Three faults, all on the same screen, all only visible once passwords
were actually turned off — which until now nobody had done on a live
instance.
wp-login.php runs wp_signon() on its way to drawing the form, even for a
plain GET. Core tolerates that by discarding the result, but only when
the error codes are exactly the pair its own password filters produce.
Removing those filters is the whole point of turning passwords off, so
what was left behind was the generic authentication_failed — printed, in
red, above a form with no username and no password, on a site that has
neither. Every visitor was told their sign-in had failed before they
tried.
The paste-a-signature path had no way to submit. It borrowed core's
login button, and the stylesheet that retires the password form hid that
button too. The one route for people whose keys live on another machine
— sign in Electron Cash, paste the result — was therefore broken exactly
on the sites most committed to not having passwords. It now carries its
own plain submit button, so it also works on the screens where there is
no core login form to borrow from, and with JavaScript off.
And the username field outlived the password field, although
authenticate() never reads it either. "Username or Email Address" sat at
the top of a wallet login form: the one thing this fork exists to
remove, in the first place anyone looks. Both go now, with their
required attributes cleared, because a hidden required field does not
fail quietly — it refuses the submit and points an error bubble at a
control nobody can see.
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.
