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Polyphony

This documentation currently hosts information about polyproto; an advanced, secure and scalable protocol for federated chat services.

The core of the protocol lies in the polyproto-core specification and in the federation API routes, which are used to negotiate and establish connections between foreign servers and clients.

The polyproto-core federation protocol can be used for any kind of online service, enabling you to bring federated identities to your federated social network, federated chat service or federated $ANYTHING.

Glossary

  • Actor - An entity represented by a federation ID, registered on a home server. Actors can be users, bots, or any other entity with a federation ID.
  • CA, Certificate Authority - Any home server that issues and publicly attests to the validity of ID-Certs. In polyproto, only home servers are CAs.
  • Client - Any application used by an actor to connect to an instance.
  • CSR, Certificate Signing Request - A request sent to a CA to obtain a certificate. It holds information about the entity requesting the certificate, including their public identity key.
  • DN, Distinguished Name - A set of RDNs (Relative Distinguished Names) that uniquely identify a certificate. See https://ldap.com/ldap-dns-and-rdns/
  • Federation ID - A unique identifier; In public contexts, usually actor@subdomain.example.com, where bold parts are required and non-bold parts are optional.
  • Foreign server - An instance that an actor is not registered on; essentially a third party.
  • Home server - The instance that an actor is registered on. Any polyproto-core compliant server hosted on the same domain is also considered a home server. A home server is the instance that publicly attests to the validity of all legitimate ID-Certs issued under its FQDN. A domain can have many home servers, but only one per subdomain.
  • ID-CSR - A certificate signing request for a client's identity key pair. It is used to obtain an ID-Cert.
  • Identity - Synonymous with "Federation ID".
  • Identity Key Pair - A key pair associating an identity with a set of cryptographic keys used to sign and possibly encrypt messages.
  • Instance - A server hosting polyproto compliant software for clients.
  • polyproto-chat - The chat-API used by Polyphony. An extension of the polyproto protocol, defining the routes and capabilities of the chat-API used by Polyphony.
  • polyproto - The core federation protocol and APIs of polyproto, enabling identification and authorization on foreign servers. It is independent of the chat-API used.
  • Root Certificate - A certificate used to sign other certificates, establishing a chain of trust. In polyproto, only home servers have root certificates.
  • Session - A specific period of authenticated interaction between a client and an instance. During the lifetime of a session, the client can perform actions as the actor they are authenticated as.
  • Session ID - See core.md