silentmode/sirius-press
2
0
Fork 0
Code Issues Pull requests Projects Releases Packages Wiki Activity Actions
sirius-press/CHANGELOG.md
Silent Mode 5465b65756 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

2.8 KiB
Raw Blame History

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.

Known gaps

  • The plugin compatibility matrix in docs is reasoned from each plugin's setup path, not yet confirmed against a running install.
  • No instance has been stood up end to end against a live chipnet name, so the full publish path is verified by unit and interop tests rather than by a round trip through the gateway.