feat(sirius-press): a WordPress where the account is a key, not a mailbox
WordPress makes two assumptions this project cannot accept: that identity
comes from an email address, and that a site lives at one server. Both are
things somebody else can take away — a mailbox is rented from a provider who
can close it or be compelled to open it, and a server is one seizure from
being gone.
Sirius Press replaces the first and hedges the second.
Signing in means signing a challenge with the key that controls a CashAddress.
The address is recovered from the signature, so nothing is typed but the
signature itself, and the result is an ordinary WordPress session cookie —
roles, capabilities, nonces and the REST API never learn the login was
different. Three ways to produce one: a wallet the browser already exposes, a
phrase used once in the page and wiped, or a signature pasted in from any
BIP-137 wallet, which needs no JavaScript and lets the key stay on a machine
that never touches the web.
There is no password reset, and the recovery page says so plainly rather than
offering a form that cannot work. A reset mechanism is by construction a way
to take an account from its owner, and it is always easier to attack than the
cryptography it bypasses.
Publishing a post also exports it as static HTML to the name's storage on Sia,
signed by the key that owns the name, so the site keeps answering when the
server does not.
Email as a feature is untouched. wp_mail() still works, SMTP still sends, and
contact forms still deliver to addresses real people typed. Only mail to the
site's own unroutable placeholder addresses is diverted to an in-app inbox.
The objection was to email as identity, not to email.
Core is pinned and patched rather than vendored. WordPress 7.1.1 is 149 MB and
5,008 files; the fork's entire core diff is 75 lines in wp-admin/install.php.
Carrying the former to express the latter would bury the patch where nobody
reviews it and make every clone of the monorepo pay for it. Upstream releases
still merge through tools/update-wordpress.sh, which reapplies the series and
says exactly which hunk needs a human.
The cryptography is implemented twice — PHP on the server, JavaScript in the
page — because the server must verify and the browser must sign. Both are
pinned against libauth, the library the Sirius portal wallet and the BNS
gateway already use, so a disagreement of one byte fails the test suite rather
than presenting as a rejected login at three in the morning.
132 checks, no framework, about a second.
2026-09-21 01:39:38 +02:00
# Sirius Press
WordPress, with the mailbox taken out of the middle of it.
An account on a Sirius Press site is a Bitcoin Cash address. Signing in means
signing a challenge with the key that controls it. There is no registration
email, no confirmation link, no password reset — and no list of your readers'
email addresses sitting in a database waiting to leak.
Everything the site publishes is also mirrored, as plain static HTML, to the
BCNR name it belongs to. When the server is down, being upgraded, or seized,
the name keeps serving the last thing it published.
It is still WordPress. Yoast, WooCommerce, Contact Form 7 and the rest of the
ecosystem install and run; roles, capabilities, nonces and the REST API are
untouched. The fork's diff against upstream core is **one file, 75 lines** —
everything else is plugins.
---
## What this is for
You own a BCNR name. You want a real site behind it — one with an editor, a
media library, plugins, a theme you did not have to write — without the two
things WordPress assumes and this project rejects:
1. **That identity comes from email.** It does not. A mailbox is rented from
somebody who can close it, read it, or be compelled to hand it over. A key
is not.
2. **That the site lives at one server.** Sirius Press publishes a static copy
of every page to your name's storage on Sia, signed by the key that owns the
name. Readers reach that copy through any BCNR resolver, with no DNS and no
certificate authority in the path.
Email itself still works. `wp_mail()` is not disabled — configure SMTP and your
contact forms send, your WooCommerce receipts arrive. The objection was never
to email as a feature. It was to email as an identity.
---
## Getting it running
On a fresh Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 server:
```bash
curl -fsSL https://silentmode.st/sirius-press/install.sh | sudo bash
```
That installs Docker if needed, brings up MariaDB + PHP-FPM + nginx, and prints
the URL to finish setup. It takes about five minutes on a small VPS, most of it
building the PHP image.
For shared hosting, a `.zip` you can upload is on
[the releases page ](https://code.silentmode.st/silentmode/sirius-press/releases ).
Full instructions, including how to point your name at it:
**[docs/install.md ](docs/install.md )**.
---
## How it works
### Signing in
The login page issues a short, single-use challenge. You sign it, the server
recovers the public key from the signature, derives the address, and looks up
the account. Nothing is typed but the signature.
Three ways to produce it, in order of preference:
- **A wallet the browser already has.** Theseus exposes one; the key never
touches the page.
- **A recovery phrase typed into the login form.** Used once, in the page, then
wiped. It is never transmitted — only the signature is.
- **Any Bitcoin Cash wallet at all.** The challenge is a BIP-137 message, the
format Electron Cash has had a "Sign message" box for since forever. Copy the
text, sign it on a machine that never touches the web, paste the result back.
This path works with JavaScript switched off.
The signature becomes an ordinary WordPress session cookie. Everything
downstream — `current_user_can()` , nonces, REST permissions, every plugin that
checks a capability — behaves exactly as it does on stock WordPress.
**There is no password reset, because there is nothing to reset.** If you lose
your phrase, the account is gone. An administrator can point an account at a
new address from the user editor, which makes recovery a decision a human
makes about a person they recognise — not something an attacker triggers by
compromising a mailbox. [docs/accounts.md ](docs/accounts.md ) says this at more
length, and the fork's "lost password" page says it to your users.
### Publishing
Publish a post and the affected pages — the post, the home page, the archives
it belongs to — are queued. Draining the queue renders each page over a
loopback request, rewrites its links to be document-relative, and PUTs it to
`/api/site/<name>/<path>` on the BNS gateway, signed by the key that owns the
name.
Signing happens one of two ways, and the choice is yours:
| | Where the key lives | Unattended publishing |
|---|---|---|
| **Manual** (default) | Nowhere. You type the phrase on the Publishing screen, it signs in your browser and uploads straight to the gateway. | No — the queue waits for you. |
| **Automatic** | Encrypted in the database, under `SIRIUS_PRESS_KEY` from `wp-config.php` . | Yes — cron drains the queue. |
Automatic is genuinely convenient and genuinely risky, and the settings screen
says so in those words. The gateway only accepts writes signed by the name's
current on-chain owner, so the key that can publish for your name is the key
that owns your name and its funds. There is no middle option where the server
holds something weaker; that is a property of the protocol, not a gap in this
fork. [docs/publishing.md ](docs/publishing.md ) has the details.
---
## Layout
```
plugins/
sirius-press-core/ wallet crypto, gateway client, settings, the inbox
sirius-press-auth/ wallet sign-in, registration, the recovery page
sirius-press-sia-export/ the static export queue and uploader
sirius-press-compat/ shims for plugins that insist on an admin email
mu-plugins/ the bits that must load before plugins do
build(sirius-press): build from the vendored subtree instead of a download
The subtree is in place, so everything that used to fetch and patch core at
build time now just copies it.
tools/build.sh copies wordpress/ — no download, no checksum step,
because there is nothing to fetch and nothing to
trust that is not already in the repository
docker/Dockerfile COPY wordpress/ instead of curl + sha256 + patch;
the build args and the `patch` package are gone
docker-compose.yml no WP_VERSION / WP_URL / WP_SHA256 to keep in step
tools/update-wordpress.sh is rewritten around what the subtree makes
possible. It imports the pristine release onto sirius-press/wordpress-upstream
and then `git subtree merge`s that branch, which three-way merges upstream
against the fork's own commit. A patch either applies with fuzz and hopes or
fails and leaves you re-deriving the change by hand; a merge conflict is
resolved once, in the file, and the next release merges against the
resolution.
patches/ survives as documentation rather than mechanism, and is now
generated: tools/refresh-patches.sh diffs the subtree against the pristine
import and rewrites the directory, with --check for CI. It answers the
question anyone auditing a fork asks first — what exactly did you change
inside WordPress? — in a minute, which `git log wordpress/` cannot, because
that log is mostly upstream imports. Generated documentation stays true; a
hand-maintained record of a core diff drifts, and a stale one is worse than
none because people trust it.
One test change worth noting: the syntax sweep no longer walks all of
wordpress/. It lints the fork's own PHP plus every core file patches/ says
the fork touches, which keeps the suite at seven seconds instead of a minute
while still covering the only core file that can break.
2026-09-21 03:19:28 +02:00
wordpress/ WordPress itself, vendored as a subtree, patched
patches/ a generated record of the core diff — one file
feat(sirius-press): a WordPress where the account is a key, not a mailbox
WordPress makes two assumptions this project cannot accept: that identity
comes from an email address, and that a site lives at one server. Both are
things somebody else can take away — a mailbox is rented from a provider who
can close it or be compelled to open it, and a server is one seizure from
being gone.
Sirius Press replaces the first and hedges the second.
Signing in means signing a challenge with the key that controls a CashAddress.
The address is recovered from the signature, so nothing is typed but the
signature itself, and the result is an ordinary WordPress session cookie —
roles, capabilities, nonces and the REST API never learn the login was
different. Three ways to produce one: a wallet the browser already exposes, a
phrase used once in the page and wiped, or a signature pasted in from any
BIP-137 wallet, which needs no JavaScript and lets the key stay on a machine
that never touches the web.
There is no password reset, and the recovery page says so plainly rather than
offering a form that cannot work. A reset mechanism is by construction a way
to take an account from its owner, and it is always easier to attack than the
cryptography it bypasses.
Publishing a post also exports it as static HTML to the name's storage on Sia,
signed by the key that owns the name, so the site keeps answering when the
server does not.
Email as a feature is untouched. wp_mail() still works, SMTP still sends, and
contact forms still deliver to addresses real people typed. Only mail to the
site's own unroutable placeholder addresses is diverted to an in-app inbox.
The objection was to email as identity, not to email.
Core is pinned and patched rather than vendored. WordPress 7.1.1 is 149 MB and
5,008 files; the fork's entire core diff is 75 lines in wp-admin/install.php.
Carrying the former to express the latter would bury the patch where nobody
reviews it and make every clone of the monorepo pay for it. Upstream releases
still merge through tools/update-wordpress.sh, which reapplies the series and
says exactly which hunk needs a human.
The cryptography is implemented twice — PHP on the server, JavaScript in the
page — because the server must verify and the browser must sign. Both are
pinned against libauth, the library the Sirius portal wallet and the BNS
gateway already use, so a disagreement of one byte fails the test suite rather
than presenting as a rejected login at three in the morning.
132 checks, no framework, about a second.
2026-09-21 01:39:38 +02:00
docker/ compose stack: MariaDB, PHP-FPM, nginx
tools/ build, upstream update, release
fix(sirius-press): recovering a key is not the same as verifying a signature
Running the fork against a live WordPress found a real hole in registration,
and it is the kind that only shows up when you actually try it.
ECDSA public-key recovery always succeeds. Given any well-formed signature
and any digest it returns a key — just not the signer's, unless the digest is
the one that was signed. The auth flow leaned on that as if a wrong message
would fail. It does not; it quietly yields a stranger's address.
At sign-in this was harmless, because the wrong address matches no account
and the attempt fails. Registration and wallet-linking were another matter:
both took the recovered address and bound it to an account, so a signature
over slightly different text — a challenge copied without its blank line, a
wallet that rewrote the text, a login signature replayed at the registration
form — created an account keyed to an address nobody could sign for. The
person would see "success" and discover the truth the next time they tried to
get in. Wallet-linking was worse still: it would move an existing account onto
a dead address and lock its owner out of their own site.
Both paths now require the address the signer claims and compare it to the
recovered one, which is what verification actually means. Sign-in accepts the
claim when the page sends it and uses it to turn "no account uses that wallet"
into the more useful "that signature is not over the text we asked for".
Also from running it:
URL rewriting mangled every link on a site whose URL carries a port. The
protocol-relative pass matched inside absolute URLs and gave each one a second
scheme, and matching the host without its port left the port stranded as
`//host:8760:8760/`. Local and staging installs would have exported a site of
broken links.
Plain permalinks silently collapse an entire site onto one exported file,
because every post's URL is `/?p=N` and its path is `/`. The queue looks
healthy the whole time. The Publishing screen now says so.
Translations loaded on `plugins_loaded`, which WordPress 6.7 warns about on
every request — the kind of noise that trains people to stop reading logs.
And one deletion: an `is_email()` filter written on the assumption that
WordPress rejects `.invalid` addresses. It does not — `is_email()` validates
syntax, not whether a domain could exist — so the filter never fired. A filter
that appears to relax a rule but does not is worse than no filter, because
someone later reasons from it. The documentation made the same claim and has
been corrected.
Verification added rather than asserted: tests/live.mjs drives a real instance
over HTTP (40 checks), and tests/mock-gateway.mjs answers uploads with the
signature check transcribed from the gateway's own source, so the publishing
path can be exercised without a registered name.
2026-09-21 02:35:32 +02:00
tests/ 138 unit checks plus a live end-to-end suite
feat(sirius-press): a WordPress where the account is a key, not a mailbox
WordPress makes two assumptions this project cannot accept: that identity
comes from an email address, and that a site lives at one server. Both are
things somebody else can take away — a mailbox is rented from a provider who
can close it or be compelled to open it, and a server is one seizure from
being gone.
Sirius Press replaces the first and hedges the second.
Signing in means signing a challenge with the key that controls a CashAddress.
The address is recovered from the signature, so nothing is typed but the
signature itself, and the result is an ordinary WordPress session cookie —
roles, capabilities, nonces and the REST API never learn the login was
different. Three ways to produce one: a wallet the browser already exposes, a
phrase used once in the page and wiped, or a signature pasted in from any
BIP-137 wallet, which needs no JavaScript and lets the key stay on a machine
that never touches the web.
There is no password reset, and the recovery page says so plainly rather than
offering a form that cannot work. A reset mechanism is by construction a way
to take an account from its owner, and it is always easier to attack than the
cryptography it bypasses.
Publishing a post also exports it as static HTML to the name's storage on Sia,
signed by the key that owns the name, so the site keeps answering when the
server does not.
Email as a feature is untouched. wp_mail() still works, SMTP still sends, and
contact forms still deliver to addresses real people typed. Only mail to the
site's own unroutable placeholder addresses is diverted to an in-app inbox.
The objection was to email as identity, not to email.
Core is pinned and patched rather than vendored. WordPress 7.1.1 is 149 MB and
5,008 files; the fork's entire core diff is 75 lines in wp-admin/install.php.
Carrying the former to express the latter would bury the patch where nobody
reviews it and make every clone of the monorepo pay for it. Upstream releases
still merge through tools/update-wordpress.sh, which reapplies the series and
says exactly which hunk needs a human.
The cryptography is implemented twice — PHP on the server, JavaScript in the
page — because the server must verify and the browser must sign. Both are
pinned against libauth, the library the Sirius portal wallet and the BNS
gateway already use, so a disagreement of one byte fails the test suite rather
than presenting as a rejected login at three in the morning.
132 checks, no framework, about a second.
2026-09-21 01:39:38 +02:00
docs/
```
### Where WordPress itself is
build(sirius-press): build from the vendored subtree instead of a download
The subtree is in place, so everything that used to fetch and patch core at
build time now just copies it.
tools/build.sh copies wordpress/ — no download, no checksum step,
because there is nothing to fetch and nothing to
trust that is not already in the repository
docker/Dockerfile COPY wordpress/ instead of curl + sha256 + patch;
the build args and the `patch` package are gone
docker-compose.yml no WP_VERSION / WP_URL / WP_SHA256 to keep in step
tools/update-wordpress.sh is rewritten around what the subtree makes
possible. It imports the pristine release onto sirius-press/wordpress-upstream
and then `git subtree merge`s that branch, which three-way merges upstream
against the fork's own commit. A patch either applies with fuzz and hopes or
fails and leaves you re-deriving the change by hand; a merge conflict is
resolved once, in the file, and the next release merges against the
resolution.
patches/ survives as documentation rather than mechanism, and is now
generated: tools/refresh-patches.sh diffs the subtree against the pristine
import and rewrites the directory, with --check for CI. It answers the
question anyone auditing a fork asks first — what exactly did you change
inside WordPress? — in a minute, which `git log wordpress/` cannot, because
that log is mostly upstream imports. Generated documentation stays true; a
hand-maintained record of a core diff drifts, and a stale one is worse than
none because people trust it.
One test change worth noting: the syntax sweep no longer walks all of
wordpress/. It lints the fork's own PHP plus every core file patches/ says
the fork touches, which keeps the suite at seven seconds instead of a minute
while still covering the only core file that can break.
2026-09-21 03:19:28 +02:00
In `wordpress/` , as a git subtree, already patched. That is what gets built
and what gets shipped — there is no download step and no checksum to trust at
build time.
Upstream releases arrive through `git subtree merge` against a branch of
pristine imports, which three-way merges them against the fork's own commit
on top. `tools/update-wordpress.sh <version>` does the whole thing;
`patches/` keeps a generated, readable record of the 75 lines that differ
from stock WordPress, so nobody has to read a 3,800-file log to find out what
this fork changes in core.
The trade is repository size — WordPress is about 149 MB. Worth it for a fork
that can absorb a security release in a minute.
[docs/upstream-merges.md ](docs/upstream-merges.md ) has the procedure.
feat(sirius-press): a WordPress where the account is a key, not a mailbox
WordPress makes two assumptions this project cannot accept: that identity
comes from an email address, and that a site lives at one server. Both are
things somebody else can take away — a mailbox is rented from a provider who
can close it or be compelled to open it, and a server is one seizure from
being gone.
Sirius Press replaces the first and hedges the second.
Signing in means signing a challenge with the key that controls a CashAddress.
The address is recovered from the signature, so nothing is typed but the
signature itself, and the result is an ordinary WordPress session cookie —
roles, capabilities, nonces and the REST API never learn the login was
different. Three ways to produce one: a wallet the browser already exposes, a
phrase used once in the page and wiped, or a signature pasted in from any
BIP-137 wallet, which needs no JavaScript and lets the key stay on a machine
that never touches the web.
There is no password reset, and the recovery page says so plainly rather than
offering a form that cannot work. A reset mechanism is by construction a way
to take an account from its owner, and it is always easier to attack than the
cryptography it bypasses.
Publishing a post also exports it as static HTML to the name's storage on Sia,
signed by the key that owns the name, so the site keeps answering when the
server does not.
Email as a feature is untouched. wp_mail() still works, SMTP still sends, and
contact forms still deliver to addresses real people typed. Only mail to the
site's own unroutable placeholder addresses is diverted to an in-app inbox.
The objection was to email as identity, not to email.
Core is pinned and patched rather than vendored. WordPress 7.1.1 is 149 MB and
5,008 files; the fork's entire core diff is 75 lines in wp-admin/install.php.
Carrying the former to express the latter would bury the patch where nobody
reviews it and make every clone of the monorepo pay for it. Upstream releases
still merge through tools/update-wordpress.sh, which reapplies the series and
says exactly which hunk needs a human.
The cryptography is implemented twice — PHP on the server, JavaScript in the
page — because the server must verify and the browser must sign. Both are
pinned against libauth, the library the Sirius portal wallet and the BNS
gateway already use, so a disagreement of one byte fails the test suite rather
than presenting as a rejected login at three in the morning.
132 checks, no framework, about a second.
2026-09-21 01:39:38 +02:00
---
## Requirements
- PHP 7.4+ — 8.2 or newer recommended
- **GMP or BCMath.** Not optional: the wallet cryptography runs in PHP. GMP is
about twenty times faster and is what the Docker image uses.
- 64-bit PHP — address checksums need 40-bit arithmetic
- OpenSSL, for encrypting a stored publishing key
- MySQL 5.7+ / MariaDB 10.4+
---
## Testing
```bash
fix(sirius-press): recovering a key is not the same as verifying a signature
Running the fork against a live WordPress found a real hole in registration,
and it is the kind that only shows up when you actually try it.
ECDSA public-key recovery always succeeds. Given any well-formed signature
and any digest it returns a key — just not the signer's, unless the digest is
the one that was signed. The auth flow leaned on that as if a wrong message
would fail. It does not; it quietly yields a stranger's address.
At sign-in this was harmless, because the wrong address matches no account
and the attempt fails. Registration and wallet-linking were another matter:
both took the recovered address and bound it to an account, so a signature
over slightly different text — a challenge copied without its blank line, a
wallet that rewrote the text, a login signature replayed at the registration
form — created an account keyed to an address nobody could sign for. The
person would see "success" and discover the truth the next time they tried to
get in. Wallet-linking was worse still: it would move an existing account onto
a dead address and lock its owner out of their own site.
Both paths now require the address the signer claims and compare it to the
recovered one, which is what verification actually means. Sign-in accepts the
claim when the page sends it and uses it to turn "no account uses that wallet"
into the more useful "that signature is not over the text we asked for".
Also from running it:
URL rewriting mangled every link on a site whose URL carries a port. The
protocol-relative pass matched inside absolute URLs and gave each one a second
scheme, and matching the host without its port left the port stranded as
`//host:8760:8760/`. Local and staging installs would have exported a site of
broken links.
Plain permalinks silently collapse an entire site onto one exported file,
because every post's URL is `/?p=N` and its path is `/`. The queue looks
healthy the whole time. The Publishing screen now says so.
Translations loaded on `plugins_loaded`, which WordPress 6.7 warns about on
every request — the kind of noise that trains people to stop reading logs.
And one deletion: an `is_email()` filter written on the assumption that
WordPress rejects `.invalid` addresses. It does not — `is_email()` validates
syntax, not whether a domain could exist — so the filter never fired. A filter
that appears to relax a rule but does not is worse than no filter, because
someone later reasons from it. The documentation made the same claim and has
been corrected.
Verification added rather than asserted: tests/live.mjs drives a real instance
over HTTP (40 checks), and tests/mock-gateway.mjs answers uploads with the
signature check transcribed from the gateway's own source, so the publishing
path can be exercised without a registered name.
2026-09-21 02:35:32 +02:00
tests/run.sh # 138 checks, no framework, about a second
node tests/live.mjs # 40 more, against a running instance
feat(sirius-press): a WordPress where the account is a key, not a mailbox
WordPress makes two assumptions this project cannot accept: that identity
comes from an email address, and that a site lives at one server. Both are
things somebody else can take away — a mailbox is rented from a provider who
can close it or be compelled to open it, and a server is one seizure from
being gone.
Sirius Press replaces the first and hedges the second.
Signing in means signing a challenge with the key that controls a CashAddress.
The address is recovered from the signature, so nothing is typed but the
signature itself, and the result is an ordinary WordPress session cookie —
roles, capabilities, nonces and the REST API never learn the login was
different. Three ways to produce one: a wallet the browser already exposes, a
phrase used once in the page and wiped, or a signature pasted in from any
BIP-137 wallet, which needs no JavaScript and lets the key stay on a machine
that never touches the web.
There is no password reset, and the recovery page says so plainly rather than
offering a form that cannot work. A reset mechanism is by construction a way
to take an account from its owner, and it is always easier to attack than the
cryptography it bypasses.
Publishing a post also exports it as static HTML to the name's storage on Sia,
signed by the key that owns the name, so the site keeps answering when the
server does not.
Email as a feature is untouched. wp_mail() still works, SMTP still sends, and
contact forms still deliver to addresses real people typed. Only mail to the
site's own unroutable placeholder addresses is diverted to an in-app inbox.
The objection was to email as identity, not to email.
Core is pinned and patched rather than vendored. WordPress 7.1.1 is 149 MB and
5,008 files; the fork's entire core diff is 75 lines in wp-admin/install.php.
Carrying the former to express the latter would bury the patch where nobody
reviews it and make every clone of the monorepo pay for it. Upstream releases
still merge through tools/update-wordpress.sh, which reapplies the series and
says exactly which hunk needs a human.
The cryptography is implemented twice — PHP on the server, JavaScript in the
page — because the server must verify and the browser must sign. Both are
pinned against libauth, the library the Sirius portal wallet and the BNS
gateway already use, so a disagreement of one byte fails the test suite rather
than presenting as a rejected login at three in the morning.
132 checks, no framework, about a second.
2026-09-21 01:39:38 +02:00
```
fix(sirius-press): recovering a key is not the same as verifying a signature
Running the fork against a live WordPress found a real hole in registration,
and it is the kind that only shows up when you actually try it.
ECDSA public-key recovery always succeeds. Given any well-formed signature
and any digest it returns a key — just not the signer's, unless the digest is
the one that was signed. The auth flow leaned on that as if a wrong message
would fail. It does not; it quietly yields a stranger's address.
At sign-in this was harmless, because the wrong address matches no account
and the attempt fails. Registration and wallet-linking were another matter:
both took the recovered address and bound it to an account, so a signature
over slightly different text — a challenge copied without its blank line, a
wallet that rewrote the text, a login signature replayed at the registration
form — created an account keyed to an address nobody could sign for. The
person would see "success" and discover the truth the next time they tried to
get in. Wallet-linking was worse still: it would move an existing account onto
a dead address and lock its owner out of their own site.
Both paths now require the address the signer claims and compare it to the
recovered one, which is what verification actually means. Sign-in accepts the
claim when the page sends it and uses it to turn "no account uses that wallet"
into the more useful "that signature is not over the text we asked for".
Also from running it:
URL rewriting mangled every link on a site whose URL carries a port. The
protocol-relative pass matched inside absolute URLs and gave each one a second
scheme, and matching the host without its port left the port stranded as
`//host:8760:8760/`. Local and staging installs would have exported a site of
broken links.
Plain permalinks silently collapse an entire site onto one exported file,
because every post's URL is `/?p=N` and its path is `/`. The queue looks
healthy the whole time. The Publishing screen now says so.
Translations loaded on `plugins_loaded`, which WordPress 6.7 warns about on
every request — the kind of noise that trains people to stop reading logs.
And one deletion: an `is_email()` filter written on the assumption that
WordPress rejects `.invalid` addresses. It does not — `is_email()` validates
syntax, not whether a domain could exist — so the filter never fired. A filter
that appears to relax a rule but does not is worse than no filter, because
someone later reasons from it. The documentation made the same claim and has
been corrected.
Verification added rather than asserted: tests/live.mjs drives a real instance
over HTTP (40 checks), and tests/mock-gateway.mjs answers uploads with the
signature check transcribed from the gateway's own source, so the publishing
path can be exercised without a registered name.
2026-09-21 02:35:32 +02:00
The suite that matters most is `tests/interop.mjs` , which pins the browser
wallet against the PHP one. Both implement secp256k1, RFC 6979, BIP-32 and
BIP-137 independently, and every vector came from libauth — the library the
Sirius portal wallet and the BNS gateway both use. A signature made in a
browser verifies on the server and at the gateway, or the suite fails.
### What has actually been run
On WordPress 7.1.1, against a live instance:
- The patched setup wizard asks for a wallet and installs with or without one.
- Sign-in, registration, replay refusal, wrong-key refusal, altered-text
refusal and purpose separation — 40 checks, all through real HTTP with real
session cookies.
- Yoast SEO 28.6, Contact Form 7 6.1.7 and WooCommerce 11.1.1 install,
activate, and leave every Sirius Press screen rendering cleanly.
- Publishing: 29 files signed by the server and accepted by a gateway running
the real verification logic, read back intact, with a wrong key refused 403.
- An upstream version bump through `tools/update-wordpress.sh` , reapplying the
patch series.
Not yet run: `install.sh` on a clean Ubuntu box, and an upload to the real
gateway with a registered name. [docs/testing.md ](docs/testing.md ) says how to
do both and what each proves.
feat(sirius-press): a WordPress where the account is a key, not a mailbox
WordPress makes two assumptions this project cannot accept: that identity
comes from an email address, and that a site lives at one server. Both are
things somebody else can take away — a mailbox is rented from a provider who
can close it or be compelled to open it, and a server is one seizure from
being gone.
Sirius Press replaces the first and hedges the second.
Signing in means signing a challenge with the key that controls a CashAddress.
The address is recovered from the signature, so nothing is typed but the
signature itself, and the result is an ordinary WordPress session cookie —
roles, capabilities, nonces and the REST API never learn the login was
different. Three ways to produce one: a wallet the browser already exposes, a
phrase used once in the page and wiped, or a signature pasted in from any
BIP-137 wallet, which needs no JavaScript and lets the key stay on a machine
that never touches the web.
There is no password reset, and the recovery page says so plainly rather than
offering a form that cannot work. A reset mechanism is by construction a way
to take an account from its owner, and it is always easier to attack than the
cryptography it bypasses.
Publishing a post also exports it as static HTML to the name's storage on Sia,
signed by the key that owns the name, so the site keeps answering when the
server does not.
Email as a feature is untouched. wp_mail() still works, SMTP still sends, and
contact forms still deliver to addresses real people typed. Only mail to the
site's own unroutable placeholder addresses is diverted to an in-app inbox.
The objection was to email as identity, not to email.
Core is pinned and patched rather than vendored. WordPress 7.1.1 is 149 MB and
5,008 files; the fork's entire core diff is 75 lines in wp-admin/install.php.
Carrying the former to express the latter would bury the patch where nobody
reviews it and make every clone of the monorepo pay for it. Upstream releases
still merge through tools/update-wordpress.sh, which reapplies the series and
says exactly which hunk needs a human.
The cryptography is implemented twice — PHP on the server, JavaScript in the
page — because the server must verify and the browser must sign. Both are
pinned against libauth, the library the Sirius portal wallet and the BNS
gateway already use, so a disagreement of one byte fails the test suite rather
than presenting as a rejected login at three in the morning.
132 checks, no framework, about a second.
2026-09-21 01:39:38 +02:00
---
## Licence
GPL-2.0-or-later, inherited from WordPress.
