S2S Communication Now Encrypted with TLS! 🛡️
Hey RoseWire community! 👋
We’re thrilled to announce a significant upgrade that makes our federated network even more secure and robust: all Server-to-Server (S2S) communication on RoseWire now exclusively uses TLS (Transport Layer Security)! 🎉
What Does This Mean for You?
While you might not see a drastic change in your daily RoseWire experience, this under-the-hood improvement is crucial for the privacy and integrity of your data. Think of it as building a stronger, invisible fortress around all the conversations and file transfers happening between RoseWire instances. 🏰
Here’s the breakdown of what TLS for S2S brings:
- 🔒 Enhanced Privacy: All data exchanged between RoseWire servers — like shared posts, file transfer initiation, and peer discovery — is now encrypted end-to-end. This means eavesdroppers can’t snoop on the content as it travels across the internet. Your conversations stay private, as they should be! 🤫
- 🤝 Increased Trust & Authentication: TLS doesn’t just encrypt; it also verifies identities. Each RoseWire server now presents a trusted certificate (typically from a recognized authority like Let’s Encrypt 🌱) to other servers. This ensures that when your server communicates with another, it’s not leaking data in plain text. No more “man-in-the-middle” attacks! 🕵️♀️➡️❌
- 💪 Data Integrity: Beyond privacy and authentication, TLS also guarantees that the data hasn’t been tampered with during transit. If even a single bit of information is altered, the receiving server will detect it and reject the communication. Your data arrives exactly as it was sent! ✅
What’s Changed Under the Hood?
For the technically curious, we’ve transitioned our S2S endpoints to enforce HTTPS. This involved a few key changes:
- No More Plain HTTP for S2S: All peer-to-peer communication, including fetching public keys (
/actor), inbox messages (/api/s2s/inbox), and peer lists (/api/s2s/peers), now requires a secure HTTPS connection.
- Certificate Validation: Servers now perform strict validation of TLS certificates. If a peer server presents an untrusted (e.g., self-signed) or invalid certificate, the connection is immediately rejected. This is why you might have seen some
tls: bad certificate errors during the upgrade process if your servers weren’t all on trusted certificates. 😉
- Flexible Certificate Management: We’ve also updated the server configuration to allow administrators to provide paths to their own TLS certificate and private key files. This means instances can use certificates from various sources, including manually obtained Let’s Encrypt certificates (via DNS challenges, for example), giving admins more control. 📜🔑
Our Commitment to Security 🚀
This TLS upgrade is part of our ongoing commitment to making RoseWire a secure, private, and resilient platform for federated communication. We believe that strong encryption is not an option, but a fundamental requirement for any modern online service.
We’re excited for you to experience a more secure RoseWire. As always, if you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out!
Stay secure, The RoseWire Team 🌹
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