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John Brooks bec3784f2f core: Track Tor's connectivity state and other details 2016-08-28 19:59:49 -06:00
backend rpc: Draft more RPC API calls 2016-08-16 17:43:39 -07:00
cli cli: Start a trivial readline-style interface 2016-08-16 17:58:39 -07:00
core core: Track Tor's connectivity state and other details 2016-08-28 19:59:49 -06:00
rpc rpc: Draft more RPC API calls 2016-08-16 17:43:39 -07:00
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README.md Fix README markup. 2016-08-03 01:39:03 +02:00

README.md

This is an idea for the architecture of a Ricochet client. Don't get excited. It doesn't do anything.

The idea is to implement all client backend logic in Go, and export a RPC API for frontends.

Benefits:

  • We can have all network-facing and critical logic in Go, without being forced to use Go for frontends (because it lacks decent UI capability)
  • We can keep the current Qt UI implementation as one frontend
  • It's easy to build new frontends in anything that can use gRPC (like cli)
  • Backends are headless and frontends are detachable and interchangable
  • Can do some fancy sandboxing

Other ideas:

  • This is currently using RPC only for the backend<->frontend; would it make sense to RPC any other layers or distinct components? Could have security benefits.
  • In particular, we still have one process that has access to private keys, tor config, and untrusted network traffic. That sucks.
  • Can do frontend connection to backend over authorized onion for advanced setups

Structure:

  • core is the client logic implementation
  • rpc has gRPC/protobuf definitions & generated code
  • backend is the backend RPC server
  • cli is an example frontend client