PROTOCOL NOTES / 05

Control & link health

Prove identity, authorize actions, and test the return path.

Implemented software · Physical qualification pending

Transport proof comes before engine hello

TLS 1.3 uses self-signed Ed25519 certificates to prove possession; outgoing connections pin the discovered expected identity. Session tickets and caching are disabled. A length-prefixed transport greeting exchanges protocol version, nonzero UDP media port, opposite directions, and attempt ID.

Engine hello then checks the ride, version, admission token, and membership rules. Both transport/greeting and hello have bounded establishment deadlines. A valid hello starts direct health tracking; it does not turn a standby edge into an active media path.

Signatures do not replace authorization

Signed control bodies carry version, ride, source, increasing sequence, and message type. Verification must also establish whether the source may perform that action: the organizer signs rosters; admitted sources announce their streams; handoff coordination is direct and bound to the TLS peer.

Signatures cover the exact compact body serialization used by pinned nlohmann::json::dump(), not RFC 8785. A compatible implementation must match ordering, escaping, UTF-8, and numeric representation.

Measure a round trip, not just incoming traffic

EventConfigured behavior
Ping interval1 second; signed direct neighbor exchange, never flooded
Suspect3 seconds without the required round-trip evidence
Dead6 seconds; close and repair the affected link
RecoveryTwo valid round trips; a pong consumes one outstanding token
Hello timeout5 seconds for an establishing protocol peer

Incoming audio is not sufficient proof that a control path works in both directions. Likewise, silence is not proof of a failed connection. Each pong must match a currently outstanding, single-use ping. These values are implemented software defaults, not qualified radio thresholds.

Repair the affected scope

Failure detection and scoped repair preserve unrelated branches.
Failure detection and scoped repair preserve unrelated branches. · Open full size ↗

A failed peer does not invalidate every binding on a shared interface. Reasoned state transitions feed diagnostics while reconnection uses the current session and route generation.

Authority: Wire reference; direct link liveness. Public examples are synthetic. This guide is maintained against the private implementation; it does not imply access to its source.