Geph5 is a major rewrite with a few big architectural differences from Geph4 that largely serve the goal of simplifying and massively cleaning up the design:
sosistab2, or anything similar that builds a reliable transport on unreliable pipes, is no longer used. Instead, obfuscated transports must themselves provide reliable transport. In practice, this means that stuff is based on streams multiplexed over TCP, not packets and UDP.- The client no longer has complex logic for intelligently hot-swapping pipes. This has proven to be difficult to achieve given diverse network environments, inaccurate/sleepy phone clocks, etc. Instead, a session is started and used until it breaks, and another session is started, etc. With fast enough session creation, the only noticeable difference is that proxied TCP connections reset, which most applications handle gracefully.
- The central authentication server is called the broker, not the binder. It also now uses a simple JSON-RPC API without end-to-end encryption, with integrity-critical responses having ed25519 signatures.
- The broker is in charge of communicating with bridges and exits to set up routes for users. Complex
(number of bridges) * (number of exits)communication patterns are eliminated, and the broker can be easily used to generate routes for Earendil and similar software. - VPN mode is supported by tunneling through stream ("socks5") mode, but with support for intercepting traffic tun2socks-style instead.
- We pervasively use config files rather than massive strings of command-line arguments.
- We no longer use webviews for GUI. Instead, GUI clients are written in Rust and directly call protocol libraries.
The code is generally licensed under MPL 2.0. Low-level libraries useful to a wide variety of projects, such as the sillad framework, are generally licensed under the ISC license.
Unlike Geph4, Geph5 is organized in a Cargo workspace, "monorepo"-style:
libraries/contains library crates that may depend on each other. All of these crates also receive crates.io releases.binaries/contains binary crates.geph5-clientgeph5-exitgeph5-bridgegeph5-broker