Notary v0.4.0

Notary: a native NIP-46 remote signer for Nostr. macOS (Apple Silicon), ad-hoc signed (not notarized).

What's new in v0.4.0

• A relay that goes quiet is noticed. Each relay thread waits inside receive until its relay says something, so a peer that went away without closing left that thread waiting forever. For a signer that is the worst kind of failure: remote signing simply stops, the approval window never opens, the client's request times out, and the daemon still reports the relay as connected.

  A keeper thread now watches every connection, pings after thirty seconds of silence and half-closes the socket after ninety, which returns the blocked read and lets the relay thread reconnect. It has to be a separate thread, because a thread waiting on a dead peer is the last thing able to notice that it is waiting.

• Relays have a fourth state, quiet. The socket is open, nothing has come down it for a while, and a keepalive is out unanswered. Not disconnected, because nothing has failed; not plainly connected either, because the last evidence of that is a minute old. The GUI shows it in amber, and /info reports it.

• A request cannot get past the staleness check by choosing an absurd timestamp. Notary refuses a NIP-46 request older than two minutes, which is what stops a request captured off the relay from being replayed later. That age was a plain subtraction on a created_at the sender picked, and a request stamped with the smallest number an i64 holds made the difference too wide to fit, so it wrapped to a negative age. A negative age is not greater than two minutes, so the check waved it through.

  The arithmetic saturates now: a timestamp that far away reads as stale, which is what the check meant all along. This is a guard rather than the lock, since a request still has to be sealed to your bunker and authorized before anything is signed, but a replay window you can open by choosing a number is not one worth leaving open in the thing that holds your key.

Full history in the CHANGELOG. Your key never leaves the daemon.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zig-nostr/notary/main/scripts/install-macos.sh | bash

The installer downloads the latest release, verifies its SHA-256, installs Notary.app to /Applications, and opens it, ready to use.

Notary is ad-hoc signed, not notarized, on purpose: it holds your keys, so the trust anchor is a build you can reproduce, not an Apple signature. Read the installer or build from source. Your key never leaves the daemon.