Validate Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) message and message values, either individually or as hash chains (with support for parallel batch validation).
The aim here is to get as close as possible to the full set of validation criteria employed by the JavaScript implementation of ssb-validate.
Support for out-of-order validation (regular and parallel) and multi-author out-of-order validation (regular and parallel) has been added.
Visit the ssb-validate2-rsjs-node repo (the src/lib.rs file in particular) to see examples of this crate in action. The validation functionality is paired with ssb-verify-signatures to perform complete validation of SSB messages. A technique for returning an invalid message when performing parallel validation is also included in the code.
Further examples can be seen in the tests of src/message.rs and src/message_value.rs in this repo.
Secure Scuttlebutt "feeds" are a sequence of messages published by one author. To be valid, a message must satisfy a number of criteria. The exact criteria depend on the context of the message. It's important to note that this crate does not perform signature verification. See the ssb-verify-signatures repo for that functionality.
If the message is the first in the feed:
previous field must be nullsequence field must be 1If the message is not the first in the feed:
previous field must be the hash of the previous messagesequence field must be 1 larger than the sequence of the previous messageOther criteria which all messages must satisfy (unless they are being validated out-of-order):
hash field must be sha256author must not change compared to the previous messagekey, it must be the hash of the value of the messagevalue fields must be in the order: previous, author or sequence, author or sequence, timestamp, hash, content, signaturevalue must not include extra (unexpected) fieldscontent field must be encoded in canonical base64 and contain .box if it is a string (encrypted private message)value must not exceed 8192 UTF-16 code unitsAll of the above criteria are validated by this library (either directly or via dependencies).
You can check messages one by one or batch process a collection of them (uses rayon internally)
In addition to validating messages using all of the above criteria, it is also possible to validate out-of-order messages by satifying a subset of those criteria. This crate provides functions to perform batch validation of such out-of-order messages.
Out-of-order message validation may be performed for single-author or multi-author use-cases (separate functions exist for each case).
When performing validation for out-of-order messages from a single author, the messages must be authored by a single keypair. However, it is not required that the sequence number of a message be 1 larger than the sequence number of the previous message, nor is it required that the hash of the previous message match the hash given for the previous message in a message.
Multi-author validation, by contrast to the above, does not perform any checks of the previous message. Indeed, it may be said that this method of validation has no concept of a previous message (except that the previous field must be present in the message in the correct order).
The doc comments for this crate and all dependencies can be built and served locally by cloning the repo and running cargo doc --open. You can find more information about cargo doc here.
AGPL-3.0