Client-to-Client Protocol¶
Wormhole clients do not talk directly to each other (at least at first):
they only connect directly to the Mailbox Server. They ask this server
to convey messages to the other client (via the add
command and the
message
response). This document explains the format of these
client-to-client messages.
Each such message contains a “phase” string, and a hex-encoded binary “body”.
Any phase which is purely numeric (^\d+$
) is reserved for encrypted
application data. The Mailbox server may deliver these messages multiple
times, or out-of-order, but the wormhole client will deliver the
corresponding decrypted data to the application in strict numeric order.
All other (non-numeric) phases are reserved for the Wormhole client
itself. Clients will ignore any phase they do not recognize.
Immediately upon opening the mailbox, clients send the pake
phase,
which contains the binary SPAKE2 message (the one computed as X+M*pw
or Y+N*pw
).
Upon receiving their peer’s pake
phase, clients compute and remember
the shared key. They derive the “verifier” (a hash of the shared key)
and deliver it to the application by calling got_verifier
:
applications can display this to users who want additional assurance (by
manually comparing the values from both sides: they ought to be
identical). At this point clients also send the encrypted version
phase, whose plaintext payload is a UTF-8-encoded JSON-encoded
dictionary of metadata. This allows the two Wormhole instances to signal
their ability to do other things (like “dilate” the wormhole). The
version data will also include an app_versions
key which contains a
dictionary of metadata provided by the application, allowing apps to
perform similar negotiation.
At this stage, the client knows the supposed shared key, but has not yet
seen evidence that the peer knows it too. When the first peer message
arrives (i.e. the first message with a .side
that does not equal our
own), it will be decrypted: we use authenticated encryption
(nacl.SecretBox
), so if this decryption succeeds, then we’re
confident that somebody used the same wormhole code as us. This event
pushes the client mood from “lonely” to “happy”.
This might be triggered by the peer’s version
message, but if we had
to re-establish the Mailbox Server connection, we might get peer
messages out of order and see some application-level message first.
When a version
message is successfully decrypted, the application is
signaled with got_version
. When any application message is
successfully decrypted, received
is signaled. Application messages
are delivered strictly in-order: if we see phases 3 then 2 then 1, all
three will be delivered in sequence after phase 1 is received.
If any message cannot be successfully decrypted, the mood is set to
“scary”, and the wormhole is closed. All pending Deferreds will be
errbacked with a WrongPasswordError
(a subclass of
WormholeError
), the nameplate/mailbox will be released, and the
WebSocket connection will be dropped. If the application calls
close()
, the resulting Deferred will not fire until deallocation has
finished and the WebSocket is closed, and then it will fire with an
errback.
Both version
and all numeric (app-specific) phases are encrypted.
The message body will be the hex-encoded output of a NaCl SecretBox
,
keyed by a phase+side -specific key (computed with HKDF-SHA256, using
the shared PAKE key as the secret input, and
wormhole:phase:%s%s % (SHA256(side), SHA256(phase))
as the CTXinfo),
with a random nonce.