Middleware: Communication
BitBoxApp <-> Middleware RPCs
TODO
The Middleware handles the communication between the BitBoxApp and the BitBoxBase.
- minimize traffic
- RPC Client/Server (Go RPC package)
- Why Websockets
- End to End encryption
- Noise paring / handshake
- TLS vs Noise
- JWT Authentication
Specific RPC sequence diagrams:
HSM communication
TODO
IPC notifications
The Middleware is able to receive IPC notifications from other processes running on the BitBoxBase. IPC notifications are implemented via a Unix named pipe and notifications are formatted in a JSON based protocol. Using a named pipe allows simple and dependencyless implementation in other Go, Python or Shell Script based processes running on the BitBoxBase. One draw back is that a named pipe blocks writes until the content is read. By default the named pipe is located in /tmp/middleware-notification.pipe and system level permissions are required to write in the pipe.
Schematic showing multiple scripts writing notifications into the named pipe.
The JSON based protocol for the notifications is versioned, includes a notification topic and a can contain a payload. The payload can contain any valid JSON structure. Since a write operation to a unix pipe only being atomic (i.e. two writes do not interleave) as long as the amount written is smaller than the PIPE_BUF, which is 4096 bytes for Linux, the Middleware drops all notifications bigger than 4095 bytes.
Sample notification:
{"version": 1, "topic": "sampletopic", "payload": {"sampleInt":123,"sampleString": "string", "sampleBool": true}}