[Freedombox-discuss] Santiago Updates
Hi folks, just wanted to send out updates on what I accomplished with
Santiago this weekend. Consider this both a status update and a request
for help. If this strikes you as interesting, feel free to jump in.
Santiago sits at [0], on the "santiago" branch. Santiago, as James
mentioned in the hackfest update, tries to be a hard-to-discover
service-discovery tool, making it easier for friends to advertise
services to one another, privately.
There were a lot of changes this weekend. The previous system
(immediately after the hackfest) was nothing more than a technical demo,
showing how the data were stored and accessed. This time around,
Santiago's starting to grow some legs. I've separated the different
objects into their roles, though I'm not completely sure everything is
broken out correctly. We also have a service-building API, so it's now
testable.
If you have code or ideas to contribute to any of the following,
*please* do so. These
Immediate TODOs:
- Consider changing message contents. Do we include meta-information in
the replies to reduce the number of sent messages overall? Is sending
data that can identify a single Santiago port to the recipient a
greater risk than sending out many more messages per request, while
keeping the responder hidden?
- Build out unit tests to verify the system's behavior. Since every
setting no longer depends on magic config files, it's now unit
testable. Thank Pete (or your preferred deity).
- Store and load the data from FileDict objects correctly. James, I'll
have to ask you about that, I'm getting weird threading errors that
are probably due to building this outside of the main Plinth system.
- Verify and decrypt incoming messages. You know, actually implement
the PGP part that's the whole point of this exercise.
Near TODOs:
- Actually send replies to the recipient's Santiago.
- Build a non-HTTP protocol.
Far TODOs:
- Add message queuing?
- Add service expiry?
- Add process separation?
- Add really weird protocols.
Once all the immediate and the first of the near TODOs are complete,
this'll be ready to deploy as a testing tool. I would prefer end-users
stay away from it until the message queuing is worked out, but the worst
that *should* happens is that the Santiago process (and the plug it's
running on) are (D)DOSed, which will be inconvenient, but not harmful.
Until the PGP encryption and signature verification are in, this may be
very harmful.
Thanks for your time,
Nick
0: https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth
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