Gate connected-link trust on a secure session; deny forged direct announces the connected shortcut

Residual gap after the rotation-heal containment (#1401): "verified
direct" announces prove the signature but not directness — TTL is
unsigned — so a malicious connected peer can replay a victim's fresh
announce with its TTL restored. When the victim has no live link, the
replayer's link rebinds to the victim's ID and reads as "connected",
and MessageRouter's connected fast-path then trusts it outright: every
DM stalls on a Noise handshake the replayer can never complete and is
silently lost while showing "sent".

Router-level trust gate (no wire change):
- Transport gains canDeliverSecurely(to:) — BLE answers with an
  established Noise session; Nostr keeps its prompt-delivery predicate;
  the protocol default forwards to canDeliverPromptly for transports
  without a forgeable link layer.
- MessageRouter.sendPrivate only trusts a connected link outright when
  it can deliver securely; otherwise it still sends (kicking the
  handshake on a genuine link) but retains a copy and hands a sealed
  copy to couriers, like the reachable path. flushOutbox gets the same
  gate so a flush over an insecure link resends instead of dropping the
  retained copy.

Presence hardening (defense in depth): a "direct" announce arriving on
a link already bound to a different peer no longer shortcuts the
claimed peer into "connected" — only real link state does. Genuine
first-contact and direct announces are unaffected; only the ambiguous
heal path loses the forgeable shortcut.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
jack
2026-07-09 11:55:32 +02:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 4.8
parent 021af3a22d
commit 18862102ea
10 changed files with 269 additions and 9 deletions
+3
View File
@@ -103,6 +103,9 @@ struct ProtocolContractTests {
#expect(probe.sentMessages.count == 1)
#expect(probe.sentMessages.first?.content == "hello")
#expect(probe.acceptPendingFile(id: "pending") == nil)
// Secure delivery defaults to prompt delivery (itself defaulting to
// reachability) for transports without a forgeable link layer.
#expect(probe.canDeliverSecurely(to: peerID) == false)
}
@Test