79 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
79 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
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# Future Vision
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WASTE's design philosophy is still sound: small trusted groups, no central server, encrypted everything, equal nodes. That's essentially what Signal's sealed sender and private groups do today, just without a self-hosted option. This gap is worth filling.
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---
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## Architecture
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Two clean layers, connected by the IPC port.
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### Daemon
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The real application. A long-running background process that handles everything:
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- Peer mesh and connection management
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- Cryptography and handshake
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- NAT traversal and relay fallback
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- File transfer
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Exposes a local JSON API over TCP (`127.0.0.1:17337`). Can run headlessly — SSH into a box and the mesh stays alive even with no UI attached.
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### UI Layer
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Talks to the daemon over the IPC port. The separation means the UI is replaceable without touching the core.
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Target: a web frontend (React or similar) wrapped in a native binary using a Tauri-style approach — native packaging, OS webview, no Electron weight. Avoids the wxWidgets ugliness of the old wxWASTE fork and the Qt licensing headaches of the VIA fork.
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---
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## Protocol Modernization
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### NAT Traversal
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The main unsolved problem from the original WASTE — one party always needed an open port.
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- Try UDP hole punching (STUN) first
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- Fall back to an encrypted relay (DERP-style) when hole punching fails
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- Relay sees only opaque encrypted blobs — end-to-end encryption holds
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- Run the relay on a Hetzner VPS; `waste-relay` already implements the blind-forward model
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### Bootstrapping & Rendezvous
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No DHT needed at small group scale (10–50 nodes). Keep it simple:
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- Each peer generates an Ed25519 keypair on first run — the public key **is** their identity
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- Share a small signed invite file (`.waste-invite`) out of band: email, Signal, whatever
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- The invite contains: current IP:port hint + public key + short-lived signature
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- Once two peers connect, they gossip each other's addresses to mutual friends
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- A local known-peers list in the data directory is sufficient at this scale
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### Identity
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- Persistent Ed25519 keypair, generated once
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- Public key = stable identity, not a mutable nickname
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- No phone number, no central registry — closer to Signal's model than WASTE's original unregistered aliases
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### Transport (Long-term)
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Current transport is TCP with custom framing. QUIC is worth revisiting once the core is solid — it gives multiplexing and better NAT traversal behavior essentially for free.
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---
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## Roadmap
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| Priority | Item |
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| 1 | Deploy `waste-relay` to Hetzner; verify cross-internet NAT traversal |
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| 2 | Invite file format (`.waste-invite`) — solve bootstrapping without manual IP sharing |
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| 3 | Peer gossip — auto-connect to friends-of-friends after initial invite |
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| 4 | File transfer — chunked, encrypted, resumable |
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| 5 | Message persistence — SQLite via `modernc.org/sqlite` |
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| 6 | UI — web frontend consuming the IPC port; native packaging |
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| 7 | UDP hole punching — full STUN implementation in `internal/nat` |
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| 8 | QUIC transport — replace TCP framing for better NAT behavior |
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---
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## What to Keep from WASTE
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- **Small group** — not a public network, not federated, not discoverable
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- **No registration** — no phone number, no email, no central service
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- **Encrypted everything** — at rest and in transit, end to end
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- **Equal nodes** — no peer is "the server"; the relay is dumb infrastructure only
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- **The soul** — a private overlay for people you actually trust
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