open-standards/wai/wai-web/peer

Peer delivery in a page

A page fetches objects from the neighbours that hold them before it asks the origin, holds every byte a peer sent to the object's receipt before it uses it, and signs for what it verified (peer-delivery). Asking and serving are each off until the person using the page turns them on, and the operator's policy must allow each as well.

file	what it is
peer.js	the links (a data channel, HTTP) and the client and holder over them
index.html, page.js	the reference page: an asker or a holder, by its query
harness.mjs	what the two runs share: the bundle in node, the corpus's world, an HTTP holder
verify_peer.mjs	the run with no browser: links in memory and a local HTTP link, faults planted
run.mjs	the run in a browser: pages over data channels and a local HTTP link, faults planted

Everything that decides is the peer bundle, src/peer.rs over wai::peer_delivery: the Rust a native sink runs. peer.js carries frames and makes requests; it never hands on a byte the bundle has not answered taken for.

Build

# from wai/wai-web
cargo build --locked --release --target wasm32-unknown-unknown --features peer
wasm-bindgen --target web --out-dir peer/pkg --out-name wai_peer \
  "${CARGO_TARGET_DIR:-target}/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release/wai_web.wasm"

The runs

Both use the world of the conformance corpus (live-conformance/peer-delivery/): group A of six objects and group B of three, the second of B past one data frame. Every service they start binds port 0 and prints its port, and is closed before the run exits.

node peer/verify_peer.mjs .. peer/pkg [session.json]
PLAYWRIGHT_HOST=<dir with node_modules/playwright>/ node peer/run.mjs .. [session.json]
python3 -I ../live-conformance/peer_delivery_verify.py --session session.json

verify_peer.mjs (33 checks) needs node alone. run.mjs (23 checks) opens seven pages in the installed browser, each a profile of its own: a holder and an asker whose settings are left off, four holders that serve over data channels, and an asker with asking on, which also reaches a holder over HTTP on another origin. The faults are planted on the holders' side, and the checks are on what the asker did:

planted	held to
a peer serves an object with a byte changed	the bytes are refused at their receipt, the next holder serves, the peer is asked nothing more, and no acknowledgement names it
a record states a group one object larger than its receipt	the record is refused whole and its holder is never asked
a peer lists an object it does not hold	its miss sets the record aside, the origin serves, and the next object it listed is not asked of it
a setting left off	the page constructs no peer connection, sends no request to a holder and signs nothing

Each run can write the session's acknowledgements to a file, and peer_delivery_verify.py --session recomputes from those signed records alone what each holder was acknowledged, with no code of the client's.

A browser gives a page its local addresses as names that resolve on the local network. Where they do not resolve between two profiles of one machine (a session started over SSH, with no multicast), no data channel opens and run.mjs fails at "four data channels and the HTTP link are up", naming the kinds of candidate each connection offered. There, WAI_PEER_BROWSER_ARGS="--disable-features=WebRtcHideLocalIpsWithMdns" has the browser offer the addresses themselves, and the run is otherwise the same.

run.mjs is run by hand on a machine with a browser installed; verify_peer.mjs and the session recomputation run in wai-web-wasm.yml.