Phase 1 of the federation/gossip layer fox sketched as the natural
extension of v9.8 admissibility's content-addressed identity. Two
peers ingesting the same dump already compute identical document_roots
and identical 8-dim cache_keys; the mesh layer is the wire-and-trust
plumbing that lets them dedup answers, exchange Merkle proofs, and
cleanly distrust an evicted member without a hard fork.
Cryptography (cryptography lib, audited):
Ed25519 — every membership mutation + (future) gossip envelope
is signed by the actor's pubkey.
X25519 ECDH — wraps each epoch's symmetric mesh secret to every
current member's DH pubkey via HKDF-derived AEAD key.
ChaCha20-P1305— AEAD for envelope payloads + per-member secret wrap.
State machine:
mesh_identity — singleton; this peer's keys + group name
mesh_roster — per-epoch (member_id, sign_pub, dh_pub, role)
mesh_epochs — epoch_id -> {started_at, started_event_hash,
secret_envelope JSON, reason}
meta:mesh.enabled flag — off by default; gates everything
Eviction works by rotating to a new epoch whose envelope omits the
kicked member. Their prior signatures stay verifiable (the older
roster row is retained), but any gossip from epoch+1 onward is
opaque to them — the secret was never shared with their pubkey.
Authority gate: only roster members with role='admin' can add or
kick. Self-kick is rejected explicitly. The last admin can't be
kicked. Schedule-rotate (refresh secret, no roster change) is open
to any current member as a session-hygiene op.
Audit-chain integration: every mesh state mutation writes an audit
event (mesh_init, mesh_enable/disable, mesh_epoch_rotate). The
epoch's started_event_hash backfills into mesh_epochs after the
audit row commits, giving each epoch a tamper-evident pin into the
ledger.
CLI subcommands: mesh init, mesh status, mesh enable, mesh disable,
mesh members, mesh add, mesh kick, mesh rotate. All read-only or
local-state-only — no network code paths in this commit.
The HTTP gossip wire (`mesh sync`, `mesh serve`) is the next phase.
Schema, cryptography, and roster state machine are all in place to
support it without further migration.
russell@unturf.com
aa8caeeece