, Tor, and Bluetooth on a small live mesh of
deployed nodes. v0.3.0 is the testing-and-polishing track for
everything accumulated since v0.2.0 on the v0.2.x wire format —
Nostr-mediated peer discovery, UDP NAT traversal, peer ACL, the
DNS-responder fix, packaging hardening, and discovery rate-limit
retuning. New wire-format work is staged on the next branch for
the post-v0.3.0 release line.
What works today
- Spanning-tree construction with greedy coordinate routing.
- Bloom-filter-guided destination discovery (no flooding, single-path with retry).
- Two-layer Noise encryption (IK at the link, XK at the session) with periodic hitless rekey for forward secrecy at both layers.
- Persistent or ephemeral node identity with key-file management.
- IPv6 TUN adapter with built-in
.fipsDNS resolver and multi-backend auto-configuration (systemd dns-delegate, systemd-resolved, dnsmasq, NetworkManager). - Static hostname mapping (
/etc/fips/hosts) with auto-reload. - Per-link metrics (RTT, loss, jitter, goodput) and mesh size estimation.
- ECN congestion signaling (hop-by-hop CE relay, IPv6 CE marking, kernel-drop detection).
- UDP, TCP, Ethernet, Tor, and BLE transports (BLE via L2CAP CoC with per-link MTU negotiation).
- Nostr-mediated overlay endpoint discovery and UDP hole punching for NAT traversal.
- LAN gateway (
fips-gateway) with both outbound (LAN-to-mesh) and inbound (mesh-to-LAN port-forwarding) modes. - Peer ACL: per-npub allow / deny admission control at the link
layer; opt-in mesh-firewall baseline at
fips0ingress. - Runtime inspection and peer management via
fipsctlandfipstop. - Reproducible builds with toolchain pinning and
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. - Linux (Debian, systemd tarball, OpenWrt, AUR), macOS (
.pkg), and Windows (ZIP, service) packaging. - Docker-based integration and chaos testing.
Near-term priorities
- Native API for FIPS-aware applications (npub:port addressing without the IPv6-shim path).
- Security audit of the cryptographic protocols.
Longer-term
- Mobile platform support.
- Bandwidth-aware routing and QoS.
- Protocol stability and a versioned wire format.
- Published crate.
License
MIT — see LICENSE.