Keep working when the network is hostile, and make the app verifiable

Tier 3 of a protest-hardening review. The BLE mesh is already properly
fenced off from network reachability and needs nothing here; every gap is
on the internet side, or in how someone gets a build they can trust.

Say when Tor is blocked. The bootstrap poll loop simply ended at its
75-second deadline, leaving isStarting true with no further state, so a
network that blocks Tor was indistinguishable from a slow one and the UI
said "starting tor…" indefinitely. TorManager now exposes
bootstrapDidStall and posts .TorBootstrapDidStall, and the app reports
that mesh messaging still works while internet delivery is paused. It is
cleared on each new start or restart, so a later attempt can report again.

Let relays be added by hand. The four built-in relays are well-known
clearnet hostnames, which is four names for a censor to block and no
recourse short of a new build. NostrRelaySettings persists up to eight
additional relays, normalized, .onion accepted, with a settings editor.
They join the same target set as the built-ins and are subject to the
same activation policy. Removal reconciles against the previous set:
the teardown path iterates the current targets, so without that a removed
relay's socket and queued sends would linger — covered by a test that
fails without it. The merged list is cached rather than recomputed,
because allowedRelayList consults it once per candidate URL and would
otherwise read UserDefaults inside that loop.

Stop stranding people who denied location. The activation gate required
location permission or a mutual favorite, but teleporting into a geohash
requires neither, so someone with no permission and no favorites could
sit in a channel that never connected while Tor and the relays stayed
suppressed and nothing said why. Being in a location channel is now a
third arm of the gate, in both the activation service and the relay
manager's copy of the policy, and leaving the channel closes it again.

Stop burning the Tor timeout when Tor is off. GeoRelayDirectory awaited
Tor readiness unconditionally, but with the preference off TorManager has
been shut down, so every refresh spent the full bootstrap deadline and the
directory froze on its cached copy. It now keys on the preference, not on
live readiness: Tor wanted but unavailable must still skip the fetch
rather than fall back to clearnet.

Say what turning Tor off costs. The toggle's copy described it as
hiding your IP "for location channels", understating both scope and
consequence. It now names private messages too, and while the toggle is
off the settings screen states that every relay can see the device IP.

Make builds verifiable. There was no release verification of any kind:
no signatures, no checksums, no documented procedure. Post-takedown that
is the acute gap, because mirrors appear and people install whatever they
can find during a shutdown. source-manifest.yml publishes a per-tag
SHA-256 manifest with a provenance attestation, self-checking before it
publishes, and docs/VERIFYING-A-BUILD.md explains how to verify source and
states plainly that compiled builds from anywhere but the App Store cannot
be verified. It also records the gaps honestly: no published signing key,
no reproducible build, no non-GitHub mirror.

docs/TOR-INTEGRATION.md was substantially stale — it documented a
torrc, SOCKSPort and ControlPort that the in-process Arti client does not
use, and claimed there are no user-visible settings — so it is rewritten,
including the deferred gap below.

Deferred: no Tor bridges or pluggable transports. arti-client is built
without pt-client or bridge-client and bootstraps from stock config, so
in a country that blocks Tor outright there is still no circumvention
path — only a clear report that there isn't. Closing it needs the Rust
features, bridge config through the FFI, and an xcframework rebuild under
the pinned toolchain with a provenance update, which is its own change.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
jack
2026-07-26 18:10:50 +02:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 934b2cd2d3
commit 862e44e2e1
22 changed files with 3253 additions and 293 deletions
+4 -1
View File
@@ -60,6 +60,9 @@ Public archives contain content already intended for public mesh/board distribut
- When mesh bridge is enabled, public mesh messages not marked “nearby only” are signed under a per-cell Nostr identity and published to a neighborhood rendezvous geohash. Presence and public bridge traffic therefore expose a coarse area to relays and participants.
- A bridge gateway can carry signed bridge/location events and opaque courier drops for nearby mesh-only peers. It cannot validly publish a neighbor's radio-only message because the author must first sign the bridge event.
- Relays added by hand persist in local preferences (`nostr.customRelays`, at most 8, normalized on read) and are wiped on panic. An added relay names an operator someone chose to route through, so it is treated as sensitive local state rather than inert configuration. `.onion` addresses are accepted, which is the point: the four built-in relays are well-known clearnet hostnames and a filter blocking four names would otherwise end internet-delivered private messages until a new build shipped.
- Turning the Tor preference off routes relay sockets and the relay-directory fetch directly, disclosing the device IP to every relay operator including those carrying private messages. The settings UI states this while the preference is off.
Residual risk: Nostr relay retention and logging are outside project control. Public events may be copied indefinitely. Timing, coarse location, and participation can be correlated even when content is encrypted or per-cell identities are used.
## Location
@@ -88,7 +91,7 @@ Residual risk: Nostr relay retention and logging are outside project control. Pu
## Panic Wipe Coverage
The panic action clears identity/session state, preferences, location state, groups, prekeys, outbox mail, courier mail, bridge dedup state, gossip archive, board data, managed media, and active subscriptions/transports. Managed media deletion completes synchronously, after active media work has been invalidated. Keychain secrets use device-only accessibility, and an install marker detects and clears app keys that survive uninstall before a later reinstall can use them. New persistent stores must add an explicit wipe hook and a regression test.
The panic action clears identity/session state, preferences, location state, groups, prekeys, outbox mail, courier mail, bridge dedup state, gossip archive, board data, managed media, hand-added relays, and active subscriptions/transports. Managed media deletion completes synchronously, after active media work has been invalidated. Keychain secrets use device-only accessibility, and an install marker detects and clears app keys that survive uninstall before a later reinstall can use them. New persistent stores must add an explicit wipe hook and a regression test.
## Release Review Checklist