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Johnathan Corgan
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Everything the release needs except the version number, which stays at 0.5.0-dev until the tag. The changelog entry covers only the work that is new on this line. The point release's forty-six entries arrived under their own heading with the forward merge and are left alone; the twenty that remained are regrouped by topic and eight more added for changes no entry covered. Three of those eight matter to someone upgrading. Five root modules and four re-exports left the public library surface and Node::connections narrowed, none of it recorded anywhere; the entry names what to use instead and distinguishes the removed connection-phase enum from the Noise type of the same name, which is a different type that still exists. Tracing targets moved, so an existing RUST_LOG filter stops matching rather than erroring. And the handshake resend interval key no longer governs the first resend, which is now a constant, though it still governs later ones. Seven more entries cover the work that landed after the first content pass was written: the experimental native datagram API, the fipsctl probe diagnostic, per-instance transport addressing, the app-owned UDP socket seam, and the connect, disconnect and path-MTU fixes. The four bug fixes among them all reach the deployed line, so the release notes no longer claim this release carries exactly one fix for a shipped bug; it carries four. There is no security section, because after the split every security entry belongs to the point release. The release notes say so plainly rather than leaving a reader upgrading across both releases to conclude this one carries no security work. The notes are organized by audience, since the release spans OpenWrt routers, embedders, FreeBSD, and the existing platforms, and a single list serves none of them. The native datagram API is given a section of its own rather than folded into the embedding seam: it is a client-facing API rather than a way to host a node, and its one rule with no Berkeley-socket counterpart, that the v1 wire carries no half-close, needs to be somewhere a client author will read it. FreeBSD is advertised as supported on x86_64 only, stated wherever the platform appears. Android is advertised as an embedding seam and not as a supported platform: a compile-gated library surface with no artifact and no host application guide. The configuration table rename is carried through every shipped file that taught the old spelling: nine documentation files, the OpenWrt sample config and a test generator, twenty-two sites in all. Guides written this same cycle were among them, which is how the omission was found. The documentation that arrived with the native API was checked for the same omission and was already clean. The compatibility tests keep the old spelling deliberately, since they exist to test the fold. The changelog section is the fold of master's [Unreleased], not a snapshot of it. An earlier version of this commit took a copy that then drifted, so each section ended up holding a bullet the other did not and re-folding them would have picked a winner silently. Both causes were fixed on master instead — the NixOS module had never been recorded there, and the pre-release batch of fixes was new — so [Unreleased] is a strict superset and this is a copy rather than a merge. [0.5.0] carries all forty-six bullets byte for byte, [Unreleased] is empty, and [0.4.2] is untouched, checked by hashing it against master's copy. The BLE work landed after the content pass and gets one summary entry in the changelog and one section in the release notes rather than nine bullets: the ble_available gate replacing target_os = "linux", packet-boundary recovery for stream-oriented backends, peer recognition by node identity instead of a rotating link address, the L2CAP PSM moving into the backend seam and onto the advertisement, the embedder-supplied Android radio, bounded probe retry, and inbound handshakes moved off the accept loop. The two release-notes copies no longer share their link paths. Relative links resolve from one directory only, so the seven written for docs/releases/ all 404ed from the root copy. The root copy now uses paths from the repository root and the versioned copy keeps the ../ form; both sets were resolved against the tree. The same two links are broken the same way in the v0.4.0 through v0.4.2 notes, left as shipped history. The contributor tallies are re-derived against maint..HEAD rather than adjusted: twenty commits from outside the project and 171 from me, with Arjen at fifteen and fr34aky at two. An earlier count of twelve and 138 was carried from a measurement taken three days before this content was written, and the BLE branch widened the gap after it. Arjen's NixOS flake module, the UDP sin6_scope_id fix and most of the BLE rework were uncredited, as was fr34aky's L2CAP PSM seam. They want one last re-derive at tag time if anything lands before the tag. A sweep of all 99 tracked markdown files against the tree corrected fifty-three of them. Four told the reader to run a build.sh that does not exist; the only harness builder is testing/scripts/build.sh. The BLE build prerequisites were described as optional on the strength of a probe that build.rs does not perform, and bluez was named a build prerequisite when libdbus-sys asks only for libdbus-1-dev and pkg-config and bluez is the runtime daemon. Link cost is the primary sort key in next-hop ranking, not reserved for future use; Ethernet runs on macOS as well as Linux; the BLE MTU is the L2CAP CoC MTU rather than a negotiated ATT_MTU; effective Ethernet MTU is 1497; the LAN discovery subsystem is src/mdns and eight citations still named a src/discovery that never existed here. The connectivity states in three tutorials were invented, and their jq filters matched nothing including healthy peers. One command filtered on a literal fd97: address prefix, which only the first byte of fixes, so it returned empty for all but one reader in 256 and every later step using the variable failed silently. transports.tor.advertise_on_nostr was undocumented despite being validated against node.rendezvous.nostr.enabled. The transport design document gains the BLE section it never had, written from the source: the backend cascade and its compile_error tripwire, the platform gate, the PSM advertisement wire layout and the byte budget that forces a 16-bit service-data key, and the probe and admission bounds. Three source files carried the same class of staleness and are corrected with the documentation: the OpenWrt ipk usage line and Makefile error text both named a packaging/openwrt that does not exist, and chaos.sh parsed --subnet without listing it. Folded in with the content commit, having been prepared alongside it: The three GitHub Action pins that had gone stale. Every third-party action is pinned to a commit SHA, nothing reports that a pin has aged, and re-resolving all ten against their tags found dorny/test-reporter@v2, taiki-e/install-action@v2 and vmactions/freebsd-vm@v1 had moved. The three install-action@nextest references stay unpinned, since that action reads the tool to install from the ref name. check-action-pins.sh passes at 75 references and all nine workflow files parse. The lockfile refresh, which is the mutating half of the dependency sweep. Thirty-six packages move to their latest semver-compatible versions and every one is transitive; nothing declared in Cargo.toml changes version. No advisory forces any of them. It was taken before the validation battery, because a gate run against a lockfile that later moves proves nothing about what ships. The sha2 0.10 to 0.11, hkdf 0.12 to 0.13 and bech32 0.11 to 0.12 majors, three of the four deferred at v0.4.0 for change surface rather than security. All three land with no source change. sha2 and hkdf must move together, since both depend on digest 0.11, and neither changes an algorithm. That matters because the chaining-key KDF in the Noise handshake is built on Hkdf::<Sha256>, where an output change would be a wire break rather than a compile error; no known-answer vectors exist for that path, so the wire-compatibility gate is what covers it. secp256k1 0.31 is deliberately absent, since nostr's own requirement would leave two copies of the ECC library in the tree. The README support matrix, rebuilt as one feature table broken out by Linux variety. A single Linux column hid that Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and NixOS are one glibc build differing in packaging, that OpenWrt is musl and drops BLE, and that Android is not a daemon platform. Transport rows sort by how many platforms carry them. A Native API row reads its platform set from the cfg gates. The installer row becomes a package format row naming the artifact, and only the .deb is exercised per release. Four changelog and release-note gaps the BLE re-walk found: a Bluetooth LE bullet stranded inside the released 0.4.2 section, a missing Fixed entry for the scan and probe loop counting a pool-refused connection as an established link, the unnamed embedder call that installs an application-owned radio, and the fact that stopping the transport now stops scanning as well as advertising. Three release-document gaps found walking the unsurveyed commits: the UDP reuse-flag fix stated in the direction opposite to the one it was made, with the silent second-daemon bind it prevents left unsaid; the corrected native-API socket paragraph carried into both release-note copies, which still named SOCK_SEQPACKET on FreeBSD and two kernels where three are handled; and the coordinate-cache hardening, which shipped with no text anywhere despite adding four operator-visible status fields. That last entry states plainly that the checks are mitigations and not a closure, since the coordinate is still not authenticated. Also folded in, the documentation pass that followed the content commit: A stage-pipeline diagram for the probe, embedded in the fipsctl reference under the five-stage list. It draws the five stages left to right with each stage's failure reasons below it, and the bypass that skips both lookup stages when the coordinates are cached or the target is a direct peer. Its branches come from the probe state machine rather than from the report, so the path stage is drawn as the one failure that does not stop the probe. A rewrite of the README's "What FIPS does" section. It now opens with what a machine running FIPS gets, rather than with the two deployment modes, and gives the self-organizing and permissionless property its own paragraph since it holds for both modes. A regrouping of the README's feature list into the mesh, getting traffic onto it, and running a node, with a bullet added for the native datagram API, which had none despite sitting in the support matrix. The Quick start now leads with the released packages rather than a source build. It also fixes a real defect: the package enables fips.service and fips-dns.service and starts neither on a fresh install, so .fips name resolution was silently dead until the next reboot and neither page said to start the service. A rewrite of the release notes. They opened with seven subsections of upgrade caveats and reached the first feature two hundred lines in; they now open with a summary of the release and elaborate below it in the same order. Android is stated as supported through an embedded crate rather than as a standalone daemon, consistently across all three documents. The OpenWrt pair is corrected: it is 802.11s between routers with FIPS supplying encryption, authentication and routing, plus a convention of an open !FIPS SSID a client joins over WiFi, not meshing over a router's own radios. The probe's path output is described as the least-common-ancestor walk, which is the worst-case fallback route rather than the route a packet takes. Detail that did not change what a reader does was cut from the notes and kept in the changelog.
FIPS Sidecar
Run FIPS as a network sidecar container, providing mesh-only network
access to a companion application. The app container shares the FIPS
container's network namespace and is isolated from the host network by
iptables rules — it can only communicate over the FIPS mesh via fips0.
This is the recommended deployment pattern when connecting to an untrusted public FIPS mesh: the application never touches the underlying transport network, so it cannot leak traffic outside the mesh or be reached by non-mesh peers.
Quick Start
# From the repo root:
./testing/scripts/build.sh
cd testing/sidecar
docker compose up -d
# Verify the sidecar is running:
docker compose exec fips fipsctl show status
# Verify the app container can see the FIPS interface:
docker compose exec app ip addr show fips0
With the default .env, FIPS starts with no peers. See
Run with peers to connect to an existing mesh.
Security Model
The sidecar pattern enforces strict network isolation on the app container:
- No IPv4 access: iptables blocks all eth0 traffic except FIPS UDP transport (port 2121). The app container cannot reach the Docker bridge, the host network, or any IPv4 address.
- No IPv6 on eth0: ip6tables blocks all IPv6 traffic on eth0. The app container cannot use link-local or any Docker-assigned IPv6 addresses.
- FIPS mesh only: The only routable network path is through
fips0(fd00::/8). All application traffic traverses the FIPS mesh with end-to-end encryption. - Loopback allowed:
lois unrestricted for inter-process communication within the shared namespace.
This means the app container treats the FIPS mesh as its sole network. Even if the application is compromised, it cannot bypass the mesh or communicate with the transport layer directly.
Architecture
┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Shared network namespace │
│ │
│ ┌───────────────┐ ┌──────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ fips-sidecar │ │ fips-app │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │
│ │ fips daemon │ │ your workload │ │
│ │ fipsctl │ │ │ │
│ │ dnsmasq │ │ │ │
│ └───────────────┘ └──────────────────────────┘ │
│ │
│ Interfaces: │
│ lo — loopback (unrestricted) │
│ eth0 — Docker bridge (iptables: FIPS only) │
│ fips0 — FIPS TUN (fd00::/8, unrestricted) │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
The FIPS sidecar owns the network namespace and creates the fips0 TUN
interface. The app container joins via network_mode: service:fips and
sees the same interfaces. The entrypoint script applies iptables rules
before launching the FIPS daemon:
IPv4 rules (iptables):
- ACCEPT on
lo(both directions) - ACCEPT UDP sport/dport 2121 on
eth0(FIPS transport) - DROP everything else on
eth0
IPv6 rules (ip6tables):
- ACCEPT on
lo(both directions) - ACCEPT on
fips0(both directions) - DROP everything on
eth0
DNS Resolution
DNS inside the container is handled by dnsmasq (127.0.0.1:53):
.fipsqueries are forwarded to the FIPS daemon's built-in DNS resolver (127.0.0.1:5354), which resolves npub-based names tofd00::/8addresses- All other queries are forwarded to Docker's embedded DNS (127.0.0.11)
The resolv.conf mount points the container's resolver at 127.0.0.1,
where dnsmasq handles the routing.
Build
./testing/scripts/build.sh
Run it from the repo root. It compiles FIPS for Linux, copies the binaries
into the Docker context, and builds the sidecar and app images.
Cross-compilation from macOS is supported via cargo-zigbuild.
Run with Peers
To connect the sidecar to an existing mesh, provide the peer's npub and transport address:
FIPS_PEER_NPUB=npub1... \
FIPS_PEER_ADDR=203.0.113.10:2121 \
FIPS_PEER_ALIAS=gateway \
docker compose up -d
Verify the peer link:
docker compose exec fips fipsctl show peers
docker compose exec fips fipsctl show links
Verify Connectivity and Isolation
From the app container:
# Ping a mesh node by npub (resolves via .fips DNS):
docker compose exec app ping6 -c3 npub1sjlh2c3x9w7kjsqg2ay080n2lff2uvt325vpan33ke34rn8l5jcqawh57m.fips
# Fetch a web page from a mesh node over FIPS:
docker compose exec app curl -6 "http://[fd69:e08d:65cc:3a6b:9c2c:2ac4:bd40:5e4b]:8000/"
# Docker bridge is blocked — this should fail:
docker compose exec app ping -c1 -W2 172.20.0.13
# Loopback is allowed:
docker compose exec app ping -c1 127.0.0.1
Environment Variables
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
FIPS_NSEC |
(required) | Node secret key (hex or nsec1 bech32) |
FIPS_PEER_NPUB |
(empty) | Peer's npub to connect to |
FIPS_PEER_ADDR |
(empty) | Peer's transport address (e.g. 203.0.113.10:2121) |
FIPS_PEER_ALIAS |
peer |
Human-readable peer name |
FIPS_UDP_BIND |
0.0.0.0:2121 |
UDP transport bind address |
FIPS_TUN_MTU |
1280 |
TUN interface MTU |
FIPS_NETWORK |
fips-sidecar-net |
Docker network name (set to join external network) |
FIPS_SUBNET |
172.20.1.0/24 |
Docker network subnet |
FIPS_IPV4 |
172.20.1.20 |
Sidecar's IPv4 address on the Docker network |
RUST_LOG |
info |
FIPS log level |
Troubleshooting
FIPS_NSEC is required — The FIPS_NSEC environment variable is not
set. Either add it to .env or pass it on the command line. Generate a
random key with: openssl rand -hex 32
fips0 interface not appearing — The FIPS daemon needs /dev/net/tun
and NET_ADMIN capability. Check that the compose file includes both:
cap_add:
- NET_ADMIN
devices:
- /dev/net/tun:/dev/net/tun
No peer connection established — Verify the peer address is reachable
from the sidecar container (docker compose exec fips ping -c1 <peer-ip>).
If joining an external Docker network, ensure FIPS_NETWORK, FIPS_SUBNET,
and FIPS_IPV4 match the target network. Check logs with
docker compose logs fips.
DNS not resolving .fips names — Verify dnsmasq is running:
docker compose exec fips pgrep dnsmasq. Check that resolv.conf is
mounted (should contain nameserver 127.0.0.1). Verify the FIPS DNS
resolver is listening: docker compose exec fips dig @127.0.0.1 -p 5354 <npub>.fips AAAA.
iptables errors in entrypoint — The sidecar container requires
NET_ADMIN capability for iptables. Without it, the isolation rules
cannot be applied and the entrypoint will fail.
Production Considerations
Secrets management: The default .env contains a hardcoded nsec for
development. In production, use Docker secrets, a vault, or inject the key
via a secure CI/CD pipeline. Never commit production keys to version control.
Logging: Set RUST_LOG to control log verbosity (debug, info,
warn, error). For production, configure the Docker logging driver with
size limits:
logging:
driver: json-file
options:
max-size: "10m"
max-file: "3"
Resource limits: Add memory and CPU constraints in the compose file:
deploy:
resources:
limits:
memory: 256M
cpus: "0.5"
Multiple peers: The entrypoint supports a single peer via environment
variables. For multiple peers, mount a custom fips.yaml directly:
volumes:
- ./my-fips.yaml:/etc/fips/fips.yaml:ro
Health checks: Add a Docker health check using fipsctl:
healthcheck:
test: ["CMD", "fipsctl", "show", "status"]
interval: 30s
timeout: 5s
retries: 3