waste-go

A modern reimagining of WASTE — decentralized, friend-to-friend encrypted mesh networking with chat and file sharing. Written in Go.

Project layout

waste-go/
├── cmd/
│   ├── daemon/     The peer process — run one on each friend's machine
│   └── relay/      Bootstrap/relay server — run this on your Hetzner VPS
└── internal/
    ├── proto/      All wire types (shared by daemon and relay)
    ├── crypto/     Ed25519 identity, X25519 ECDH, ChaCha20-Poly1305
    ├── mesh/       Connected peer state + per-connection handler
    ├── ipc/        Local JSON API (UI talks to daemon here, port 17337)
    └── nat/        Relay client (hole-punching lives here later)

Prerequisites

• Go 1.22+ → https://go.dev/dl/
• VS Code with the Go extension (golang.go)

On first open VS Code will prompt you to install gopls, dlv, and goimports — accept all of them.

Getting started

# Fetch dependencies
go mod tidy

# Build everything (confirms it compiles)
go build ./...

# Terminal 1 — relay (optional for LAN testing, required across internet)
go run ./cmd/relay -bind 127.0.0.1:17339

# Terminal 2 — peer A
go run ./cmd/daemon -alias alice -data-dir /tmp/waste-alice -peer-port 17338 -ipc-port 17337

# Terminal 3 — peer B
go run ./cmd/daemon -alias bob -data-dir /tmp/waste-bob -peer-port 17340 -ipc-port 17341

Then connect B → A and send a message (netcat works fine as a quick test):

# Tell peer B to connect to peer A
echo '{"type":"connect","addr":"127.0.0.1:17338"}' | nc 127.0.0.1 17341

# In another terminal — subscribe to peer A's events, then send a message from B
nc 127.0.0.1 17337 &
echo '{"type":"send_message","room":"general","body":"hello from bob"}' | nc 127.0.0.1 17341

On Windows — use PowerShell's built-in TCP client instead of nc:

# Open a connection to peer B's IPC port and keep it open
$c = [System.Net.Sockets.TcpClient]::new('127.0.0.1', 17341)
$w = [System.IO.StreamWriter]::new($c.GetStream()); $w.AutoFlush = $true

# Tell peer B to connect to peer A
$w.WriteLine('{"type":"connect","addr":"127.0.0.1:17338"}')

# Send a chat message from B
$w.WriteLine('{"type":"send_message","room":"general","body":"hello from bob"}')

# In a separate terminal — subscribe to peer A's events
$r = [System.Net.Sockets.TcpClient]::new('127.0.0.1', 17337)
$reader = [System.IO.StreamReader]::new($r.GetStream())
while ($true) { $reader.ReadLine() }

Keep $c / $w in scope for the session; closing them disconnects the peer.

Deploying the relay on your Hetzner VPS

GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build -o bin/waste-relay ./cmd/relay
scp bin/waste-relay user@your-vps:~/

# On the VPS
./waste-relay -bind 0.0.0.0:17339

Then start daemons with -relay your-vps-ip:17339 and they'll register and be able to find each other across NAT.

IPC protocol (plain JSON over TCP)

Everything is newline-delimited JSON. You can test with nc 127.0.0.1 17337.

Commands you send:

{"type":"connect","addr":"1.2.3.4:17338"}
{"type":"send_message","room":"general","body":"hi"}
{"type":"get_state"}

Events the daemon pushes:

{"type":"state_snapshot","local_peer":{...},"connected_peers":[...]}
{"type":"peer_connected","peer":{...}}
{"type":"message_received","message":{"from":"...","body":"hi","room":"general"}}
{"type":"peer_disconnected","peer_id":"..."}

Crypto choices

Purpose	Algorithm	Notes
Identity	Ed25519	Fast, small keys, standard
Key exchange	X25519 ECDH	Per-session ephemeral keys
Symmetric	ChaCha20-Poly1305	No AES-NI needed, authenticated
Hashing	SHA-256	File integrity

Replaces WASTE's original Blowfish/PCBC (broken cipher mode) + RSA.

Roadmap

• UDP hole-punching (STUN) in internal/nat
• Invite file format (.waste-invite) — share a keypair + address hint
• Peer gossip → auto-connect to friends-of-friends
• File transfer
• Message persistence (SQLite via modernc.org/sqlite)
• Tauri or simple web UI consuming the IPC port