fips/testing/README.md

FIPS Testing

Integration and simulation test harnesses for FIPS, using Docker containers running the full protocol stack.

Test Harnesses

static/ -- Static Docker Network

Fixed topologies with manual scripts for building, config generation, connectivity tests (ping, iperf), and network impairment (netem). Useful for deterministic debugging and validating specific topology configurations.

Topology	Nodes	Transport	Description
mesh	5	UDP	Sparse mesh, 6 links, multi-hop
chain	5	UDP	Linear chain, max 4-hop paths
rekey	5	UDP	Rekey integration test topology

tor/ -- Tor Transport Integration

End-to-end Tor transport testing with Docker containers running real Tor daemons. Requires internet access for Tor bootstrapping.

Scenario	Description
socks5-outbound	Outbound SOCKS5 connections through Tor to clearnet peer
directory-mode	Inbound via HiddenServiceDir onion service (co-located)

nat/ -- NAT Traversal Lab

Real Docker NAT traversal tests for the Nostr/STUN bootstrap path, using router containers with iptables-based NAT, a local Nostr relay, and a local STUN responder.

Scenario	Description
cone	Two NATed peers establish a UDP traversal path
symmetric	UDP traversal fails under symmetric NAT, TCP fallback wins
lan	Peers on the same LAN prefer local addresses over reflexive

chaos/ -- Stochastic Simulation

Automated network testing with configurable node counts, topology algorithms (random geometric, Erdos-Renyi, chain, explicit), and fault injection (netem mutation, link flaps, traffic generation, node churn). 10 scenarios covering general stress and node churn, discovery over sparse topologies, spanning-tree and bloom-propagation regression, transport-specific validation (UDP, TCP, Ethernet), and ECN/congestion testing. Scenarios are defined in YAML and executed via a Python harness that manages the full lifecycle: topology generation, Docker orchestration, fault scheduling, log collection, and analysis.

interop/ -- Mixed-Version Interop Harness

On-demand harness that runs an N-node full mesh from a node-spec where each node can run a different build of the FIPS daemon, then attributes every FMP/FSP/rekey/connectivity failure to a specific version pair (same-version vs MIXED). Used to catch interop regressions between builds, not as a per-commit CI gate; not part of ci-local.sh.

mesh-lab/ -- Mesh Reliability Lab

On-demand harness that runs a chosen integration suite N times under a configurable host-pressure profile (idle / light / github-runner- equivalent / heavy via stress-ng), per-container netem impairment, and optional trace-level RUST_LOG, capturing per-rep diagnostics and a mechanism-match summary across the run. Used for statistical reliability characterization of known flake classes under calibrated stress, not as a per-commit gate; not part of ci-local.sh.

sidecar/ -- Network Sidecar Isolation

FIPS running as a sidecar container that owns the network namespace of a companion application container, with iptables/ip6tables rules confining the app to the mesh. scripts/test-sidecar.sh boots a three-node chain of such pairs and asserts both connectivity and isolation.

firewall/ -- nftables Baseline

End-to-end exercise of the production fips0 nftables baseline at packaging/common/fips.nft, covering the default-deny, conntrack and drop-in semantics.

acl-allowlist/ -- Peer ACL Enforcement

Six nodes with per-node allowlist files mounted at the runtime ACL paths, exercising insiders, outsiders and allowed remotes at once to check which peer pairs are admitted and which are rejected.

native-api/ -- Native Datagram API

Checks the experimental native datagram API: a client process opens a flow to a remote pubkey over a Unix socket, receives a file descriptor, and exchanges datagrams on it with no TUN device and no IPv6 emulation.

dns-resolver/ -- fips-dns-setup Backends

Runs fips-dns-setup against each supported Linux resolver backend in systemd containers, verifying backend detection, generated config and teardown, plus an end-to-end scenario that resolves a .fips name through the configured backend. The end-to-end scenarios run the binaries from a Debian package: --deb PATH supplies one, and without it the suite builds one through packaging/debian/build-deb-container.sh.

deb-install/ -- Debian Package Install

Installs the built .deb in systemd containers for each target distro and verifies unit enablement, conffile placement and end-to-end .fips resolution as a user would meet it. GitHub CI also installs the arm64 package on ubuntu22 on an arm64 runner, a leg the local run cannot have and the parity check reports as GitHub-only.

boringtun/ -- WireGuard Throughput Baseline

Two userspace WireGuard peers running Cloudflare BoringTun, measured with iperf3, as a comparison baseline for FIPS tunnel throughput.

ble/ -- BLE L2CAP Spike

Standalone cargo project (ble_spike) that validates the bluer API assumptions behind the BleIo trait against real adapters on two machines. Not a Docker harness.

Running CI locally (ci-local.sh)

ci-local.sh runs the full local CI pipeline — build, clippy, unit tests, and the integration suites (including the chaos scenarios) — mirroring the GitHub ci.yml integration matrices. Run ./ci-local.sh --help for the full option list and --list for the available suites. Every run starts with a parity check that verifies the local suite set covers the same work as the GitHub matrix, per scenario for chaos and per distro for deb-install, across every job that carries a matrix; a divergence fails the run. GitHub runs the same check as its own ci-parity job. --check-parity runs it alone (see check-ci-parity.sh).

Per-run isolation and the FIPS_CI_RUN_ID override

Every invocation derives a run id and scopes all of its Docker resources to it, so two simultaneous runs on the same host (for example, one per git worktree, or an operator testing by hand while CI is in flight) never collide:

• Compose projects are named fipsci_<run-id>_<suite>, so container, network, and volume names are all prefixed per run.
• Build images are tagged fips-test:<run-id> and fips-test-app:<run-id>, exported as FIPS_TEST_IMAGE / FIPS_TEST_APP_IMAGE, and every compose file and suite script reads those. The run does not write fips-test:latest at all: a bridge back to that shared mutable name would let a consumer that had been missed keep working while resolving whichever concurrent run wrote the tag last. :latest stays the hand-build name, produced by testing/scripts/build.sh, and remains the default every consumer falls back to when the variables are unset.
• The build context is a per-run copy at testing/docker-<run-id>/, exported as FIPS_BUILD_CONTEXT. It is absolute because compose resolves a relative build context against the compose file's own directory rather than the working directory. testing/docker/ is the hand-run context and a CI run does not write to it. Without this, two runs race on the contents of one directory and either can build a correctly-per-run-tagged image from the other's binaries.
• Each parallel chaos child gets a unique, non-overlapping /24 in 10.30.x (via the sim --subnet override). 10.30.x sits outside Docker's default address pool and the fixed-subnet suites' 172.x ranges, so neither a sibling chaos child nor an auto-assigned network can swallow a pinned subnet.

By default the run id is <short-git-sha>-<random> — the SHA portion records what code a container is testing, the random suffix keeps simultaneous runs of the same SHA disjoint. Override it for a reproducible, attach-by-name debug session:

FIPS_CI_RUN_ID=mydebug ./ci-local.sh --only static-mesh
# containers are named fipsci_mydebug_static_fips-node-a, etc.

Preemption-safety and exit codes

ci-local.sh is safe to cancel mid-run. A signal trap tears down every compose project the run started (not just the current suite) and reaps any in-flight parallel chaos children, bounded by a timeout so a stuck compose down cannot wedge the trap. Exit codes distinguish a cancelled run from a failing one:

Code	Meaning
0	all stages passed
1	one or more stages failed
130	interrupted by SIGINT — cancelled, not a failure
143	terminated by SIGTERM — cancelled, not a failure

A preempting CI worker (the push-triggered, CI-gated build pipeline that kills an in-flight run when a newer same-branch tip arrives) maps 130/143 → cancelled (discard, do not record a failing commit), 0 → green, any other non-zero → red.

Cleaning up leftover resources

Every CI-created container, network, and volume carries the label com.corganlabs.fips-ci=1. If a run is hard-killed (SIGKILL, OOM, crash) and leaves resources behind, reap them with:

./ci-local.sh --reap        # or: ./ci-cleanup.sh

ci-cleanup.sh force-removes everything bearing the CI label or a fipsci_ compose-project prefix; it is safe to run when there is nothing to reap and safe to run repeatedly. Pass --project-prefix to scope the sweep to a single run.

It also removes the chaos simulation's leftover host-namespace veth interfaces (vh…a/vh…b), the one resource it touches that is neither a docker object nor labelled — a host interface can carry neither a label nor a compose project, so it is matched by name shape alone. That makes the reach here asymmetric with everything above, and worth stating plainly:

• A bare chaos.sh run's containers survive a broad reap. Its compose project is not fipsci_, and the simulation labels only the network, not the services.
• A bare chaos.sh run's veth interfaces do not. An unscoped reap deletes them while they are in use, severing the Ethernet links of a live simulation and leaving its containers running.

So do not run a broad --reap while a bare simulation is up. Scope the interface sweep with --veth-suffixes (which is what ci-local.sh's own teardown passes) or wait for the simulation to finish. --project-prefix does not help here: it scopes only the compose-project sweep.