Hideout Rendezvous Node

This repo implements a rendezvous node in the Hideout network.

A rendezvous node's primary responsibility is to relay packets between peers, through a JSON PubSub protocol wherein nodes may:

• publish packets,
• subscribe to packet shapes, and
• unsubscribe from packet shapes.

Rendezvous nodes form a peer-to-peer network using secure (TLS) web sockets with optional TLS client certificate authentication.

Peers connect to one or more rendezvous nodes in order to publish and subscribe to packets from other peers. This forms a logical peer-to-peer network among peers without connectivity to one another at the TCP/IP layer. Within this logical network, peers should perform their own authentication, encryption, delivery reliability, and peer discovery. Each of these, and more, is included in the Hideout protocol stack.

Usage

This is a Node.js application (not a library). The easiest way to get up and running is via the public Docker image. Run docker run hideoutchat/rendezvous to spin up a local instance for testing. Do not run this Docker image in production!

A production node requires some environment variables to specify important configuration such as the TLS certificate and key, the IP address and TCP port on which to listen, and the URL to a peer rendezvous node on the network the node would like to join.