Constellation

Constellation forms a network of nodes, each of which advertises a list of public keys that they are the recipient for. Each node exposes an API which allows the user to send a payload to one or more public keys. That payload will be encrypted for the public key before being transferred over the wire to the recipient node. You can think of it as a network of Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs) exchanging PGP-encrypted emails.

Installation

Prerequisites

1. Install supporting libraries: - Ubuntu: apt-get install libdb-dev libsodium-dev zlib1g-dev libtinfo-dev - Red Hat: dnf install libdb-devel sodium-devel zlib-devel ncurses-devel - MacOS: brew install berkeley-db libsodium

Downloading precompiled binaries

Constellation binaries for most major platforms can be downloaded here.

Installation from source

1. First time only: Install Stack: - Linux: curl -sSL https://get.haskellstack.org/ | sh - MacOS: brew install haskell-stack
2. First time only: run stack setup to install the Haskell compiler
3. Run stack install

Generating keys

1. To generate two key pairs, one for the node and one for archival, run constellation-enclave-keygen node archival

If you choose to lock the keys with a password, they will be encrypted using a master key derived from the password using Argon2i. This is designed to be a very expensive operation to deter password cracking efforts. When constellation encounters a locked key, it will prompt for a password after which the decrypted key will live in memory until the process ends.

Running

1. Run constellation-node <path to config file>

For now, please refer to the Constellation client Go library for an example of how to use Constellation. More detailed documentation coming soon!

Configuration File Format

# Externally accessible URL for this node (this is what's advertised)
url = "http://127.0.0.1:9001/"

# Port to listen on
port = 9001

# Socket file to use for IPC
socketPath = "tm1.ipc"

# Initial (not necessarily complete) list of other nodes in the network.
# Constellation will automatically connect to other nodes not in this list
# that are advertised by the nodes below, thus these can be considered the
# "boot nodes."
otherNodeUrls = ["http://127.0.0.1:9000/"]

# This node's public key
publicKeyPath = "tm1.pub"

# This node's private key
privateKeyPath = "tm1.key"

# This node's archival key (payloads sent by this node are encrypted for
# this key by default.)
archivalPublicKeyPath = "tm1a.pub"

# This node's archival private key
archivalPrivateKeyPath = "tm1a.key"

# Where to store payloads and related information
storagePath = "data/payloads"