jaap-jan
0500e43e02
The shell layered its setup and unlock screens over the terminal, which does not work: NativeWebView attaches a real Win32 child HWND through NativeControlHost, and a child window composites above everything its parent paints regardless of visual-tree z-order. The cards rendered sliced at the terminal column's left edge; at the window's default width every one of their buttons fell inside the WebView's rectangle, so the flow could only be completed by keyboard, and a click in that region handed Win32 focus to WebView2 so the text boxes silently stopped accepting keystrokes. The WebView is now collapsed while the vault is not unlocked. The comment that previously forbade this — hiding it means never realising it — was wrong: NativeControlHost creates the native attachment on attach to the visual tree, never consulting layout or visibility, and NativeWebView replays a Source assigned before its adapter exists. A collapsed WebView still starts WebView2, loads the page and lets the renderer attach. Confirmed: 35 msedgewebview2 processes with the control collapsed. What the first connection after unlocking actually depends on is the existing await on WaitForRendererAsync, since the data plane drops frames when no renderer is attached. Also fixes the second visible defect: the default server URL was https://localhost:7217, the API's *second* launch profile, while the README, its appsettings and a plain `dotnet run` all use http://localhost:5233 — so nothing was listening, and an HTTPS client against a plaintext port reports "The SSL connection could not be established", which reads as a certificate problem. The default now matches, a missing scheme is rejected by name instead of parsing as scheme "localhost", and that specific TLS failure now suggests http://. Both new tests fail when the fixes are reverted. Corrections to claims I made earlier and should not have: - docs/platform-flags.md asserted the opposite of the mechanism above and cited an established msedgewebview2 connection as verification. That observation was taken while the overlay was showing but, because of this very bug, the WebView was uncovered and in plain view — so it confirmed only that a visible WebView is realised. A process-level check cannot verify a rendering claim. The entry was also filed under "Local cache". - ITerminalHost was documented as the live seam the app plugs into, with a stub standing in for headless tests. It has no implementation anywhere and no test uses it; the view navigates the control directly. It also counted Avalonia.Controls.WebView and NativeWebView as two interchangeable backends when they are one component, with the Linux backend backwards. - The README claimed the shell's whole path was covered by tests. Its state machine is; its layout is covered by nothing, and a headless test could not have caught this — headless has no native window, so it would have rendered correctly and confirmed the wrong belief. Verified by screenshotting the running app: the card renders complete and centred at the default size, with the button clickable.
DodoSSH
A self-hosted, team-oriented SSH client with an end-to-end encrypted vault.
Manage hosts, credentials and keys in a desktop app; sync them across your devices and share them with teammates through a server you run yourself. The server stores ciphertext and never holds a key — the operator cannot read the credentials it stores.
Status: early development. See the milestone plan for what exists today.
Why
Teams either scatter SSH credentials across individual ~/.ssh directories with no sharing
story, or pay per-seat for a hosted product that holds their infrastructure credentials.
DodoSSH keeps the convenience of a synced, shareable vault while remaining self-hostable and
zero-knowledge.
Architecture
| Component | Choice |
|---|---|
| Backend | ASP.NET Core on .NET 10, PostgreSQL + EF Core |
| Client | Avalonia (C#) for Windows/Linux/macOS; terminal pane is a WebView running xterm.js |
| Auth | OIDC, provider-agnostic (Entra ID, Keycloak, Auth0, Authentik) |
| Vault | End-to-end encrypted; X25519 + Ed25519 + XChaCha20-Poly1305, Argon2id unlock |
| Connections | Client-direct SSH by default, with an optional raw-TCP server relay |
Two consequences worth knowing before you read further:
- Revocation is not retroactive. A removed member keeps what they already downloaded. The real remediation is rotating the SSH credential, so offboarding is built around a rotation checklist rather than a button that implies more than it delivers.
- No session recording in relay mode. The relay forwards SSH ciphertext, so it cannot see commands. That is the cost of the relay not being able to read your traffic.
The reasoning behind each major decision is recorded in docs/adr/, starting with
the E2EE trust model.
Repository layout
src/
DodoSSH.Contracts DTOs shared with the client — the real API contract
DodoSSH.Crypto DSH1 envelope, AAD derivation, the key hierarchy
DodoSSH.Domain entities and invariants, no EF
DodoSSH.Infrastructure DbContext, configurations, migrations
DodoSSH.Api the server
DodoSSH.Client.Auth OIDC code+PKCE on a loopback redirect, and the key binding
DodoSSH.Client.Api the typed server client, and client-side enrollment
DodoSSH.Client.Domain the decrypted item model and the three-way merge — no I/O at all
DodoSSH.Client.Storage the local cache: ciphertext mirror, outbox, offline unlock material
DodoSSH.Client.Sync the pull/apply/push loop and the conflict policy
DodoSSH.Client.Session where a profile lives, unlocking it, and getting one in the first place
DodoSSH.Client.Ssh connections, PTY shells, host key trust
DodoSSH.Client.Terminal the loopback data plane and credit-based flow control
DodoSSH.Client.App Avalonia; the only project that knows about a UI toolkit
tests/ one test project per source project
docs/adr/ architecture decision records
Everything under src/DodoSSH.Client.* except App is deliberately free of Avalonia. That is the
seam that lets the SSH layer, the terminal's flow control and the OIDC flow be tested without a UI
toolkit or a browser engine — which is most of why they are testable at all.
Building
Requires the .NET SDK pinned in global.json (10.0.x).
dotnet build DodoSSH.slnx
dotnet test DodoSSH.slnx
The tests need a Docker daemon. Everything that touches the database, the identity provider or an SSH server uses Testcontainers rather than a stub or a shared instance, so there is nothing to start first and nothing to clean up after — but with no daemon those suites fail rather than skip.
Running it
Four commands, in order. The first two are once per machine.
1. The development dependencies — PostgreSQL and Keycloak, with the dodossh realm imported:
docker compose -f deploy/docker-compose.dev.yml up -d
2. The schema. The API never migrates anything: it fails readiness while a migration is pending, and
says which one. dotnet-ef is pinned in .config/dotnet-tools.json, so run dotnet tool restore first if
you have not:
dotnet ef database update --project src/DodoSSH.Infrastructure
With nothing else configured this targets the compose stack above. Set DODOSSH_DESIGN_CONNECTION to point
it at another database.
3. The server:
dotnet run --project src/DodoSSH.Api
It listens on http://localhost:5233, serving /healthz/live, /healthz/ready and — in
Development — /openapi/v1.json.
4. The desktop client:
dotnet run --project src/DodoSSH.Client.App
In the app, enter http://localhost:5233 as the server. Your browser opens for sign-in — the realm ships
alice / alice — then choose a vault passphrase and write down the recovery code, which cannot be
skipped and cannot be recovered from the server. You can then add a host and open a shell on it. Keycloak's
admin console is at http://localhost:18080 (admin / admin).
Three of M1's known gaps are visible immediately, so they are worth expecting rather than diagnosing: a connection asks for the host's password every time, because credentials are not a synced entity type yet; host key trust lasts one session, because known hosts do not live in the vault yet; and unlock asks for the passphrase on every launch, because no device key is registered.
End-to-end verification
One suite runs against a real server rather than a stub. It needs a Docker daemon and nothing else, so it is part of the ordinary test run:
dotnet test tests/DodoSSH.SystemTests
It brings up PostgreSQL, Keycloak and an OpenSSH server in containers, applies the committed migrations,
starts the API as a child process out of its own build output, and then drives the real client: sign in
through Keycloak, enroll, unlock, create a host, sync it, read it back on a second simulated machine,
unlock again with no network, and open a shell on the sshd. Roughly 25 seconds once the images are
pulled.
What makes it worth its weight is that it consumes the artefacts that ship — the realm file from
deploy/keycloak, the EF migrations, the API's own appsettings — rather than a fixture written to match
them. On its first run it found a loopback redirect URI the realm registered in a form Keycloak rejects,
and a JSON configuration gap that made the whole sync surface unreachable from the real client while every
other test passed. Both are the same class of bug: two sides of a stub agreeing with each other about
something the specification never said.
The one value it cannot take from a committed file is Oidc:Authority, since the container's port is
assigned at start. Everything that authority points at is still the real realm.
Development and testing are currently Windows-only. Anything known or suspected to differ on
Linux and macOS is tracked in docs/platform-flags.md, along with the
deployment gotchas that have already cost time once. Read it before assuming something works
off-Windows.
Conventions the build enforces
- Warnings are errors.
dotnet format --verify-no-changesgates CI. - Package versions are centralised in
Directory.Packages.props;packages.lock.jsonis committed and CI restores in locked mode. BannedSymbols.txtbansDateTime.UtcNow(useTimeProvider),Guid.NewGuid(useCreateVersion7), sync-over-async, MD5/SHA1 and PBKDF2.- Public members of
DodoSSH.Contractsmust be declared inPublicAPI.Unshipped.txt, so a contract change is a build error rather than a client-side surprise.
Milestones
-
M0 — foundation. Repo structure, build conventions, CI, ADRs. Done.
-
M1 — vertical slice. OIDC login → enroll → create a host → open a shell. Server done: the DSH1 crypto core, the data model, sync push/pull for hosts,
/me, and enrollment with the identity-provider key binding. Client done: the key hierarchy, the OIDC flow with the key binding, SSH connections with host key trust, the terminal data plane, the encrypted local cache with the sync client — offline unlock, an outbox and a field-level three-way merge, conflict matrix green — and an Avalonia shell that is vault-backed: server URL → browser sign-in → enroll → unlock → host list → terminal. The shell's state machine is covered by tests against an in-memory server, so the states that matter most (the recovery code that cannot be skipped, the unlock that needs no network) are checked rather than remembered.Its layout is not covered by anything, and that gap has already cost a shipped defect: the setup and unlock screens were layered over the terminal's WebView, which on Windows is a native child window that cannot be covered, so they rendered sliced with their buttons unclickable. No test in this repository loads a
.axamlfile, and a headless one could not have caught this — there is no native window in headless, so it would have rendered perfectly and confirmed the wrong belief. Screens get looked at, or they are unverified. Verified end to end:tests/DodoSSH.SystemTestsdrives the whole slice against a real Keycloak, a real API, a real PostgreSQL and a realsshd— sign-in, the identity-provider key binding, enrollment, offline unlock, a host through the vault to a second machine, and an interactive shell. See End-to-end verification.Known gaps in the client, stated rather than implied by the interface: credentials are not a synced entity type yet, so a connection still asks for a password; known host keys live in memory for one session instead of in the vault; and no device key is registered, so the passphrase is needed on every launch until the OS keystore is wired.
-
M2 — full personal vault, robust sync, relay.
-
M3 — teams, sharing, ACLs.
-
M4 — hardening and ops, packaging, self-hosting guide.
-
M5 — multi-provider OIDC, key rotation, per-item content keys.
Licence
MIT.