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Aleksandr Bogomiakov 2166ba4800 Separate internal WireGuard encryption from data carriers
AWG-only policy also selected a competing end-to-end plugin, so compatible
external links could still have no compatible encrypted data channel. Carrier
changes replaced tunnel state and status selected counters from different
engines. Use one internal WireGuard plugin and a separate DataCarrier contract
for external capabilities/lifecycle. Keep the logical link, keys, handshake,
interface and counter epoch across policy, fallback and direct/relay changes.
Control/discovery transport selection and membership remain independent.

Share the bounded per-neighbour UDP WireGuard engine between ordinary WG and
Amnezia masking. Encrypt the relay envelope inside the outer hop channel with
fresh pair keys/PSK. Remove duplicate WG key/device code and the TCP/TLS inner
cipher. TLS carries opaque internal WireGuard frames. Refuse missing native
transports instead of letting default iroh impersonate their protocol names.
Probe the actual authenticated carrier, independently of the shared IP tunnel;
failed local probe submissions count as loss too.

Apply the vendored iroh interface exclusion to actual direct candidates, not
just public discovery records. Exclude overlay subnets from introductions and
propagate the actual owned interface name, including kernel-assigned utun names,
to every carrier. Production logs showed paths through the overlay itself.
This removes a recursive transport path; it does not establish the historical
cause of the reported 100 GB absolute counter. Exit-node traffic is also real
peer IP traffic even when local applications are idle.

Hide inner cipher choices/handshake clutter in CLI and tray. Report external
routes, readiness and actionable policy/version failures. Count original IP
packets only when their ciphertext is accepted by the logical transport,
including queued packets' exact unpadded lengths. Exclude physical probes and
keepalives. Export counter epochs; sum per-peer rate deltas and discard stale
histories so joins/restarts cannot turn old totals into fresh traffic. Status
also prints exact IP byte totals for comparison with the tray.

Coordinated upgrade: data ALPN 6, internal wireguard-e2e capability v4,
wg/awg v2, QUIC carrier v1, TLS v2, local IPC v23. Control ALPN 8, device/network
identity derivation, signed records and saved network choices stay unchanged.
Keep the historical wg-quic key store; transactionally import missing keys from
wg then awg without replacing canonical keys. Forget removes legacy copies too,
on the blocking pool, to prevent resurrection after restart. Preserve historic
cipher options as shared settings, rejecting contradictory values.

Validation on Linux in the Nix development shell:
- cargo fmt --all -- --check
- cargo clippy --locked --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
- cargo test --locked --workspace --all-targets (562 passed, 3 ignored)
The inherited service socket/secret/group environment overrides were removed
for isolated CLI process tests. A new carrier test initially raced the first
peer announcement; its deadline polling now waits for a peer row explicitly.
Real loopback endpoints, membership, SQLite, WG/AWG/TLS encryption and memory
TUNs cover mixed-carrier relaying and one smoltcp TCP connection surviving
relay/direct/policy changes and a dropped transmission. Counter tests check
exact plaintext lengths, refused sends, epochs, joins and stale histories.
Public DHT, privileged kernel and manual benchmark tests remain ignored;
macOS/Windows native TUNs, desktop GUI and WAN/DPI behavior were not run.
2026-10-22 01:07:52 +01:00

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Pairwise Amnezia transport

The CLI's default carrier preference is wg,awg,wg-quic,tcp-tls. To select AWG explicitly:

tsng up --protocol awg
tsng up --protocol wg,awg,wg-quic,tcp-tls

The startup list is the initial per-network preference. A saved network choice overrides it and can enable any built-in protocol at runtime:

tsng protocols home awg,wg-quic
tsng protocols home awg

Changes are local to this device, persist across restarts, and retire existing physical data links for that network before renegotiation. The single internal WireGuard channel, its keys, session and counters survive. Authenticated control sessions, membership, addresses and other networks stay live. Removing every protocol (none in the CLI, all checkboxes off in the tray) leaves the network control-only. Re-enabling a carrier resumes the existing internal channel, subject to ordinary WireGuard and application timeouts. The choice applies to both incoming and outgoing local data links; a relay may use a different transport on its next hop. Control and discovery are independent.

awg is Tsunagi AWG wire version 2. Its packet masking engine is adapted from RunaRoo/AmneziaWG-RS, with the pinned source and license recorded in UPSTREAM.md. It uses the existing boringtun Noise/WireGuard implementation instead of upstream's Node, global executors and OS interface machinery. Compatibility with ordinary Amnezia servers is not implemented: this carrier connects authenticated Tsunagi members.

Negotiation and lifetime

There is one independent UDP socket and cancellable packet-engine task per (network, peer) pair. The smaller endpoint id initiates, following the same rule as other data carriers. Both sides must announce enabled AWG wire version 2. An authenticated iroh control session is required throughout; AWG supplies no alternate discovery or membership mechanism.

Every open generates new masking parameters, a header-protection key, an outer WireGuard key pair and a PSK. The initiator sends a private Offer with a random attempt id, its public key, candidate socket addresses and the shared profile. The responder validates it, creates its own fresh key pair and socket, and returns an Answer naming that attempt. Both send masked handshakes and encrypted delivery probes to the candidates. Only authenticated WireGuard data, not a STUN response or an incoming UDP address alone, verifies a path.

Negotiation payloads are bounded at 4096 bytes (a caller can lower the limit), redacted in Debug, excluded from public message events and erased on drop. They are never capabilities, signed records, cache entries or exported status. At most 128 pairs are admitted per transport, with bounded command/data queues, at most 32 candidates per attempt and finite establishment deadlines. Stale answers and duplicate offers are rejected; a new attempt replaces and closes an older pair engine. Cancellation, peer departure, network deactivation and shutdown retire sockets without waiting for a remote reader.

A process restart, a failed setup, or a complete fallback cycle returning to AWG starts fresh negotiation. Normal WireGuard rekeying within a live attempt keeps that attempt's masking profile. A failed pair does not reconfigure other pairs or other networks. A full mesh of 15 members uses 14 engines per member and 105 independent pairs in total; it does not create additional system interfaces.

Masking

Each profile randomizes disjoint H1–H4 header ranges, a 12–48-byte S1–S4 prefix, a ChaCha20 header-protection key, handshake trailers, junk packet count/lengths, and extra content padding. Prefix lengths are equal within one profile so header detection has one offset. A fresh random nonce is in every packet's prefix; handshake headers and transport headers/counters are protected. The standard WireGuard header is restored before boringtun authenticates a message. This preserves boringtun's standard MAC calculations, which is another reason this is a Tsunagi-specific AWG wire version.

Before a handshake, an I1 signature packet is generated from either a complete DNS query or SIP OPTIONS template, with fresh identifiers and consistent length fields, followed by random junk packets. I2–I5 are unused in this version. The templates are structural generators, not replayed captures. QUIC imitation is not selected. Masking can change DPI classification; it is not a promise of indistinguishability or that any particular firewall will admit it.

Packets, NAT and fallback

The pair engine carries opaque relay envelopes inside authenticated outer WG packets. It fragments those envelopes into bounded chunks and expires incomplete assemblies; a logical datagram is bounded at 64 KiB and an outer UDP packet is at most 1200 bytes. The encapsulated IPv4 headers are internal framing only: no interface or OS address is created for a pair. Overlay addresses, routing, ownership checks and end-to-end encryption remain independent. A relay decrypts its own adjacent AWG carrier to forward opaque end-to-end ciphertext, never the destination's IP packet.

Local IPv4 candidates and simultaneous encrypted probes provide direct UDP connectivity. In direct/relay reach mode the CLI also uses stun.l.google.com:19302 to discover a server-reflexive address on this pair's socket, with a 1.2-second bound. A STUN result is only a candidate. Local reach mode makes no STUN request. Configure or disable it with -o awg:stun=HOST:PORT or -o awg:stun=off. Failed discovery still permits local candidates. IPv6-only paths, symmetric NAT and networks blocking arbitrary UDP may fail AWG and fall back; there is no AWG-over-QUIC substitution or AWG TURN relay hidden behind its name.

Data delivery checks go through the specific authenticated physical carrier, once per second, independently of control-plane RTT or the shared internal tunnel. A successful relay path cannot mask a broken direct carrier. Requests and replies bind a fresh private marker/key to the sender's endpoint id. Unanswered requests expire after three seconds. After a 20-second warmup, at least 15 completed observations and at least 60% loss in the last 20 observations retire a carrier. Probes are consumed at the carrier boundary and never enter the TUN or user IP counters. AWG additionally checks encrypted outer delivery throughout the pair lifetime.

Setup failure or persistent runtime loss advances to the next mutually supported carrier in the initiator's order. Earlier expired cooldowns do not jump ahead of untried carriers. Retry cooldowns remain bounded; reaching AWG again negotiates new parameters. Control sessions and the logical end-to-end tunnel survive a carrier change. Status and the tray show the actual external transport or relay route and data readiness. There is no user-selectable internal cipher.

The internal capability is wireguard-e2e v4; external wg and awg use v2, wg-quic v1 and tcp-tls v2. All members must upgrade together. Control ALPN tsunagi/ctrl/8, discovery, membership and signed state are unchanged. The data ALPN is tsunagi/data/6; the relay envelope format is unchanged. Local IPC is v23, so agent, CLI and tray must match. Historical wg-quic/wireguard.sqlite is the canonical internal key store. Missing keys are imported transactionally from wg then awg, without replacing an existing canonical key or modifying a source database. Corrupt key stores fail rather than silently regenerating keys. Device identities, network ids, addresses and saved transport choices survive.

Ordinary wg uses the same independent pair engine with standard WireGuard headers, no masking/junk, fresh hop keys and PSK, and a preferred local UDP port (default 51820; additional pairs use dynamic ports). The whole relay envelope is inside the hop encryption. It is separate from the internal WireGuard channel. Neither UDP mode is a client for an externally configured WireGuard server.

Verification

The default rootless, offline tests use real iroh endpoints, membership proofs, SQLite, UDP sockets, masked WireGuard handshakes, end-to-end encryption and memory TUNs. They cover independent three-member pairs, full-size bidirectional packets, restart freshness/socket release, 80% runtime datagram loss, fallback to real iroh and fresh negotiation on retry, plus malformed profiles/messages, role checks, probe forgery and STUN response parsing. These tests do not establish DPI effectiveness, WAN throughput, public NAT traversal or per-pair memory cost.