Megaphone

What is it?

Megaphone is an internal Mozilla system providing global broadcasts for Firefox.

Traditionally Firefox has polled multiple services at different frequencies (e.g. every 24 hours) to check for updates. Megaphone serves as an alternative, notifying user agents of new updates in near real time (within 5 minutes) over the WebPush WebSocket protocol.

This enables Firefox to:

Revoke HTTPS Certificates or malicious extensions immediately after security incidents occur
Update quicker (Firefox itself, tracking protection lists, or general settings)
Provide faster turn-around/feedback loops for studies/experiments (Shield)

All via one unified, simpler client-side service that doesn't require polling.

This repository provides a Rust based Megaphone endpoint (API). Broadcasts are sent to the Megaphone endpoint. The autopush-rs service polls the endpoint as the source of truth for current broadcasts, ultimately delivering them to clients.

Also see the API doc.

Requirements

Rust nightly as specified in the rust-toolchain file (recognized by cargo) in the root of the project (recognized by cargo).
MySQL 5.7 (or compatible)
libmysqlclient (brew install mysql on macOS, apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev on Ubuntu)
*For running the docker image locally: docker-compose v1.21.0 or later

Setting Up

Install Rust
Create a megaphone user/database
Run:

$ export ROCKET_DATABASE_URL=mysql://scott:tiger@mydatabase/megaphone $ cargo run

Running the Docker Image

Install docker-compose
From a dedicated screen (or tmux window)

$ docker-compose up

This will create two intertwined docker images:

db_1 - the database image. This image is a local test image. The database can be accessed via mysql -umegaphone -ptest -h localhost --port 4306 megaphone.

app_1 - the megaphone application. This is accessible via port 8000.

API

Megaphone is normally called via a HTTP interface using Authorized calls. Responses are generally JSON objects with appropriate HTTP status codes to indicate success/failure.

Authorization

All calls to Megaphone (minus the Dockerflow Status Checks) require authorization. Authorization is specified by the Authorization header via Bearer tokens specified in the application's configuration.

e.g.

export ROCKET_BROADCASTER_AUTH={test=["foobar"]}
export ROCKET_READER_AUTH={autopush=["quux"]}

The test broadcaster would specify:

Authorization: Bearer foobar

The autopush reader would specify:

Authorization: Bearer quux

PUT /v1/broadcasts/< broadcaster_id > /< bchannel_id >

Broadcast a new version.

The body of the PUT request becomes the new version value.

A special version value of "NOP" (the string "NOP" prefixed and suffixed by four underscores) signals a "No Operation" to clients: that no action should take place, effectively overwriting and cancelling any pending version update.

The return value is a JSON structure including the HTTP status of the result: successful results either being a 201 code for newly created broadcasts or 200 for an update to an existing broadcast.

{
   "code": 200
}

GET /v1/broadcasts

Read the current broadcasts.

The return value is a JSON structure including the HTTP status of the result and a broadcasts object consisting of broadcastIDs and their current versions.

{
   "code": 200,
   "broadcasts": {
      "test/broadcast1": "v3",
      "test/broadcast2": "v0"
   }
}

Dockerflow Status Checks:

GET /heartbeat

Return the status of the server.

This call is only used for server status checks.

GET /lbheartbeat

Return a light weight status check (200 OK).

This call is only used for the Load Balancer's check.

GET /version

Return a JSON response of the version information of the server.