unseenet-entrance

A web entrance to Unseenet - the graphical client in an ordinary browser.
On a phone or a computer, with nothing to install. The less hidden way in, on purpose.

Pre-alpha. Nothing is stable yet, and Unseenet has not had a security review. Do not rely on it to protect anyone yet.

What it is

Unseenet is a discussion network over Tor: groups and nodes that nobody can remove, and posts that nobody but their author can delete or change. Its own clients start Tor themselves. A web entrance (UN-RFC 0043) is for everyone who will not install anything: open its address in a browser, and you have the same client, with your keys in your own browser.

This repository is two things:

• The entrance - a small server anyone can run on a free cloud VM. It serves the web client, and carries the client's connections to the nodes over Tor. It cannot read, change or forge anything: it only moves bytes.
• The web client - not a third client, but unseenet-gui itself, with its backend (the real unseenet core) running in the browser. Every fix to the core or the GUI reaches the web too.

Use it

Open an entrance's address, for example the project's own, https://entrance.unseenet.net/. It sends you on to the entrance's IP address, https://129.151.209.26/, which is where the app lives - and which still works if the name is ever blocked. Create a vault - a name and a passphrase - or open one you have. A bar at the top always says that you are on the open web.

• Keep your vault. Your keys live in the vault, encrypted with your passphrase. Either Save vault file after a session and open it next time, or choose Keep on this device: then the browser keeps it, still encrypted, and saves every change by itself.
• Add it to the home screen (Share → Add to Home Screen on an iPhone, ⋮ → Install app or Add to home screen on Android, the install icon in the address bar on a computer). It then starts like an app, from the device, and finds your vault at once.
• When the entrance is gone. The app keeps working: it talks through another entrance from the signed list. Other entrances in the bar saves the jump page, a small file that finds one that answers - keep it, send it to a friend. See When an entrance is blocked.
• New versions are offered in the bar (New version), and installed only when you say so, after every file has been checked against the project's signature. See New versions.
• In Tor Browser, use the entrance's onion address: then the entrance does not see your IP address either.

On a phone the client shows one thing at a time: your groups, a group, a post. The ⋯ button holds the rest.

A new key ripens first. Most nodes ask a key to have worked a while before it posts (key ripening, UN-RFC 0025). The client does that work in the browser, in the background, while the page is open. A brand-new key takes 10-15 minutes before its first post goes out, on a computer or a recent phone. After that the key keeps ripening while the page is open: each level makes postage cheaper. Closing the page loses at most the step in progress, because the key's progress is kept in your vault, and the same vault ripens on in Unseenet's own client.

What you give up

The app keeps itself on the device and runs only versions whose every file matches a signed post. But the browser fetches the app's service worker itself, from the entrance, and whoever controls the entrance could change it; the app warns when it is not a signed one. If you need to hide that you use Unseenet, or who you are, use the real client.

Run an entrance

The network gets freer with every entrance that someone else runs. On Debian 12/13 or Ubuntu 24.04+ - a free cloud VM is enough - with ports 80 and 443 open to the internet:

curl -fsSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/unseenet/unseenet-entrance/main/deploy/install.sh
sudo sh install.sh

That installs Tor, gives the entrance an onion address, installs the newest signed version of the web client through the network, gets a Let's Encrypt certificate for the machine's public IP address (no domain needed; the 6-day certificates renew by themselves), and runs it as its own user with the journal in memory only. At the end it prints both addresses. Choices, given before sh:

Run the same command again to update the entrance's own code; settings in /etc/unseenet-entrance.env are kept. Its other settings:

Then systemctl restart unseenet-entrance. Never put it behind a CDN that ends TLS on someone else's machine (UN-RFC 0043 section 5). A TLS tunnel costs the entrance about 100 KB of memory; for a very busy entrance, TLS ended by Caddy or HAProxy on the same machine (TLS=none, the entrance on 127.0.0.1, ENTRANCE_TRUST_FORWARDED=1, and that proxy's logs off) brings it to about 36 KB - allowed by section 5, but one more program to keep quiet. Certificates: Certificates. To have your entrance in the signed list that apps and the jump page use, open an Add my entrance issue: a check reaches it over HTTPS and its onion, compares the client it serves with the signed release, and tunnels to a node.

What an entrance does, and does not

• It tunnels a browser's WebSocket to a known node's onion service and copies bytes both ways, unchanged. The tunnels of one web-client session share a Tor circuit to each node, as Unseenet's own clients do; other sessions and other visitors never share one (UN-RFC 0043 4.1.1).
• It serves the web client, and the signed lists it reads from the network about once an hour: the entrances (/.well-known/unseenet-entrances.json) and the versions of the web client (/.well-known/unseenet-releases.json), as raw signed articles that clients check themselves.
• It writes nothing about visitors anywhere: no access log, no error that names an address. Limits are counted in memory, under a key made at start.

When an entrance is blocked

Every entrance serves the jump page, /unseenet-entrances.html: one small file with the signed list of entrances inside. Opened from disk it checks the list against the project key, shows which entrances answer, opens a random one that does, and can fetch a newer list and save itself again. An installed app does the same by itself: when its entrance does not answer, it talks through another one from the list (UN-RFC 0043 section 8).

The client in a file. python3 tools/build_web.py --file-from https://an.entrance/ builds web/unseenet-web.html: the whole web client and the signed list in one file of about 19 MB. Opened from disk it picks an entrance that answers and uses it only as a tunnel; no page is served, so a blocked address or a changed page does not matter. Chromium and Firefox.

New versions

Every entrance serves the same build of the web client, built by this repository's CI - every day, and when something changed - and posted in the project channel unseenet.releases with the SHA-256 of every file (UN-RFC 0043 sections 7.2-7.3):

• The app shows New version and updates only when you say so. It takes the files from any entrance that has that version and uses them only when every one matches the signed post. It never goes back to an older version.
• The entrance updates the web client it serves by itself, the same way - from the release here, or file by file from other entrances - without a restart. Its own code is never updated by itself.

Neither needs GitHub: the posts are read through the network, and the files can come from any entrance. The releases are also here, as web-<version>, with the list of checksums to compare by hand.

A mirror of the releases

An entrance can also mirror Unseenet's own releases, so that the portable clients and sticks can update over Tor when GitHub is blocked: MIRROR=portable (the portable zips and the USB zip, about 300 MB per channel) or MIRROR=all (also a stick's update and image, about 1.1 GB). It follows unseenet.releases, fetches each new version from GitHub or another mirror, checks every file against the signed checksums, keeps only the newest, and serves it at /mirror/<channel>/ on its onion address and its open address. Clients find it in the signed list of entrances and use nothing that does not match the signature, so a mirror needs no trust. MIRROR=off removes it.

How it works

browser ─ page (unseenet-gui, unchanged) ─ shim.js ─ worker: Python + unseenet core + GUI backend
                                                         │ WebSocket
                                                     entrance ── Tor ── node (.onion)

tools/build_web.py puts unseenet-gui's page, a pinned Pyodide (sha256-checked) and a zip of the Python code into web/; at run time nothing is loaded from anywhere else. The GUI's backend runs in Pyodide in a Web Worker; web/shim.js answers the page's /api/ calls from that worker. web/py/webbackend.py is the only glue: the network goes through the entrance instead of Tor, work the core gives a thread runs inline, and the vault is a file in memory. web/sw.js keeps the client on the device and serves only what the page has checked.

Develop

python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -e .
python3 tools/build_web.py --core ../unseenet --gui ../unseenet-gui   # or without: clones from GitHub
ENTRANCE_SOCKS=127.0.0.1:9050 .venv/bin/unseenet-entrance               # needs a running Tor
# open http://127.0.0.1:8043/

tests/lab_updates.py runs two entrances on this machine with a test key and signed test versions, without the network (see its docstring); python -m pytest tests the Python tests.

src/unseenet_entrance/
  server.py        the entrance: tunnel, static files, the lists, headers
  listfetch.py     the signed lists, read from the nodes over Tor
  release.py       the web client updating itself; installing a signed version
  mirror.py        mirroring Unseenet's releases
web/               shim.js, sw.js, worker.js, py/ - and the build's output
js/                articles, signed lists and versions checked in JavaScript
jump/              the jump page
tools/             build_web.py, post_release.py (CI), chiavdf/ (key ripening for Pyodide)
deploy/install.sh  the installer

Versions and releases

The entrance follows semantic versioning on the same principles as unseenet: tags vX.Y.Z on main, the changes in CHANGELOG.md, and releases on PyPI. Each release names the minor version of unseenet it works with (unseenet>=0.5,<0.6), and the web client is built from the releases named in .github/workflows/web.yml (CORE_REF, GUI_REF). install.sh installs the newest release tag.

The web client has versions of its own, web-<version>, made by web.yml whenever a file changes and posted in unseenet.releases.

To release the entrance: move the entries under ## [Unreleased] in CHANGELOG.md to a new ## [X.Y.Z] - YYYY-MM-DD section, set __version__ in src/unseenet_entrance/__init__.py, commit, then git tag -a vX.Y.Z -m "unseenet-entrance X.Y.Z" && git push origin vX.Y.Z.

Part of Unseenet

License

Apache License 2.0. The Unseenet logo: CC BY 4.0.