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Johnathan Corgan 6a564e26ac Prepare the v0.5.0 release content

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.

2026-08-30 10:42:59 +00:00

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Getting Started with FIPS

FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System) is a self-organizing encrypted mesh network built on Nostr identities. Your machine becomes a node in the mesh with a self-generated cryptographic identity, and existing networking software — SSH, web servers, file transfer, anything IPv6-native — runs over the mesh unchanged.

There are two common ways to deploy FIPS, and the rest of this guide and the linked docs branch accordingly:

As an overlay on top of existing IP networks (Ethernet, WiFi, the public internet, Tor), FIPS lets your node reach any other peer regardless of NAT, ISP, or physical location.
From the ground up over non-IP transports — raw Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth — FIPS provides a complete permissionless network without any pre-existing IP infrastructure, ISP, or DNS.

The two paths share a lot of common ground — install, identity, configuration. They diverge mainly in transport setup and the deployment topology you choose.

There is no central server. Any node can run; any pair of running nodes can mesh.

What you'll need

A Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, or Windows host. Linux is the most exercised platform; macOS, FreeBSD, and Windows installers are available. The FreeBSD package is built for x86_64 only.
The pre-built installer for your platform (see the project README's Quick start section for download links), or a source checkout if you want to build the installer yourself.
For the source-build path only: a working Rust toolchain (the version pinned in rust-toolchain.toml is auto-installed by rustup), and the platform-specific build dependencies listed in packaging/README.md.

Install

FIPS is installed by running a binary installer for your platform. The installer drops the daemon and CLI tools into system locations, installs systemd / launchd / rc.d / Windows-service unit files, places a default fips.yaml, and creates the fips system group. There is no cargo install path: the daemon needs more than just binaries copied into place.

You can either build the installer yourself from source, or download a pre-built one from the release distribution. Both paths produce the same installer artifacts and the same post-install state.

From the release distribution

The most direct path. The release distribution carries a per-platform installer:

Debian/Ubuntu: .deb package
Arch Linux: fips AUR package
OpenWrt: .ipk and .apk packages
macOS: .pkg installer
FreeBSD: native .pkg (x86_64 only)
Windows: .zip with service-install scripts
Generic systemd Linux: .tar.gz with an install.sh script

See the project README's Quick start section for download links and per-platform invocations.

FreeBSD

FreeBSD gets a native package built from packaging/freebsd/. It ships fips, fipsctl, fipstop, the fips and fips_dns rc.d services, and .fips DNS integration. fips-gateway is not included: its NAT backend is nftables, which is Linux-only. The Ethernet and BLE transports are unavailable on FreeBSD; UDP, TCP, Tor, and Nym are.

One architecture. The published artifact is fips-<version>-freebsd-amd64.pkg. There is no aarch64 FreeBSD build, so on any other architecture use the from-source path below.

pkg add ./fips-<version>-freebsd-amd64.pkg
cp /usr/local/etc/fips/fips.yaml.sample /usr/local/etc/fips/fips.yaml
sysrc fips_enable=YES fips_dns_enable=YES
service fips start
service fips_dns start
fipsctl show status

FreeBSD differs from the Linux layout in three places worth knowing before you go looking for files:

Config lives at /usr/local/etc/fips/fips.yaml, not /etc/fips/. It installs with sample semantics and mode 0600, so an edited file survives pkg upgrade and pkg delete, and a nsec: in it is not world-readable.
The daemon runs under daemon(8) with pidfile /var/run/fips/fips.pid and logs to /var/log/fips.log. The rc.conf knobs are fips_config, fips_flags, and fips_logfile.
The control socket resolves to /var/run/fips/control.sock. As on Linux, a fips group is created and its members can run fipsctl and fipstop without root (pw groupmod fips -m <user>, then re-login).

Making the local resolver the system resolver is a one-time operator step the package deliberately does not take, and there are field-tested caveats around unbound upstreams and /etc/resolv.conf. Both are covered in the FreeBSD section of packaging/README.md and in packaging/freebsd/README.md.

From source

For development, custom builds, or unsupported architectures. The packaging/ tree builds the same installer formats locally; you then apply the resulting installer the same way you would a downloaded one.

git clone https://github.com/jmcorgan/fips.git
cd fips/packaging
make deb         # or: tarball, ipk, apk, aur, pkg, freebsd, zip, all

The resulting installer lands in deploy/ at the project root. Apply it the same way you would a downloaded one (for example sudo dpkg -i deploy/fips_*.deb on Debian/Ubuntu).

See packaging/README.md for per-format build details, cross-target options, and the full make target list.

With Nix (flake)

On Nix/NixOS, a flake at the project root builds the binaries from source with the pinned toolchain and no manual prerequisite install:

nix build .#fips          # all four binaries, into ./result/bin
nix develop               # dev shell with the toolchain + build deps

This path produces binaries only — it does not run the installer, so there are no systemd units, no fips group, and no default fips.yaml. On NixOS, wire the daemon in through your system configuration using the flake's nixosModules.default output instead: import it and set services.fips.enable = true. See packaging/nixos/README.md and the Nix / NixOS section of packaging/README.md.

What's installed and running

Here's what the installer leaves on your machine, what's running, and what you'll need to set up yourself.

Binaries installed system-wide:

fips (daemon)
fipsctl (control-socket client)
fipstop (live-status TUI)
fips-gateway (Linux only)

Files placed on disk:

/etc/fips/fips.yaml — default daemon config (preserved on upgrade). On macOS and FreeBSD this is /usr/local/etc/fips/fips.yaml.
/etc/fips/fips.nft — mesh-interface nftables baseline (used only when the firewall service is enabled). Linux only.
/etc/fips/fips.d/ — empty drop-in directory for operator nftables additions. Linux only.
Systemd, launchd, rc.d, or Windows-service unit files for the fips services. FreeBSD installs fips and fips_dns only, since fips-gateway and the nftables firewall service are Linux-only.

System changes:

A fips system group is created. Add your user to it (sudo usermod -aG fips $USER, then re-login) to run fipsctl and fipstop without sudo.
The runtime directory /run/fips/ exists with mode 0750 root:fips.

Services enabled at install, and started on the next boot:

fips.service — the daemon. Brings up the fips0 TUN adapter, listens on the configured transports, and exposes the control socket at /run/fips/control.sock.
fips-dns.service — wires .fips hostname resolution into the host resolver (a /etc/systemd/resolved.conf.d/ drop-in pointing at [::1]:5354 on systemd hosts).

The Debian package enables both and starts neither, so a fresh install leaves them stopped. Start them yourself rather than waiting for a reboot:

sudo systemctl start fips fips-dns

Services installed but not enabled (operator opt-in):

fips-firewall.service — applies /etc/fips/fips.nft to the mesh interface. See how-to/enable-mesh-firewall.md.

What's working once both services are running:

The daemon is running with a fresh ephemeral identity — a new Nostr keypair is generated on every start.
The fips0 TUN adapter exists with the daemon's mesh address.
The daemon's transport listeners are up: UDP 0.0.0.0:2121 and TCP 0.0.0.0:8443. They are inert at this point because no other node knows your daemon's npub yet — see "What's not yet configured" below.
.fips hostname resolution is plumbed into the host resolver.

What's not yet configured — these are what guide your next steps:

No peers. The daemon has nobody to talk to until you add a static peer entry, enable Nostr-mediated discovery, or bring up a transport (Ethernet, Bluetooth) where peers find each other automatically on the same physical link.
Ephemeral identity. Your node's npub changes every restart. The persistent-identity tutorial walks through pinning the daemon to a stable Nostr keypair for any node others will reference by name.
Mesh firewall not active. Inbound exposure on fips0 follows the host's existing firewall rules until you enable the baseline service.

Reaching mesh nodes by name

A FIPS node is identified by its Nostr public key (npub1...). For ordinary IP software running over the mesh — SSH, web browsers, ping, file transfer — use the form <npub>.fips as the destination; the local .fips resolver translates that to the corresponding mesh IPv6 address so the FIPS node can be found. The resolver runs entirely on your machine and does not generate any external DNS traffic.

For shorter forms, the resolver also consults two host maps before falling back to direct npub lookup: /etc/fips/hosts (shipped pre-populated with the public test mesh roster, and freely editable for your own entries) and the alias: field on configured peers in fips.yaml. So test-us01.fips, my-laptop.fips, or any other shortname you map resolves the same way <npub>.fips does. See how-to/host-aliases.md for the full mechanics.

Join the test mesh

The fastest way to see FIPS in action is to connect your daemon to the public FIPS test mesh. The Join the Test Mesh tutorial walks through adding a single static peer entry, watching the link come up, and reaching both that peer and a second mesh node forwarded through it — a ten-minute exercise that demonstrates the central FIPS guarantee that one good peer connects you to the rest of the mesh.

Where to go next

Documentation is organised into four sections, each with a different job. Pick the one that matches what you want to do.

Tutorials

Step-by-step lessons that take you from zero to a working setup. Read these end-to-end. Start with Join the Test Mesh and follow with ipv6-adapter-walkthrough to understand what each piece does, then move on to persistent-identity and the three Nostr-discovery tutorials — resolve-peers-via-nostr, advertise-your-node, and open-discovery — to give your node a stable npub, look up peer endpoints, publish your own, and join the ambient discovery namespace. Then host-a-service for hosting a service on your node, and ground-up-mesh for the second deployment mode where two devices peer over Ethernet, WiFi, or Bluetooth with no IP between them.

How-To Guides

Task-oriented recipes for operators with a specific goal: enable a firewall, deploy the LAN gateway, set up Bluetooth peering, diagnose an MTU problem, configure persistent identity. Each guide takes the shortest correct path from "I want to do X" to "X is done".

Reference

Lookup material consulted on demand: wire formats, configuration keys, command-line flags, control-socket commands. Austere by design; no guidance on when to use a feature.

Design

Architectural and protocol-level explanations: the mesh layer, the session layer, the spanning tree, Bloom-filter discovery, the unified MTU model, the IPv6 adapter. Read these to understand why FIPS makes the choices it does.

The design section's fips-concepts.md is a good entry point if you want the mental model before touching any commands.

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