Commit Graph
3 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
jschoubben c192572f74 Save and Load must agree, and did not
Pushed a failing test in the last commit -- my own gate reported it and I read
the count rather than the result. The failure was real and worth having.

Adding the membership requirement to Load made Generate produce an identity that
Save would write and Load would then refuse. A file that cannot be read back is
the worst shape this could take: it is read back on the next start, on a machine
nobody is watching, and by then the token that could have fixed it is spent.

Save now refuses exactly what Load refuses, and writes nothing when it does. The
round-trip test covers the membership too, since that is the half that lets a
node come back on its own.
2026-08-29 16:24:57 +02:00
jschoubben a488c76b5e A node holds its link open, and applies what the mesh signs
The loop the whole thing exists for: told, apply, report.

`run` holds one outbound connection open and consumes the node's own queue.
Every declaration is verified against the control plane's signing key before a
byte of it is read as an instruction -- not once at connect, every time. The
transport being pinned is a different question from the instruction being
genuine, and pinning only the first would make the second transitive: a
compromised broker could forge declarations, and this host applies whatever the
link delivers.

Malformed and forged are reported differently, because ADR 0004 requires a host
to tell "this is not from the mesh I joined" from "this is broken". One means
somebody is trying and the other means something needs fixing.

A node now keeps what it needs to come back on its own: the broker's address
and fingerprint, the signing key it believes, and its own broker password --
which the mesh issues at enrolment to replace the token's secret, so the
one-time thing stays one-time and the credential it holds for years is not the
one that was pasted into a terminal.

Verified in the lab end to end. The node enrolled, held its link, received a
signed declaration and applied it -- the file is on the machine with the right
contents, and the host's own record lists both resources.

That run also found issue 010, which is recorded in novox/hq: the declaration
removed every container on the machine, including the control plane that sent
it. Correct reconciliation, shared store, and the first thing that happens.
2026-08-29 16:23:27 +02:00
jschoubben 65d896d96e A node makes its own identity, and checks the broker before speaking
The host side of enrolment. It parses a token the control plane issued, dials
the broker, refuses anything but the pinned certificate, and generates an
Ed25519 keypair whose private half never leaves the machine.

Verified against a real LavinMQ serving a real certificate: the pin matched and
the node proceeded. Then against a second broker with a different certificate
on another port, which was refused -- with an error that says retrying will not
help, because it does not mean the network is down, it means the mesh was
substituted.

InsecureSkipVerify is set and that is the point rather than a weakening. At
bootstrap the broker is self-signed and reached at an address, so there is no
authority to trace and no name to match. Chain and hostname checks are replaced
with something stricter: this exact certificate or nothing, checked in
VerifyPeerCertificate, which runs before the handshake completes -- so nothing
is sent to the wrong broker. There is a test that counts the bytes an impostor
receives, and it is zero.

The token format is defined separately here and in the control plane, because
this binary requires nothing present and does not import it. They are held
together by a test on each side asserting the exact field names, so a rename
breaks both immediately rather than at enrolment on a real machine.

Two distinctions the identity file has to keep. A machine that never joined has
no identity, which is an ordinary state and not a fault. A machine whose
identity cannot be read is a different thing entirely, and must not take the
same path -- re-enrolling would discard the identity the mesh still believes and
need a person with a new token. Fault injection found the second case untested:
the corrupt-file test was passing on the parse check, so the read-error path had
nothing defending it. It does now.

An already-enrolled machine refuses to enrol again rather than quietly
acquiring a second identity.

What is not built is the link. Enrolment stops after verifying the broker and
generating the identity, having saved nothing, so it can be run again unchanged.

132 tests, plus 32 launcher and 9 rollback.
2026-08-29 15:38:19 +02:00