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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Testing

Four suites, in rough order of how fast they run and how much they prove.

tests/run.sh          # unit + interop, ~1 second, no services
node tests/live.mjs   # end to end against a running instance

The fast suites

tests/run.sh

Needs PHP 7.4+ with GMP or BCMath, and Node 18+. About a second, no database and no server.

Suite	Checks	What it pins
`test-crypto.php`	23	secp256k1 against published vectors, RFC 6979 determinism, low-S, recovery round trips
`test-identity.php`	44	CashAddress encode/decode/normalise, BIP-39/32 derivation, both signing envelopes, canonical JSON
`test-export.php`	49	URL-to-path mapping, document-relative rewriting, gateway path rules
`interop.mjs`	22	the browser wallet against the PHP one, byte for byte

interop.mjs is the one that matters most. Sirius Press implements the same cryptography twice — PHP verifies, JavaScript signs — and every vector in that file came from libauth, the library the Sirius portal wallet and the BNS gateway both use. If the two implementations disagree by a byte, nobody can log in, and the error looks like a rejected password rather than a hash mismatch. This suite makes that a test failure instead of a bad evening.

A throwaway instance

You do not need Docker, MySQL or a VPS to run a real Sirius Press. PHP's built-in server plus the official SQLite drop-in is enough, and it starts in seconds.

# 1. a patched tree
tools/build.sh
cp -R dist/sirius-press /tmp/wpsite

# 2. SQLite instead of MySQL
curl -fsSL -o /tmp/sqlite.zip \
  https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/sqlite-database-integration.zip
unzip -q /tmp/sqlite.zip -d /tmp/wpsite/wp-content/plugins/
cp /tmp/wpsite/wp-content/plugins/sqlite-database-integration/db.copy \
   /tmp/wpsite/wp-content/db.php
mkdir -p /tmp/wpsite/wp-content/database

# 3. a config (any salts will do for a throwaway)
cp /tmp/wpsite/wp-config-sample.php /tmp/wpsite/wp-config.php
#    edit it: DB_* values are ignored by the SQLite drop-in, but add
#    define( 'WP_HOME', 'http://127.0.0.1:8760' );
#    define( 'WP_SITEURL', 'http://127.0.0.1:8760' );

# 4. run it
php -S 127.0.0.1:8760 -t /tmp/wpsite

Then open http://127.0.0.1:8760/wp-admin/install.php. The setup screen asks for a wallet address instead of an email one — that alone confirms the core patch applied.

PHP needs pdo_sqlite, sqlite3, gd, mbstring and one of GMP or BCMath.

Set pretty permalinks before testing publishing. With plain permalinks every post's URL is /?p=N, whose path is /, so the whole site maps to index.html and each page overwrites the last. The Publishing screen refuses to let this pass quietly, but a script driving the queue directly will not see the warning.

End to end

WALLET=/tmp/admin-wallet.json BASE=http://127.0.0.1:8760 node tests/live.mjs

WALLET is a JSON file holding an administrator's phrase and address:

{ "phrase": "twelve words …", "address": "bchtest:qq…" }

40 checks covering sign-in, replay refusal, a stranger's signature, a signature over altered text, purpose separation, registration, the recovery page and the REST endpoints — against a real WordPress, with real sessions.

It creates one account per run, so point it at a throwaway.

Running it with the ecosystem loaded

The suite is worth far more with third-party plugins active, because it then also proves the fork's admin screens survive them:

for p in wordpress-seo contact-form-7 woocommerce; do
  curl -fsSL -o "/tmp/$p.zip" "https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/$p.zip"
  unzip -q -o "/tmp/$p.zip" -d /tmp/wpsite/wp-content/plugins/
done
# activate them, then re-run tests/live.mjs

If you hit a 429, the rate limiter is doing its job — it caps signature verification per client. Clear it between runs:

DELETE FROM wp_options WHERE option_name LIKE '%_transient_%sirius_rl_%';

Publishing, without a registered name

The upload path cannot be tested end to end without a BCNR name and the key that owns it. What can be tested is the part that actually breaks — the bytes being signed — against the real verifier:

node tests/mock-gateway.mjs --owner bchtest:qq… --port 8799

This implements PUT /api/site/<name>/<path> with the signature check transcribed from Argus/src/gateway/public-gateway.mjs: same envelope, same digest, same recovery, same comparison against the owner. A request it accepts is one the real gateway accepts.

Point the site at it — Sirius Press → Settings, gateway http://127.0.0.1:8799 — store the matching phrase, publish a post, and watch the queue drain. Signing with any other key gets the same 403 the real gateway returns.

It needs @bitauth/libauth resolvable from the script, which is the point: it verifies with the same library the gateway does, not with ours.

What is not covered

A fresh VPS install. install.sh and the Docker stack are written and syntax-checked but have not been run against a clean Ubuntu box.
A real gateway upload. Verified against the transcribed verifier above, not against navigate.st with a registered name.
Browser UI. The signing scripts are exercised through Node, which runs the same code, but nobody has clicked the buttons in a browser.

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