hivemind-rendezvous

An async store-and-forward dead-drop for HiveMind nodes that are never online at the same time. A sender deposits an encrypted message addressed to a recipient's public key. The recipient later proves ownership of that key and collects the message. No simultaneous connection, no shared IP address, and no persistent HiveMind session.

Where it sits

Normal HiveMind links are live encrypted WebSocket connections between a satellite and a hivemind-core hub. That setup needs both ends reachable at once. hivemind-rendezvous fills the gap for nodes that are only intermittently online: it is a small neutral HTTP relay that holds INTERCOM messages until the recipient comes back to fetch them.

The relay never sees plaintext. Messages are end-to-end encrypted to the recipient's public key before deposit. The relay only stores opaque blobs keyed by recipient pubkey, and enforces ownership on retrieval.

How it works

Node A (sender)    Rendezvous node     Node B (recipient)
     │                   │                    │
     │-- POST /deposit -->│                    │
     │   INTERCOM msg     │                    │
     │   target=B.pubkey  │  (stored, TTL ≤7d) │
     │                   │                    │
     │           (time passes)                │
     │                   │<-- POST /retrieve --│
     │                   │    sign(B.privkey)  │
     │                   │-- messages -------->│
     │                   │   (deleted)         │

Authentication is proof of RSA pubkey ownership: to retrieve messages, a node signs a fresh timestamp with its private key. The relay verifies the signature against the claimed pubkey and checks the timestamp freshness (replay window), then returns and deletes the pending messages.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+
• An RSA identity for each node (handled by HiveMind / poorman-handshake).
• A reachable host to run the relay: a small VPS, a Pi, or any always-on box the intermittent nodes can reach over HTTP.

Install

pip install hivemind-rendezvous

From source:

git clone https://github.com/JarbasHiveMind/hivemind-rendezvous
cd hivemind-rendezvous
pip install -e .

Quickstart

Run the relay on an always-on host:

hivemind-rendezvous
# Rendezvous server listening on 0.0.0.0:6789

That is the whole relay. Senders POST /deposit an INTERCOM message addressed to a recipient pubkey. Recipients POST /retrieve with an ownership proof to collect them. See HTTP API for the request bodies and examples for deposit/retrieve snippets.

Configuration

run_server() takes these arguments (defaults shown):

Message TTL is set per deposit (ttl field, default and hard cap 7 days).

Documentation

See docs/:

• How it works: the deposit/retrieve flow and authentication.
• HTTP API: endpoints, request/response bodies, error codes.
• Deploy: running and configuring the relay.
• Examples: deposit and retrieve from a client.

Related projects

• HiveMind-core: the hub these nodes normally connect to.
• hivemind-websocket-client: defines the INTERCOM message this relay carries.

License

Apache-2.0