Johnathan Corgan
6305287491
The Unreleased block is rebuilt from a walk of all 117 commits since v0.4.1 rather than from what the block already held, which is how six gaps surfaced. Two of them were whole missing effects. The identity write path discarded six results, so a node configured for a persistent identity could fall through to an ephemeral one in silence and change its npub, routing address and mesh address on every start. And the OpenWrt zig download verification was described only in part. Chronological fix sequences are collapsed to their net state, and fixes for bugs introduced and closed inside this cycle are folded away rather than described, since no user ever saw them. Sixty-one CI and harness commits are summarized rather than left out, because they change what a contributor running the local pipeline sees. The flat lists are reorganized into subsections by area. Everything from 0.4.1 down is untouched. Two entries carry effects no commit message mentioned. Clearing every copy of private key material added Drop to four public types, so their fields can no longer be moved out, which is source-breaking for anyone using the crate as a library and is reachable through node.identity on the public config. And the responder-side rekey narrowing covers five call sites, not the four the original entry claimed; the ack initiator arm is the one that deliberately still abandons the whole rekey. The four test-harness fixes landed since then get entries under the CI and test-harness heading, written as what a contributor sees: a failing harness that names the condition instead of exiting bare, dns-resolver scenarios that stop burning the full boot timeout on a container that booted correctly, and a chaos harness that checks its teardown and node stops actually happened rather than assuming it. Four documentation defects are fixed alongside. Two sent macOS readers to paths that do not exist there: the configuration reference stated the highest-priority system config path as /etc/fips/fips.yaml unconditionally, where the macOS package installs under /usr/local/etc/fips/, and the persistent-identity tutorial had the same problem throughout with nothing saying its paths were Linux ones. It now opens with the substitution table, notes that the daemon derives the key directory from whichever config it loaded, and points at the migration recipe for a host already carrying keys at the old path. The other two described test coverage that does not exist. The testing readme claimed twenty chaos scenarios where ten exist, and the chaos readme documented three that are in neither runner nor tree. Both scenario tables are rewritten from the files, and bloom-storm is described honestly as retired from both runners with no replacement, which is a coverage gap rather than a migration to other tests. The readme's Rust badge asserted 1.85+ while rust-toolchain.toml pins something else, so the badge no longer carries a version and the toolchain file is the only place that states one.
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.