Johnathan Corgan
aca89bbab8
The msg1 rate limiter ran one bucket for everything, so a rekey or restart msg1 from an established peer competed for admission with strangers. Under inbound pressure the maintenance traffic lost, and an established session could not re-handshake until the stranger flood eased. Classify the source before the rate-limit decision and give established links their own bucket. Classification costs two map lookups and no crypto, so it runs first. The predicate cannot be the one the master line uses. There, IK has learned the peer identity by the time msg1 is handled, so a hit in the address-to-link map is enough to prove an established peer. Under XX no identity is known at msg1, and an in-flight handshake populates that map before the peer is promoted, so the same predicate would let a stranger draw on the established bucket for the whole life of its handshake. This version requires a promoted peer, which is the property actually being asserted. Two tests cover the difference and both fail if the predicate is replaced with the master-line one: a pending inbound stranger must keep drawing on the stranger bucket for its whole lifetime, and the established gate must not admit on a bare map hit. The four handshake reject arms that leak a session index are untouched; every hunk here sits at or above the end of the msg1 handler.
FIPS Documentation
FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System) is a self-organizing encrypted mesh network built on Nostr identities, capable of operating over arbitrary transports — local networks, the public internet, Tor, Bluetooth, or point-to-point links — without central infrastructure.
With FIPS, your machine becomes a node in the mesh with a self-generated cryptographic identity. There are two ways to deploy it.
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.
From the 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.
New to FIPS? Start with the Getting Started guide.
Documentation Sections
Tutorials
If you are starting from scratch and want a guided path to a working mesh, go here.
How-To Guides
If you have a specific task in mind — enabling a feature, deploying a component, diagnosing a problem — go here.
Reference
If you need to look up wire formats, configuration keys, command flags, or counter inventories, go here.
Design
If you want to understand how the mesh self-organizes, why FIPS makes the choices it does, or how the pieces fit together, go here.