Johnathan Corgan
6a564e26ac
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.
12 KiB
Set Up the Open FIPS Access SSID (OpenWrt)
Give phones and laptops a way in: every FIPS router broadcasts the
same open SSID — !FIPS — from its access radio. Same SSID + unique
BSSIDs is one standard ESS, so a client saves the network once and
roams between all FIPS routers natively, with no per-router setup and
no shared credentials (the Freifunk model). The leading ! sorts the
network to the top of alphabetically ordered pickers (iOS, desktop
OSes — Android sorts by signal strength) and is part of the name:
SSIDs match byte-for-byte or not at all. The radio layer provides
nothing but open L2 to the nearest router; FIPS provides everything
else: encryption and authentication (Noise IK), discovery
(mDNS/Ethernet beacons), and mobility (the overlay identity survives
roaming, so no 802.11r or L2 tricks are needed).
This is the access layer — how clients reach FIPS routers. For the
router-to-router backhaul, see
set-up-80211s-mesh-backhaul.md.
For all transports.ethernet.* configuration keys, see
../reference/configuration.md.
Why open, why this addressing
Three deliberate choices distinguish this from a stock guest network:
encryption none— the SSID is open on purpose, and it must be. Clients key a saved network on SSID plus security type: if one router used a PSK and another OWE, the sameFIPSname would be three different saved networks and roaming would break. Open is the only security type that needs zero provisioning, and OWE is left out for now for exactly this uniformity reason (OWE-transition mode is inconsistent across client vendors). Every FIPS peer link is already authenticated and encrypted by the Noise IK handshake. A stranger can associate and form a FIPS peer link — that is the point of open access; the handshake authenticates each link (no impersonation, no MITM) but does not gate who may peer, and admission is open up to the daemon's max-peers cap. What confines a hostile peer is the isolatedfips_apzone (no path to br-lan or the WAN — see below), not the handshake. What you concede: any nearby device can reach the FIPS overlay surface (handshake, discovery, lookup, routing) and peer with the router; L2 metadata is visible in the air; a hostile radio can burn airtime — all inherent to an open radio link.- DHCPv4 from a fixed subnet, plus IPv6 router advertisements.
dnsmasq leases IPv4 out of
10.21.<N>.0/24(N= the radio index; the prefix echoes FIPS port 2121). The subnet is deliberately identical on every router: a roaming phone keeps its lease across routers, and dnsmasq's authoritative mode (the OpenWrt default, pinned by the helper) ACKs a renew the new router never issued. odhcpd additionally announces a ULA prefix (fd..-range) for stateless SLAAC; DHCPv6 stays off. FIPS itself only needs link-local + mDNS, but Android's provisioning check requires an RA or a DHCP offer and disconnects with neither, and plain laptops expect a real IPv4 address. Works with or without an upstream — nothing here depends on the WAN. The IPv6 side stays per-router and disposable; in all cases the FIPS overlay identity, not the IP, is the mobility anchor. - Isolated interface — its own network and firewall zone, with no
path to
br-lanand no forwarding to the WAN. Inbound traffic is rejected except DHCPv4, ICMPv6 (SLAAC itself), mDNS, and the FIPS transport ports; the raw-Ethernet transport (EtherType 0x2121) is not IP and never traverses the firewall. AP client isolation is on, so clients cannot reach each other at L2 — two FIPS phones on one router still reach each other through the router at the overlay layer.
The "no internet" behavior (expected, one-time acceptance)
The network intentionally provides no internet. On first connect, a phone's validation probe fails and it asks whether to stay on a network without internet access — choose stay connected and don't ask again. That choice is stored per SSID, so accepting it once covers every FIPS router anywhere.
After that, the network is marked "connected, no internet" (unvalidated) and the phone keeps cellular as its default route while staying associated — normal apps never notice the FIPS network exists. FIPS apps bind their sockets to the Wi-Fi network explicitly, so mesh traffic flows over Wi-Fi while everything else uses cellular.
When to use
- Any FIPS router that should serve phones and laptops directly, not just peer with other routers.
- You want clients to roam between FIPS routers with zero per-router or per-site configuration.
It is the complement of the 802.11s backhaul: the backhaul links routers (clients cannot join it), the access SSID admits clients. Both can share a radio, at an airtime cost (see constraints).
Requirements
- OpenWrt 22.03+ with the FIPS package installed (fw4; dnsmasq and odhcpd are part of the default images).
- Any radio — AP mode needs no special driver support.
Step 1 — create the access point(s)
On each router, run the helper once per radio that should serve clients:
fips-ap-setup radio0
This creates an open AP with SSID !FIPS and client isolation, an
isolated network with 10.21.<N>.1/24 and a static ULA /64, a
DHCPv4 + RA dhcp config (dnsmasq leases, SLAAC, no DHCPv6), and a
locked-down fips_ap firewall zone — then reloads the radio. Interfaces are named by radio index: radio0 →
fips-ap0, radio1 → fips-ap1. Pass a second argument to use a
different SSID — but the SSID, like the security type, must be
identical on all routers or clients will treat them as separate
networks and stop roaming.
On dual-band routers, run it for both radios so clients can pick either band:
fips-ap-setup radio0
fips-ap-setup radio1
Channels are free per router. Unlike the mesh backhaul, there is no same-channel constraint — clients scan when they roam — so leave each router on whatever channel suits its RF environment.
Equivalent manual UCI (per radio), if you prefer to see what it does
(fdxx:... stands for a /64 out of the router's ULA prefix):
uci batch <<'EOF'
set wireless.fips_ap_radio0=wifi-iface
set wireless.fips_ap_radio0.device='radio0'
set wireless.fips_ap_radio0.mode='ap'
set wireless.fips_ap_radio0.ssid='!FIPS'
set wireless.fips_ap_radio0.encryption='none'
set wireless.fips_ap_radio0.isolate='1'
set wireless.fips_ap_radio0.ifname='fips-ap0'
set wireless.fips_ap_radio0.network='fips_ap_radio0'
set network.fips_ap_radio0=interface
set network.fips_ap_radio0.proto='static'
set network.fips_ap_radio0.ipaddr='10.21.0.1'
set network.fips_ap_radio0.netmask='255.255.255.0'
set network.fips_ap_radio0.ip6addr='fdxx:xxxx:xxxx:fa00::1/64'
set dhcp.fips_ap_radio0=dhcp
set dhcp.fips_ap_radio0.interface='fips_ap_radio0'
set dhcp.fips_ap_radio0.ra='server'
set dhcp.fips_ap_radio0.ra_default='2'
set dhcp.fips_ap_radio0.dhcpv6='disabled'
set dhcp.fips_ap_radio0.dhcpv4='server'
set dhcp.fips_ap_radio0.start='10'
set dhcp.fips_ap_radio0.limit='200'
EOF
uci commit
wifi reload
plus the fips_ap firewall zone (input/forward REJECT, no
forwardings, ACCEPT rules for DHCPv4/UDP 67, ICMPv6, UDP 5353/2121,
TCP 8443).
Step 2 — check the FIPS transport binding
The fips.yaml shipped in the OpenWrt package carries one transport
entry per access interface, but commented out — so a stock install
that never runs this helper logs no per-boot "interface missing"
warning. fips-ap-setup uncommented the matching apN entry in Step 1,
and also enabled node.rendezvous.lan (the daemon's mDNS/DNS-SD
rendezvous — phone FIPS apps cannot see raw-Ethernet beacons, so mDNS
is how they find the daemon; the switch is daemon-wide and stays on if
you later remove the AP). So there is normally nothing to do here. If
you maintain your own config (or ran the manual UCI above instead of
the helper), make sure both are present and uncommented:
node:
rendezvous:
lan:
enabled: true
transports:
ethernet:
ap0:
interface: "fips-ap0"
listen: true
announce: true
auto_connect: true
accept_connections: true
ap1:
interface: "fips-ap1"
listen: true
announce: true
auto_connect: true
accept_connections: true
listen: was called discovery: before v0.5.0; the old spelling still
parses as an alias, so an existing config keeps working (see
../reference/configuration.md).
Step 3 — restart the daemon (order matters)
/etc/init.d/fips restart
Restart fips after the AP interface is up. A transport whose interface is missing at startup is logged and skipped, not retried — so if the daemon comes up before the radio, the access transport stays dead until the next restart. (An interface that vanishes and returns after startup is recovered automatically; only the missing- at-startup case needs this ordering.)
Verify
L2 and addressing first, with a phone or laptop connected to !FIPS:
iw dev fips-ap0 station dump # one entry per associated client
ip addr show dev fips-ap0 # 10.21.0.1/24 and the fd..::1/64
cat /tmp/dhcp.leases # one lease per connected client
No station entries means a radio problem; an association that drops
after ~30 s usually means the client never got an address — check
logread | grep -e dnsmasq -e odhcpd and that the
dhcp.fips_ap_radio0 section survived
(uci show dhcp | grep fips_ap).
Then the FIPS layer on top, for a client running FIPS:
logread | grep -i beacon # beacons flowing on the new transport
fipsctl show peers # client authenticated and connected
On the phone itself: the network shows "connected, no internet" and stays associated — that is the designed steady state, not an error.
Constraints
- SSID and security type must be uniform across ALL routers. One router with a PSK (or OWE) under the same name splits the ESS into different saved networks and silently breaks roaming. Never "harden" a single router.
- Airtime is shared per radio. An access AP and a mesh backhaul on the same radio share one channel. On dual/tri-band hardware, dedicate a band to the backhaul and serve clients on the others.
- Strangers can associate and peer — by design. Open access means
any nearby device can complete the Noise handshake and become a FIPS
peer (up to the max-peers cap); the handshake authenticates each link,
it does not restrict who joins. They reach only the FIPS overlay
surface — the isolated zone gives no path to br-lan or the WAN. Do not
add forwardings to the
fips_apzone: that would turn the open SSID into a hotspot and hand the isolation away. - Roaming is client-driven. Clients decide when to hop BSSIDs (standard ESS behavior); the IPv4 lease survives the hop (same subnet everywhere), the SLAAC address renumbers, and FIPS sessions ride through because the overlay identity is the anchor. Expect a brief L2 gap during the hop, as on any ESS without 802.11r.
- The
10.21.<N>.0/24convention must hold everywhere. Lease survival depends on every router serving the same subnet from the same radio index — the helper guarantees this; don't hand-pick per-router subnets. Two routers can lease the same address to two different clients; after a roam the conflict is caught (dnsmasq NAKs a renew for an address in use) and the client re-DHCPs. If a laptop is also wired to a LAN that really uses10.21.<N>.0/24, its routing table will conflict — a corner case worth knowing, not designing around: the zone forwards nowhere, so the FIPS side never reaches beyond the router either way.