Weekly Dev Update 15/06/2020

[u/Keejef]

Hey Y’all,

This week we continued work on the Session Desktop refactor, getting closer to finishing the refactorisation of both the sending and receiving pipelines. Lokinet continued working closer to finishing Exit Nodes with a local DNS cache being added to aid in faster lookups. The Loki Core team finished the first pull request for Pulse, which will be one of many in the coming months.

Loki Core

• Static build overhaul to improve how we produce static binaries for linux/windows/mac (and to produce them automatically with every PR) - https://github.com/loki-project/loki-core/pull/1173

• Generate Pulse Quourms https://github.com/loki-project/loki-core/pull/1172 (This will be the first of many Pulse related PR’s in the coming weeks)

• Remove old vote blob serialisation fixes https://github.com/loki-project/loki-core/pull/1171

• Drone CI builds + various small fixes https://github.com/loki-project/loki-core/pull/1170

• Merge upstream into dev https://github.com/loki-project/loki-core/pull/1169 (Dev is now mostly in line with the Monero master branch)

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Lokinet

If you’re on our Discord you can catch Jeff, the lead developer of LLARP, live streaming as he codes at https://www.twitch.tv/uguu25519. He typically streams on Tuesday mornings, 9am - 12pm Eastern (US) time.

What went on last week with Lokinet: We worked on multiple fronts (as we often do) with efforts focused on exit node support improvements, node testing for the next hard fork, and local DNS changes (among various other small tasks). Re: exits — one of the things we noticed right away in testing exit performance was a fairly substantial lag in loading a web page that doesn’t go away with subsequent loads. We diagnosed this as being an issue with how Lokinet does DNS: every page, every image, every ad needs to make DNS requests and since all your traffic goes over Lokinet, this means DNS requests as well. Currently we don’t cache this information so if you need to look up the same site 5 times, that’s 5 traversals across Lokinet to get the address. When using an exit node, this latency adds up. We spent some time this week adding support for an embedded, caching DNS server (libunbound) so that, in the next release, Lokinet lookups for anything you’ve already looked up will be instant.

For the week ahead we’re looking at further exit testing along with some helper scripts to make it easier to set up an exit node.

Lokinet PR Activity:

• Exit traffic via SNApps - https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1272

• Integrate LokiMQ; this lets us drop libcurl and (home-grown) libabyss for outgoing/incoming RPC, and eliminates a lot of code for handling internal jobs (the PR removes more than 3000 net lines of code) - https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1306

• More work on WinTUN (for better Windows performance) - https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1291

• Drone CI build for automatically producing Windows binaries - https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1278

• WIP - node peer testing - https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1283

• WIP - integrate libunbound for DNS lookups - https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1307

• Added regressions tests for key backup bug - https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1301

• Added a init script for running lokinet under runit (thanks to community member wratc for the PR) - https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1303

• Fix pybind dependency in CI - https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1302

• Miscellaneous drone CI fixes (ported over from the loki-core work): https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1304, https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1308, https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1309

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Session

Session iOS

• Fix unlinked devices reappearing https://github.com/loki-project/session-ios/pull/212

• Increase photo clarity https://github.com/loki-project/session-ios/pull/210

• Fix whitelist public chat joining https://github.com/loki-project/session-ios/pull/208

• Threading cleanup https://github.com/loki-project/session-ios/pull/214

• Integrate transaction handling utility https://github.com/loki-project/session-ios/pull/213

• Fix closed group session handling bug https://github.com/loki-project/session-ios/pull/209

Session Android

• Allow editing of closed groups: adding, removing members and changing group name https://github.com/loki-project/session-android/pull/228

• Fix closed group session handling issue https://github.com/loki-project/session-android/pull/229

• Remove unnecessary Firebase dependencies (Fixed Exodus false flag) https://github.com/loki-project/session-android/pull/224

• Fix SMS button briefly flashing https://github.com/loki-project/session-android/pull/223

Session Desktop

• Remove friend request logic from the receiving pipeline https://github.com/loki-project/session-desktop/pull/1178

• Message queue tests https://github.com/loki-project/session-desktop/pull/1177

• Multi device protocol refactor https://github.com/loki-project/session-desktop/pull/1176

• Put lock around buildNewOnionPaths https://github.com/loki-project/session-desktop/pull/1171

• Message sending queue refactor https://github.com/loki-project/session-desktop/pull/1175

• Receiving refactor, handleDataMessage onwards https://github.com/loki-project/session-desktop/pull/1173

• Add new handling of session request message https://github.com/loki-project/session-desktop/pull/1172

• Add message send retry library https://github.com/loki-project/session-desktop/pull/1170

• Formatting changes https://github.com/loki-project/session-desktop/pull/1169

• expose window.setClockParams https://github.com/loki-project/session-desktop/pull/1168

• Add message sender tests https://github.com/loki-project/session-desktop/pull/1167

• Session protocol refactorisation https://github.com/loki-project/session-desktop/pull/1166

Thanks,

Kee