Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Adds support for listening on and connecting to I2P and Onion services securely #3293

Open
wants to merge 21 commits into
base: main
Choose a base branch
from

Conversation

eyedeekay
Copy link

@eyedeekay eyedeekay commented Dec 27, 2023

This PR adds 2 dendrite-demo main's, each designed expressly to serve a Hidden Service/Overlay network.

The first, dendrite-demo-i2p add self-configuration for use of dendrite as an I2P hidden service(eepsite) and to connect to I2P services(federate) as an I2P client. It further disables the dendrite server from communicating with non-anonymous servers by federation(because I2P does not canonically have the ability to exit, we rely on donors for exit traffic), and enables the use of self-signed TLS certificates(because I2P services are self-authenticating but TLS is still required for other aspects of the system to work reliably). This demo turns the system into an "pseudonymous" homeserver which people can connect to using an I2P-enabled Matrix client(I like cinny and it's what I tested with).

The second, dendrite-demo-tor adds self-configuration for the use of dendrite as an Onion service and to connect to other onion services and non-anonymous web sites using Tor to obfuscate it's physical location and providing, optionally, pseudonymity. It also enables the use of self-signed TLS certificates, for the same reason as with I2P, because onion services aren't typically eligible for TLS certificates. It has also been tested with cinny.

These services are both pseudonymous like myself, not anonymous. I will be meeting members of the element team at the CCC assembly shortly to discuss contributing under my pseudonym.

As none of the other dendrite-demo have unit tests I did not add them to these checkins.

@eyedeekay eyedeekay requested a review from a team as a code owner December 27, 2023 19:28
@eyedeekay eyedeekay changed the title I2p demo Adds support for listening on and connecting to I2P and Onion services securely Dec 27, 2023
@eyedeekay
Copy link
Author

I hereby donate this code to Anoa.

@anoadragon453
Copy link
Member

I accept this donation and sign off on this code.

Signed-off-by: Andrew Morgan <andrewm@amorgan.xyz>

@eyedeekay
Copy link
Author

eyedeekay commented Dec 27, 2023

Moving this from README_I2P.md to here becasue README_I2P.md is about to me mostly irrelevant.

How to build a Dendrite Homeserver modified to run over I2P or Tor
==================================================================

I2P mode: I2P must be installed first, and the SAMv3 API bridge must
be activated.

1. First, clone the `matrix-org/dendrite` implementation of dendrite into your GOPATH and change branch to the `i2p-demo` checkout.


2. Second, build the binary:

    go build -o bin/dendrite-demo-i2p ./cmd/dendrite-demo-i2p

3. Third, run it.

    go build -o bin/dendrite-demo-i2p ./cmd/dendrite-demo-i2p

Tor mode: Tor must be installed first.

1. First, clone the `matrix-org/dendrite` implementation of dendrite into your GOPATH and change branch to the `i2p-demo` checkout.

2. Second, build the binary:

    go build -o bin/dendrite-demo-tor ./cmd/dendrite-demo-tor

3. Third, run it.

    go build -o bin/dendrite-demo-tor ./cmd/dendrite-demo-tor

@anoadragon453
Copy link
Member

(@eyedeekay I can officially confirm that the code donation above checks out 🙂)

@eyedeekay
Copy link
Author

I have demo instances up and running but I'm not sure how best to share them, as I have enabled open registration for now and don't think that I should make them that public. Let me know if there's a best way to share them with testers on your side.

@S7evinK
Copy link
Contributor

S7evinK commented Feb 29, 2024

Sorry for just moving this to contrib, as much as I like this contribution, I don't see us maintain this.
Hope this is OK with you, @eyedeekay

@S7evinK
Copy link
Contributor

S7evinK commented Feb 29, 2024

Seems like GHA or whatever is upset right now, looking at the golangci-lint errors.

Unit tests seem to be a real issue, could you take a look at this please?

@eyedeekay
Copy link
Author

eyedeekay commented Feb 29, 2024

Sorry for just moving this to contrib, as much as I like this contribution, I don't see us maintain this. Hope this is OK with you, @eyedeekay

I'm certainly fine with it being in contrib and will be along to update it as Matrix evolves if necessary, there's actually a surprising amount of people running homeservers inside I2P and this could make things a lot easier and safer for them. But, if that's how you feel about it, maybe I could talk you into finding a way to expose the package-internal net.Listener interface that I swapped out for onion and i2p listeners in my demos? Because if that were to happen, then these wouldn't need to be in the dendrite repository at all, that is merely a difficulty that arises because I can't replace the underlying net.Listener from outside the dendrite package. It's a bit of a missive below, but I think this has benefits:

It would also be a more general way to open up the use of Go matrix homeservers to other kinds of P2P and/or Overlay networks. Anyone who could implement a net.Listener and some way to Dial it would be able to have their own self-hosted Matrix homeserver. I know of how to do it for Tor and I2P, and in the past I have seen things like reverse tunneling services which offer the ability to interface with a net.Listener for instance.

Also, at least in some of these scenarios, it's sort of implied that if you can set up the server somewhere you can always set up a client to talk to it, as in the case of Tor or I2P. If you have Tor, you can talk to onion services, if you can't, then Tor has a problem. Same for I2P, if you have I2P, you can talk to I2P services, if you can't, it's our problem. This means that every I2P or Tor homeserver can also be a client of and also federate with any other I2P or Tor homeserver(at least for the purposes of mere contactability). So if you wanted to serve up something other than staticContent/*.gotmpl, you could for instance embed a cinny web-client instead, and configure it by default to point to the hosting dendrite instance, making it both a homeserver and a client which can be easily deployed to any I2P or Tor instance.

I think in the end everybody would win. You don't have to maintain a bunch of dendrite-demo* stuff, overlay network users and self-hosters can try novel P2P things.

/missive

With regard to the unit tests, I'm pretty sure the demo-tor unit test is failing because there isn't a Tor instance in the unit test container but that's just a hypothesis. It might be kind of rude to spin up a Tor client to run unit tests in CI so I'm going to work to confirm that hypothesis locally and if that's the case then my advice would be to simply disable that test. but please give me a little while to be absolutely sure that's what it is.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

None yet

3 participants