jaap-jan eb354bcdd9 Add the SSH session layer and the terminal data plane
The throughput harness the plan requires before any UI, plus the SSH
plumbing under it. 94 new tests, no WebView involved.

Credit-based flow control is what makes `yes` survivable. A terminal renders
at 60 Hz at best while a remote produces output as fast as the network
allows, and the difference has to accumulate somewhere or be refused.
Credit is reserved *before* reading, never after: because the pump cannot
read more than the renderer has room for, the coalescing buffer is bounded
by the window rather than by how fast the remote can talk. When credit runs
out the pump stops reading, SSH's own receive window closes, and the remote
sshd blocks -- backpressure to the source with no custom protocol.

Verified by falsification, not just by passing: with the credit gate removed
three tests fail, including the throughput harness's bounded-memory
assertion. Acknowledgements are clamped because they cross into JavaScript,
where a buggy or hostile page could otherwise claim to have rendered a
gigabyte and talk the host into an unbounded read.

Host key trust is enforced by *failing* the connection rather than
prompting inside the handshake. SSH.NET raises verification synchronously,
so consulting the user there would block the handshake on a UI round trip
and deadlock the first time the prompt needed the UI thread. Unknown host
and changed key become distinct exceptions the caller resolves
asynchronously. A mismatch has no retry path at all: a dialog offering to
continue is how users are trained to click through the one warning that
actually indicates interception. A legitimately rebuilt server is handled by
removing the pin in settings, away from the moment of connecting.

The data plane serves the renderer page from the same loopback listener as
the socket, which makes Origin predictable -- always http://127.0.0.1:{port}
-- where a WebView virtual-host mapping would give a different origin per
backend and nothing to validate. The token is substituted at serve time, so
it never touches disk and never appears in a URL. Being clear about what
that buys: not protection from a process running as this user, which can
read our memory anyway, but from a page in the user's browser attempting
WebSocket connections to loopback ports, which is a real and routine thing.

Two bugs the tests caught. The accept loop handled connections serially, so
an upgraded WebSocket parked it inside the receive loop and every later
request went unanswered -- the page's own script among them. The suite hung
rather than failed, which is how I found it. And SHA-1 is unavoidable here:
RFC 6455 mandates it for Sec-WebSocket-Accept, where it authenticates
nothing. Suppressed narrowly with that reasoning; the alternative,
HttpListener.AcceptWebSocketAsync, throws PlatformNotSupportedException off
Windows.
2026-07-28 21:58:55 +02:00

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, key wrapping
  DodoSSH.Domain          entities and invariants, no EF
  DodoSSH.Infrastructure  DbContext, configurations, migrations
  DodoSSH.Api             the host
tests/                    one test project per source project
docs/adr/                 architecture decision records

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-changes gates CI.
  • Package versions are centralised in Directory.Packages.props; packages.lock.json is committed and CI restores in locked mode.
  • BannedSymbols.txt bans DateTime.UtcNow (use TimeProvider), Guid.NewGuid (use CreateVersion7), sync-over-async, MD5/SHA1 and PBKDF2.
  • Public members of DodoSSH.Contracts must be declared in PublicAPI.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. Backend done: the DSH1 crypto core, the data model, sync push/pull for hosts, /me, and enrollment with the identity-provider key binding. Remaining: the desktop client, and the two spikes that gate it — the Linux WebView and SSH.NET's window-change. Both need a Linux and a macOS machine, so neither has run yet.
  • 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.

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