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Jeff GardnerandJohnathan Corgan
5e3892edb8
On any Unix host that falls through to the last-resort /tmp/fips-control.sock path, bind chowned the socket's parent unconditionally, and that parent is /tmp itself. A root daemon on such a host changed the group ownership of /tmp to fips at every start. The mode was left alone, so nothing lost access, but the ownership was ours to take and never ours to keep. macOS has no /run, so the resolver's /var/run/fips arm only fired when the directory already existed, and nothing on macOS creates it: /var/run is cleared at boot and the shipped LaunchDaemon has no equivalent of the FreeBSD rc.d fips_precmd. The packaged macOS daemon has therefore been landing on /tmp/fips-control.sock every boot. A privileged macOS process now selects /var/run/fips before its leaf exists, so that bind creates it, and the clients follow once it is there. The two halves are the same change: the bootstrap only works if bind may create and secure that directory, and the /tmp chown had to go before bind could be trusted to. Which parent bind may secure is keyed on the directory's identity rather than on which call created it. is_managed_socket_parent matches only the resolver's own candidates: /run/fips, /var/run/fips where the platform policy consults it, and $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/fips. Keying it on creation alone was tried first and regressed Linux, because systemd removes RuntimeDirectory=fips when the unit stops and recreates it as root:root on the next start, while the tmpfiles fragment that sets the fips group runs only at install and boot. The daemon's own chown was what repaired that at every bind, so a fips-group operator lost fipsctl after the first restart following a boot. Matching on identity restores it and still leaves /tmp, and any operator-configured directory, alone. The resolver is split into a pure core taking the policy, the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR value and an is_dir predicate, so the macOS and Linux policies are both exercised deterministically on a Linux runner with no environment mutation. The deb-install suite gains the end-to-end half: after a service restart it asserts /run/fips is 750 root:fips and that a real non-root fips-group user can reach the socket, which is the property an operator actually has. Also corrects a configuration.md paragraph claiming the daemon and the clients use different fallback orders, which stopped being true when the resolver order disagreement was resolved and the prose was never updated.
Reference
Information-oriented technical descriptions for lookup on demand. Reference content describes what is: wire formats, configuration keys, command-line flags, control-socket commands, default values, file paths, exit codes. It is consulted, not read end-to-end.
Reference is austere by design: minimal narrative, no opinions, no guidance on when to use a feature. The "why" lives in design/; the "how do I accomplish X" lives in how-to/.
Available Reference
| Document | Scope |
|---|---|
| wire-formats.md | All FMP and FSP message byte layouts, encapsulation walkthrough |
| configuration.md | Full YAML configuration reference for the daemon and gateway |
| security.md | nftables baseline, peer ACL, cryptographic primitives, rekey defaults, threat-resistance matrix |
| nostr-events.md | Kind 37195 advert, Kind 21059 traversal signaling, Kind 10050 inbox relays |
| transports.md | Per-transport statistics counter inventory |
| control-socket.md | Line-delimited JSON control protocol for the daemon and gateway |
| cli-fips.md | fips daemon CLI: options, exit codes, environment, files |
| cli-fipsctl.md | fipsctl control-client: subcommands, options, exit codes |
| cli-fipstop.md | fipstop live-status TUI: tabs, keybindings |
| cli-fips-gateway.md | fips-gateway service CLI: options, exit codes, files |