The settings card offered three editable boxes and said nothing about the
server itself — which addresses a test will actually use, on which ports,
what it can measure. That is the part a person checks before trusting a
result, and "which address did this come from" is precisely the question
a report leaves open.
The server now publishes it. The profile's targets carried one IPv4 and a
TODO; it reports both families and both alternates, derived from the UDP
listen spec rather than configured separately, so the list cannot drift
from what is actually bound. No reservation means no alternate is
claimed: announcing a second address as the RFC 5780 alternate when none
was set aside would promise a redirect the server will not send.
The app renders them read-only, in a panel visibly distinct from the
fields above. An editable box that changes nothing is worse than no box,
and these are facts to read rather than settings to apply.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sharing port 443 between the admin UI and the control plane forces two
hostnames — one port and one name is one certificate, and the two need
different ones. That difference had been leaking into every enrollment
link, so an operator handed out fmr-1.echo-lot.app when the thing they
and their users know is fmr.echo-lot.app.
The link now carries the public name and the app asks GET /v1/discover
where to actually connect. The endpoint is plumbing: it exists to select
a certificate, and nobody needs to see it.
Discovery hands out an address and never a pin. The pin stays in the
link. Fetching it over an ordinary TLS connection would make pinning
worth exactly what the certificate authorities are worth, and pinning is
there to survive one the operator does not control — a root injected by
corporate device management, say, which is unremarkable on the networks
this tool gets pointed at. With the pin pre-shared, an intercepted
discovery can only send a device somewhere the pin will not match: an
outage, not a compromise.
Optional on both sides. A server that does not answer, or a link that
already names the control endpoint, works unchanged — enrollment must not
start failing because a lookup did.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three phones on one account now produce one history, which is the main reason to
have accounts beyond upload permission. GET /v1/runs returns the account's runs
and says how many devices contributed; fetching and deleting resolve a run id
against the caller's own devices, so an id from another account is not found
rather than fetched from wherever it happens to live.
The rule that needed stating: the empty account is never a group. Devices nobody
has signed in on are unrelated devices that share the absence of an owner, and
matching on "" would let any anonymous device read every other one's runs.
Tested, along with sibling-device access working and cross-account access not.
App side: authorization code with PKCE. The app is a public client - anything
compiled into an APK can be read out with unzip and strings - and the redirect
returns through a custom URI scheme that any app on the device may register, so
an intercepted code is a real risk. PKCE makes a stolen code worthless: it can
only be exchanged by presenting a verifier that never left the process.
A callback whose state does not match is refused before the code is spent and
before any network call, since that is exactly how someone gets a victim to
complete the attacker's sign-in.
Nothing from the IdP is retained. The ID token is used once to prove who is
signing in and then discarded; the device credential authenticates everything
afterwards. No access tokens to store, no refresh tokens to rotate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The client generates the traffic and the server counts it. No grant is involved
- the client is sending its own packets, so there is nothing to amplify - but it
does need the server's tally, because only the far end knows how much arrived.
Without that number a sender measures how fast it can transmit, which is usually
just the speed of the local NIC and is not the question being asked.
A new wire type the server counts and deliberately never answers: a reply would
double the traffic and drag the return path into a measurement that is
specifically about the outbound one.
The tally is a counter, not a list, and short-circuits before the observation
log. A five-second run at 20 Mbps is around ten thousand packets; one struct
each would turn a measurement into an allocation storm on a shared server, and
nothing needs the per-packet detail since the client holds the send-side record.
The gap between the two counts is the loss.
direction=up on the throughput action sends nothing - it zeroes the counter, so
a second run in one session measures itself instead of inheriting the first.
Same honesty rule as downstream: measures_network is false when what arrived
matches what was offered, because then the path was never the constraint.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A throughput number reports the smallest limit on the path, and the sender's own
ceiling is one of the candidates. If the server was asked for 50 Mbps and 50
Mbps arrived, the network was never the constraint and "50 Mbps" says nothing
about it. So the result always carries limited_by and measures_network, and a
finding is raised only when the path is actually implicated.
Loss is computed against the *sender's* count, not the requested rate: the
server reports what it put on the wire, and the gap is the loss. A receiver
alone cannot tell "the network dropped it" from "the sender never sent it", and
guessing turns a healthy server-side limit into a phantom network fault. The
count is stored per action, not per packet — half a million packets of structs
would turn a measurement into memory exhaustion.
Sending is paced rather than flat out. An unpaced burst measures the server's
NIC and the first queue it meets, then collapses into loss that reads as a
network fault. The schedule is absolute rather than sleep-per-packet, which
would accumulate scheduler error and drift the rate down over a ten-second run.
Throughput gets its own grant budget sized from the request, so every other
action stays bounded at 8 MiB. When the byte cap binds before the clock does,
the *duration* is shortened and reported, rather than the run being truncated
halfway: promising thirty seconds and delivering twenty-one is the same
information with a surprise attached, and it keeps "the clock ended the run" as
the normal case — the only case where the rate is a clean property of the path.
That last behaviour came out of a test that failed honestly: 30 s at 100 Mbps
needs 375 MB against a 256 MB cap.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Letting the kernel fragment an oversized datagram answers one question — do
fragments get through. It cannot answer the more interesting one, because the
kernel always emits them in order, first one first.
The classic middlebox fault is exactly about that ordering. Only the first
fragment carries the UDP header, and therefore the ports; a stateful firewall
or NAT that has not seen it has no flow to match the rest against, and many
drop them. That is invisible to any in-order test and shows up in the field as
"large DNS answers fail on this network" or "the tunnel breaks when the MTU
drops" — it works until the network reorders, then fails intermittently, which
is the hardest kind of fault to chase.
So the server now builds the fragments itself (raw socket, IP_HDRINCL) and
controls their order: in_order as a baseline, reversed, and first-fragment-last.
The datagram is assembled and signed whole before being cut up, so what the
client reassembles is indistinguishable from an ordinary packet — otherwise it
would be measuring our sender rather than the path.
Two details that would silently produce wrong answers:
- The UDP checksum is computed rather than left zero. A zero-checksum datagram
is dropped by some middleboxes, and that drop would be recorded as a
fragmentation failure, which is the wrong conclusion entirely.
- Fragment offsets are in 8-byte units, so non-final fragments are rounded to
a multiple of 8. A 100-byte fragment is not an error, it is a datagram no
host will ever reassemble.
frag-send is advertised only when a raw socket can actually be opened — checked
by opening one, since a permission model has more ways to say no than a
capability bit has to say yes.
Fragment header arithmetic is unit-tested (reassembly coverage, MF flags, shared
IP ID, 8-byte offsets, checksum verification), cross-compiled and run on Linux
since the code is build-tagged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"3 % loss" sends an engineer looking in both directions at once. The server
records every packet it received per sequence number, so the two cases are
distinguishable: sent-but-never-seen is upstream loss, seen-but-no-reply is
downstream. The findings say which, and say what is not implicated.
Downstream loss is measured against what reached the server, not against what
was sent — the other denominator counts every upstream loss twice and
overstates the return path.
Per-direction jitter comes out of the same records without needing synchronised
clocks: (server_rx - client_tx) carries a constant unknown offset, and
differencing successive samples cancels it, so RFC 3393 variation is honestly
attributable to a direction even though absolute latency is not.
Correlation is by wire sequence number, not loop index — the counter is shared
with every packet type on the session. ProbeSession exposes it even for a lost
probe, since that is precisely the packet whose direction is in question.
Live against fmr: 0.08 ms upstream jitter vs 0.85 ms downstream, an asymmetry a
round-trip test cannot see.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
POST /admin/enroll-tokens now returns the whole link, not just the token:
echolot://enroll?v=1&u=<control URL>&p=pin-sha256:<b64>&t=<token>
The server is the only party that knows all three parts at once, and the part
an operator gets wrong by hand is the base64 pin — which does not fail loudly,
it just never matches, surfacing days later as an inscrutable TLS error. The
app takes the link from a paste or from an echolot:// deep link (QR scan), and
writes URL, pin and credential together or not at all.
One trap the tests pin: an unencoded "+" in a query string decodes to a space,
so a hand-assembled link arrives with a pin wrong by one character. Base64 has
no spaces, so they are restored — unambiguous, and it cannot damage a correctly
encoded pin.
Also fixes a spec divergence: §2.1 names the field device_credential and the
first implementation shipped "credential". Both are sent now and the client
prefers the spec's; the alias goes once nothing reads it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The server's 426 body reached the user as "needs \u003e= 0.2.0, \u003c 1.0.0":
Go escapes <, > and & by default for JSON destined for a page, which this is
not. Disabled at the encoder. The client now parses the error field rather than
pattern-matching it, so it survives whatever a future encoder decides to escape.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both sides now declare what they will talk to, and enforce it. Two axes kept
deliberately separate, because conflating them is the trap:
protocol_version — CAN these builds talk. The correctness axis. Below 1.0.0
the minor is the breaking axis, per SemVer §4.
release window — MAY they, per policy. [min, max), advertised in the
profile, overridable by the operator.
The server refuses out-of-window apps with 426 and a body naming both versions
and the accepted range; the app checks the profile in both directions before a
run rather than discovering mid-measurement that it will be refused.
Three rules that shape the rest:
- GET /v1/profile is never gated. It is where a refused client learns which
version it needs; gating it leaves the user with a network error instead of
an answer, which is precisely the confusion this exists to remove.
- An unparseable or absent version is "unknown", and is allowed. Development
builds report "dev", and a client too old to send the header cannot be
identified anyway.
- Bounds sit at breaking boundaries, not at releases, so shipping a patch
never requires editing a range. The app's server minimum is 0.4.2 for a
stated reason: earlier multi-homed servers mis-addressed granted sends and
the client measured 100% downstream loss that never happened.
The app's versionCode is now derived from its SemVer instead of being a second
number someone has to remember to bump.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three facts the client cannot produce alone, kept deliberately separate:
mtu.pmtud_down (largest datagram that arrives unfragmented — meaningful only
because the server sets DF), mtu.frag_delivery (whether larger ones arrive once
fragmentation is allowed), and train.udp_downstream (loss, reordering and
arrival spacing in the download direction, which a round trip cannot separate
from upstream loss).
ServerMeasurement now runs them on the same ProbeSession as the echo train. It
had to: a fresh session restarts client-side sequence numbers and the server's
anti-replay window discards the lot, so the re-primed source is never recorded
and every granted send goes to a socket that has already closed. That produced
four confidently-wrong FAILED tests and a RED verdict on a healthy network.
Live against fmr: path MTU 1500, fragments to 4000, 100/100 downstream, GREEN.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
fmr binds two IPv4 addresses. connFor picked whichever socket of the right
family came first in the bind list, so a downtrain for a session established on
.150 went out from .151 — and every packet was dropped by the client's NAT,
which has no mapping for that pair. tcpdump on the server showed all 50 leaving;
the client saw none. Read as "100% downstream loss", which is the worst kind of
wrong: a confident measurement of something that never happened.
Sessions now record which of our own bound addresses received their traffic, and
granted sends (and delayed echo) go back out through that socket. The fallback
to a family match is kept for the case where nothing has been received yet, and
the test pins both paths — a single-homed lab can never reproduce this.
Also: the client-side halves of the same work — anonymizer (core-privacy), local
run archive with retention (core-archive), upload client, and the app's settings
and history screens.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
big_send now forces the Don't-Fragment bit for the whole burst by default, so
the largest size that arrives IS the downstream path MTU rather than "fragments
got through" — two different measurements the schema already separates. Sizes
above our own egress MTU (from the startup self-test) are refused up front and
reported as max_df_bytes, because absence caused by our kernel must not be read
as a limit of the client's path.
Uploads: one JSON file per run under the state dir, with the policy the operator
actually cares about — who may upload (off / anonymous / account), how large,
how long to keep, and the least anonymization accepted. The profile advertises
all of it so the app can present the switch honestly instead of discovering the
rules by failing. `account` refuses today rather than falling back to anonymous:
picking the strict setting before OIDC lands must not silently mean the loose one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Multi-module Android app, built bottom-up from a verifiable core.
core-protocol is pure Kotlin/JVM (no Android SDK): SPKI-pinned control
plane (enroll/profile/session over HttpsURLConnection — API-1 compatible,
hostname verification off, trust is the pin), HKDF-SHA256 session keys,
ELT1 UDP data plane (HMAC gate, ECHO+observation, MTU probe) —
byte-compatible with the Go server.
Unit tests incl. the RFC 5869 HKDF vector (key derivation provably matches
the server). LiveServerTest + scripts/test-fmr.sh prove the client
end-to-end against the deployed fmr server: profile (8 caps), session,
ECHO rtt~11ms with the observation block returning our observed NAT port,
MTU 1400->1400, observations. Live test self-skips without ECHOLOT_LIVE_*.
Two client bugs caught live: java.net.http hostname verification (→
HttpsURLConnection, also the Android-minSdk-26 choice) and ECHO padding
needed for the observation to survive anti-amplification.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
