Three new client projects, and the wire-contract fix they needed. DodoSSH.Client.Domain holds the decrypted item model and the three-way merge, with no I/O at all — so the suite that decides whether a credential can be lost runs in milliseconds with nothing to mock. Scalars defer to the server on a genuine clash so every replica resolves the same triple identically and two clients cannot ping-pong; directives merge per name so two people each adding one both keep theirs; the jump chain merges as a whole value because its order is the route. Whatever loses is returned rather than dropped. DodoSSH.Client.Storage is EF Core on SQLite, no SQLCipher: the rows are already ciphertext, so an encrypted file would protect protected bytes at the cost of a native dependency. It keeps the server's state and the outbox in separate tables, which is what preserves the common ancestor a merge needs. One pending operation per item, enforced by a unique index. DodoSSH.Client.Sync is the pull/apply/push loop. Pulling never decrypts — a change with no local work pending is plumbed as ciphertext — so a first sync of thousands of items does not run twice as many AEAD operations for nothing. Contracts: EncryptedPayload gains WrappedDataKey and DataKeyId. The specification has required a per-item data key since crypto.md §3, the columns have existed since the first migration and DshAad.ItemPayload binds the id, but this record had nowhere to put either — so a spec-compliant item could not be transmitted at all. Found by writing the client that has to produce one. Also closes a hole in AadResourceType, which had no value for the HostTag and HostCredential that SyncEntityType has always listed. Four bugs the tests found, not review: - SQLite refuses to order or compare its own DateTimeOffset mapping, and throws at execution rather than model build. Collecting tombstones and listing conflicts are both that shape, so this was a crash waiting for the first user with a deleted host. Timestamps are integers now, by convention so a later field cannot be the one left unconverted. - SQLitePCLRaw 2.1.11, which EF resolves, is covered by GHSA-2m69-gcr7-jv3q. Pinned forward as a family. - Resurrecting content from a remote deletion cleared the original before queueing the copy. Two transactions, so a crash between them lost the work; reversed, and the rescued id is derived from the tombstone so a replay coalesces instead of duplicating. - Several equality assertions went through Shouldly's ShouldBe, which compares IEnumerable element-wise and so tested nothing about the Equals these types exist to provide. Corrected; the falsification that caught it went from 2 failures to 6. The push response's cursor is deliberately ignored. It sits after this client's own writes, so adopting it skips anything another client committed at a lower sequence in the window between a pull and a push — permanently. Re-reading one's own writes is idempotent and costs a page. The Contracts doc that invited the shortcut now says so. 593 tests, up from 448. The delete-versus-edit rules, the ancestor retention, the fresh operation id on coalesce and the cursor safeguard were each verified by breaking them and watching the right test fail.
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.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
Run the API locally:
dotnet run --project src/DodoSSH.Api
It listens on http://localhost:5233, serving /healthz/live, /healthz/ready and — in
Development — /openapi/v1.json.
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, an Avalonia shell whose terminal works end to end against a realsshd, and the encrypted local cache with the sync client — hosts, offline unlock, an outbox and a field-level three-way merge, with the conflict matrix green. Remaining: wiring the shell to the vault, so the host list comes fromHostRepositoryrather than from the form the window still shows. - 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.