wp-login.php is the most-requested path on the internet. There is no
password here to guess, so this is not about brute force — it is that a
wallet login screen answering that path tells every scanner that goes
past exactly what is running, and serves a few hundred bots a day a page
they cannot use.
Setting a login address moves the screen and makes wp-login.php answer
404 through the theme's own template. A 404 and not a redirect: a
redirect would hand the new address to the first scanner that asked for
the old one. Everything that builds a login URL follows it, because they
all go through site_url() or network_site_url() with a wp-login.php
path, and there is a wp_redirect backstop for code that builds the URL
by hand.
Refusing wp-login.php has to happen at wp_loaded and has to end the
request there. The web server sends that path to the file directly
rather than through index.php, so by the time anything of ours runs we
are already inside its require of wp-load.php — rewriting $pagenow
changes what WordPress thinks the request is, but it does not stop the
script that is already running.
What this does not do is rename wp-admin. WordPress has no supported way
to, and faking it with a proxy and a filtered admin_url() gets most of
the way before breaking plugins quietly. Breaking plugins is the one
thing this fork promises not to do, so the setting says as much on the
screen rather than implying more than it delivers.
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.
