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sirius-press/CHANGELOG.md
Silent Mode ddf49a5523 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

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Changelog

0.1.0 — unreleased

First cut. Sirius Press installs, signs people in with a wallet, and publishes static copies of its pages to a BCNR name.

Accounts

  • Sign in by signing a challenge with a Bitcoin Cash key. The address is recovered from the signature, so nothing has to be typed but the signature itself.
  • Three ways to produce one: a wallet the browser already exposes (Theseus), a recovery phrase used once in the page and wiped, or a signature pasted in from any BIP-137 wallet. The last works with JavaScript disabled.
  • One-step registration — the signature is the confirmation, so there is no email round trip and no pending state.
  • Password sign-in stays on by default and can be turned off once every account has a wallet. The screen that turns it off refuses to do so while it would lock out the person asking.
  • No password reset, and the "lost password" page explains why rather than pretending otherwise.
  • /sirius-press/v1/confirm lets any plugin demand a fresh signature before something irreversible.

Publishing

  • Publishing a post exports it, the home page and its archives to the name's storage on Sia, signed BNS-SITE1.
  • Two signing modes: manual, where the browser signs and the server stores nothing, and automatic, where an encrypted phrase lets cron publish alone. Manual is the default.
  • Unchanged pages are hashed and skipped rather than re-uploaded.
  • Unpublishing a post removes its file from the mirror.
  • wp sirius export and wp sirius status for the command line.

Compatibility

  • Every account carries an unroutable .invalid placeholder user_email, so the thousands of ecosystem reads of that field keep returning a string.
  • Mail to those placeholders is captured into an in-app inbox. Mail to real addresses is passed through untouched, so SMTP works normally.
  • Shims for WooCommerce, Contact Form 7 and core's admin-email machinery.

Core

  • One patch, 75 lines, against wp-admin/install.php: the setup wizard asks for a wallet address instead of an email address, and the address is optional.
  • WordPress is pinned and verified rather than vendored — tools/wordpress.lock plus patches/. See docs/upstream-merges.md.

Packaging

  • install.sh for a fresh Ubuntu VPS; Docker stack with MariaDB, PHP-FPM and nginx. Core lives in the image, so rebuilding is a real upgrade.
  • tools/build.sh --zip for shared hosting.
  • tools/update-wordpress.sh to move onto a new upstream release.
  • tools/publish-release.sh to ship to both mirrors.

Fixed while testing against a live instance

  • Registration and wallet-linking accepted a signature over the wrong text. Public-key recovery always succeeds — it returns a different key rather than failing — so a mismatched signature silently bound an account to an address nobody could sign for. Both paths now require the claimed address and compare it to the recovered one. Sign-in was never exposed to this, because a wrong address simply matches no account.
  • URL rewriting mangled links on any site whose URL carries a port: the protocol-relative pass matched inside absolute URLs and doubled the scheme, and a host-only match left the port stranded. Both covered by tests now.
  • Translations loaded on plugins_loaded, which WordPress 6.7+ warns about on every request. Moved to init.
  • The Publishing screen now refuses to be quiet about plain permalinks, which would collapse an entire site onto one exported file.
  • Removed an is_email() filter that rested on a false premise: WordPress validates syntax, not whether a domain can exist, so .invalid addresses already pass and the filter never fired. The documentation said otherwise and has been corrected.

Known gaps

  • install.sh and the Docker stack are written and syntax-checked but have not been run on a clean Ubuntu box.
  • Publishing is verified against a transcription of the gateway's own verification logic, not against navigate.st with a registered name.
  • Seven of the ten rows in the plugin compatibility matrix are reasoned rather than tested; the three named in the ship criteria were installed and run.