RetroShare 0.6.7 + x64 + Portable

Update OBS submodule

This release took even more time than the previous ones. This is for one simple reason: we changed lots of core features of the software (e.g. token system, notifications, etc), which had us re-implement some GUI parts taking the opportunity to make them more efficient or re-designed to a better layout (e.g. channels, boards). In the end, lots of bugs have been introduced in the process and it took some time to reach a perfectly stable product again. While we decided to stop developing new features in November 2020, it took us 4 months to fix all the bugs, mostly thanks to a really good user-feedback. As you will see, it was totally worth it.
New channel and board layouts:
Channels benefit from a new layout that is more suitable to their usage. Two different visualization modes are possible (top right blue button, left to the search field): grid or list. Use the double image below to compare both views
Both in channels or boards, the new visualization system is now based on an abstract item model (instead of manually inserted items as it was in v0.6.5) making it much faster to load and offering a lot more possibilities for how to display the information.
Short certificates:
Up to v0.6.5, Retroshare used certificates containing the SSL id, the PGP public key and naming information. It appears that we can afford to only send the PGP fingerprint instead of the full key, without losing any security.
Full certificate (old method, a.k.a. type-1):
SSL handshake <= certificate PGP signature <= profile being listed as friend.
Short certificate (new method, a.k.a. type-2):
SSL handshake <= SSL Id listed as friend
In both cases the handshake is eventually validated by information provided by your friend using a supposedly secure transmission (hand-to-hand, encrypted email, etc). This part of the security model is still up to the user.
Once a node is connected, it will supply its own PGP key using discovery (as before), which will be checked to match the fingerprint in the certificate and then be marked to be used in type-1 handshake later on for future connections. The new handshake type is indeed only used at the first connection. Whatever happens wrong in the process (mismatch profile keys fingerprint, mismatched SSL id) will prevent further connections.
The security model of Retroshare connections is based on the fact that the original certificate you get comes from the right person. It can be the SSL id (new type) or the profile public key (old type): the security level is the same. If you trust the SSL id, then any information received after connecting to this Id can be trusted as well, which includes the profile public key. Once the profile key is received, all connections (including to other nodes of the same profile) will be validated by the same profile key.
The new home page therefore displays a much shorter certificate, which happens to be small enough to e.g. fit into a QR-code, since it only contains the node and profile names, the SSL Id and profile fingerprint, and the contact local/external IPs and ports (for clear nodes):
With Tor nodes, the certificate may be a bit longer since the Tor v3 onion address is rather longer (56 bytes) than the PGP fingerprint (20 bytes).
Compatibility with Tor v3:
Retroshare v0.6.6 supports Tor v3 keys. The change is backward compatible: new Tor v3 nodes will connect to 0.6.5 nodes without any change, provided that the 0.6.5 node you’re connected to uses a version of Tor that supports v3 keys too, which means posterior to v0.3.2.9.
Tor nodes have never been easier to setup: at the node creation time, select “Hidden node over Tor” instead of “Standard node”, and fill your profile name and password. Retroshare will automatically create a hidden service for you and configure itself to use it (as soon as Tor is installed in the system – retroshare only looks for a Tor executable). Using Tor has many advantages:
Connections through firewalls are extremely reliable and fast since Tor is very hard to filter. A Tor node may therefore be a good way to keep Retroshare working in a heavily filtered network;
your IP is hidden to everyone including friend nodes; a lot of features related to clear nodes are not needed (IP Filters, Relay, DHT, UDP, etc) which makes the software lighter and certainly more stable.
Tor v2 keys will automatically deprecate after July 2021. This is not our decision: it depends on Tor stopping to support these keys. Consequently, it is recommended to upgrade your existing Tor v2 node to Tor v3. Fortunately, this is rather easy: just delete (or move away) the directory ~/.retroshare/HID06_[your SSL Id]/hidden_service/. Then start retroshare. It will automatically create a new (v3) service address. Your friends will still accept you when you connect to them (your profile key hasn’t changed). They will however not be able to locate you themselves (your Tor address has changed), until they receive your new Tor address either by discovery, or by yourself sending your certificate. This mostly happens to clear nodes for which the only direction of connection is from the clear node to the Tor node. In summary:
delete the hidden_service directory and re-launch Retroshare
send again your Retroshare certificate (See Home Page) to friend clear nodes
Auto-cleaning of unsubscribed channels, forums, boards and circles:
All GXS groups (understand e.g. a forum, a channel or even a circle or an identity) now record the last time they are advertised by friends. It is therefore possible, when a group is not subscribed, to safely delete it. The rules are the following:
unsubscribed forums, channels, boards are auto-deleted after 60 days if not seen at friend nodes either (meaning friends are not subscribed)
subscribing to a group resets the counter
Some services however have specific rules:
Identities record the last usage time that depends on how they are used by other services. The People tab comes with a list of usages, which timings correspond to regular sweeps of the databases for signature and consistency checks.
Circles have specific auto-subscribe rules to consistently benefit from this auto-cleaning strategy:
reminder: circle membership for an identity is based on two necessary conditions: (1) the identity is “invited” by the circle administrator (which is part of the group data), and (2) the identity requests membership (requests are group messages);
a circle is only subscribed (meaning propagated to friends) if a membership request from one of your identities is posted to it, which includes also when actively “leaving” a circle after previously being a member, or if you are the administrator of that circle.
circle membership requests (or leaving requests) are kept for 1 year. A membership request therefore needs to be renewed after one year.
In the early days of circles (previous releases) it was possible to create huge circles inviting all possible identities, which would automatically propagate everywhere. Thanks to the above rules, this is not possible anymore. Such circles that may already be here will be unsubscribed and disappear from your circle list after 60 days provided that none of your friend nodes request membership (The remaining time is visible in the tooltip over unsubscribed circles as “last seen: XX days ago”).
Better notifications in Circles/Channels/Forums/Boards:
The previously named “Log” tab is now called “Activity”. It still shows a configurable summary of events in the software (new forum messages, connection attempts, etc). We added a few of them especially for Circles:
Peer requesting membership or leaving a circle;
peer owned by your node being invited or rejected from a circle by the circle admin.
…and Forums: moderators added/removed
These notifications are now available because we added a more accurate description of the changes in group and message data in the GXS internal event handler.
Various GUI tweaks:
The list of small changes/improvements in the Qt interface is rather large. You will certainly notice the following incomplete subset:
A new tab for identities has been added in Statistics;
home page has been improved for more readability and a better compatibility with short certificates;
forum pinned posts behavior and look has been improved;
messages layout have been improved with spam box filter, attachments box filter and colored tags folders
Certificates signed with SHA256 instead of SHA1:
This is a basic security issue: primary collisions with SHA1 are not very far away and switching to a stronger hash makes SSL handshake more secure. Consequently all certificates created by Retroshare now use SHA256, while keeping compatibility with SHA1 signatures.
For the same reason, on debian Buster, openssl security level defaults to to 2 which precludes the use of SHA1, originally used to sign RS certificates. As a consequence, on these systems, locations created with RS previously to Jan. 2020 will not start unless one reverts the security level to a value of 1, which we only do when loading the certificate with default parameters fails and for OpenSSL versions later than v1.1.1. This backward compatibility tweak is meant to disappear from Retroshare code in 1 year.
SHA256 will be used automatically on new nodes (even with the same profile). Upgrading an existing node is unfortunately not currently possible.
Deprecation of the token system:
The existing asynchronous token system has been replaced by a blocking API, that proves much easier to use since it removes the need to have multiple functions calling and receiving events. Still, the blocking calls can take some time and the UI still needs to do them in a thread with the following constraints:
UI modifications should still happen in the UI thread;
the UI shouldn’t wait for blocking API calls.
Consequently we use a combination of two new built-in methods (that will simplify even more with C++ async calls): RSThreads::async() which executes a lambda in a separate thread and qtthreadsutils::postToObject() which sets a given lambda to be executed in the GUI thread using the normal Qt event queue.
Note that no mutex is needed since everything happens in the UI thread.
New notification system:
Adding notifications to a service is now extremely simple: a new entity named rsEvents handles all events. In order to use it, one needs to declare his own type of events, with any private information (hash and event code in the example below), and supply the serial_process method using Retroshare core macros. This way the event can be sent anywhere in libretroshare, plugins, and even to clients connected using the JSON API (e.g. web interface, python scripts, etc).
Whenever an event needs to be sent, the code only needs to allocate one event and send it to postEvent (asynchronous through a queue) or sendEvent (direct blocking call):
Catching the event, for instance in retroshare-gui is pretty simple as well. The client (here the file transfers GUI part) only needs to register an event handler for the given event type (here FILE_TRANSFER):
Note the use of postToObject (here again!) which allows the event to be handled in the GUI thread, since rsEvent will likely call the lambda that is registered as event handler from a different thread (here, the file transfer loop).
End of retroshare-nogui (don’t panic!):
The former headless retroshare server has been replaced by a new executable named retroshare-service, to which one talks using the retroshare built-in JSON API. It is rather cheap and can be ran on Android phones as well as screenless servers.
Compilation simply requires the appropriate flags:
An example of application to this interface is the new WebUI developed during Google Summer of Code 2019. See https://github.com/retroshare/RSNewWebUI, and add “rs_webui” in the compilation flags.
While retroshare_service can be used to create new nodes, the web UI doesn’t currently offer to do it. Setting up a retroshare server with retroshare_service+WebUI therefore needs to copy the full ~/.retroshare/ data directory prior to launching retroshare service:
While ‘-U’ would normally be followed by the node ID you want to start, using ‘list’ instead will show up the list of available nodes and ask for the profile password before starting it. Another limitation is currently that retroshare_service does not use the automatic Tor configuration code (which depends on Qt) and setting up a headless Tor node requires some manual tweaking in order to (1) configure Tor system-wide to start a hidden service, then (2) create a Tor node with the Qt UI, choosing the manual Tor configuration option and setting the correct ports according to what was supplied to Tor. Option ‘-W’ asks retroshare_service to set a new password for the webinterface.
The webinterface is now entirely supplied by Retroshare. In particular its html and JS files do not need anymore to be installed on the client where the WebUI runs.
Other backstage improvements:
Some backstage improvements are also worth mentioning:
A new cache for metadata allows a much faster loading of forums/channels/boards;
GxsId tracking has been improved, which can be seen by more accurate usage statistics in People->Person;
RTT/bandwidth management and service priorities has been improved after lots of careful tests. The RTT now between two friends keeps low values;
memory usage has improved, but is still not perfect. Some systems tend to allocate too much memory on threads and RS uses lots of them;
improved debug output thanks to new RsDbg(), RsError() and RsWarn() macros;
consistently switched licence to AGPLv3 (GUI) LGPLv3 (libretroshare) in prevision to application for Debian packaging.
Last words:
As usual, only congratulating all the testers and pull-requests providers will not make them true justice. This release would not be here without them. So many thanks to all of them!
Since we reached some rather stable status, we would now like to:
Apply for debian packaging (we will need some sponsoring!)
cleanup deep indexing (currently using xapian) so that it can be shipped in the next stable version
improve the reactivity of GXS sync
make our Tor automatic system Qt-free. This is not so easy because the current code heavily depends on signal/slot connections.

Спасибо очень нужная программа

https://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/2016/09/03/release-notes-for-v0-6-1/

Чтобы видеть скрытый текст, вам надо зарегистрироваться, набрать 5 комментариев, подробности в разделе ЧАВО-РЕЙТИНГ

GUI

* Used QTextBrowser to show the channel description for unsubscribed groups to avoid the horizontal growing of the channel list.
* fixed pasting of rslinks with special characters with Qt5
* fixed strings in IdDialog (patch from Henry)
* Optimized fill of feed items by moving the fill of the hidden area to the first expand of the frame.
* make IP connect state string fully translatable (patch from Henry)
* Use a better icon for "linked to your profile"
* Enabled ordered/bullet list for Message Composer
* changed default news feeds to include security_IP, remove Peer connects (this one drives most people crazy)
* change label "Security Ip" to "Ip security" in feed settings(patch from Henry)
* Added a second color button to Message Composer, for set text background color.
* Changed parameter isFirstTimeRun of RsAccountsDetail::getAccountOptions to output parameter.
* Added version information of the libraries to HelpDialog.
* Added own flag and new checkbox in settings for security ip feed items.
* Changed NewsFeed::addUnique for SecurityIpItem to compare the ip addresses. That avoids duplicates when IP changes.
* Removed banner pixmap for the ConnectFriendWizard of the standard style.
* QWizard cannot be resized horizontal when a banner pixmap is set.
* fixed whitespaces in strings (patch from Henry)
* changed "Owned by node" into "Owned by" in IdDialog (patch from Henry)
* added explanation to IP change security item in a tooltip
* Changed string "TOR" to "Tor" everywhere.
* Fixed crash in context menu of the id list in IdDialog when no row is active.
* disable IP filter tab when using a hidden node
* Used ElidedLabel for the forum name to avoid the horizontal growing of the forum list.
* Set the status of the message to read when the user read it in the news feed.
* Remove the message news feed when the user reads the message in the message list.
* Added warning to IdEditDialog, when the lenght of the nickname is too short or too long.
* Used StyledElidedLabel for the nickname in Idialog to avoid the horizontal growing of the right widget.
* Updated languages from Transifex

Plugins
* FeedReader: Added check for forum author.
* Fixed VOIP linkage for ubuntu distributions (thx to Phenom)

WebUI
* added profile import/creation
* fixed leaking file descriptors
* added upload handler for small files
* fixed terminal thread
* removed some unused parameter warnings

IP Filters
* added check for whitelist before sending a Security item for IP changed.
* improved voting for extr address, and make sure DHTStunner does not return a banned IP
* removed/improved debug info

Various code improvements
* changed Radix64::decode to return result as std::vector
* removed unused branch and dummy function in pqihandler
* removed pqisecurity dummy functions. It is a packet filter which was never implemented. It's job is now done by service permissions.
* fixed compilation for versions not using sqlcipher
* added more debug info in pqissl when connection is attempted from banned address

Bug fixes
* Fixed using uninitialized variable in p3HistoryMgr::setSaveCount.
* Fixed using uninitialized variable in p3HistoryMgr::setEnable.
* Fixed uninitialized members of bdProxyId and bdConnectionRequest.
* removed unused variable in TmpBlobStore
* let interface classes initialise their integers
* initialise BanListPeer::addr
* let turtle reputation classes initialise their integers
* let turtle items initialise their integers
* Added destructor to p3LinkMgrIMPL.
* Fixed memory leak in GuiExprElement.
* added missing initialisation in p3GxsChannels
* added missing initialisation in p3GxsCircles
* added missing initialisation in p3GxsForums
* removed useless ifs in rsaccounts.cc
* added missing initialisation in resource_api::Request
* added missing initialisation in ApiServerMHD
* fixed potential mismatch free/delete[] in distant chat
* added missing initialization for RsGXsIdGroup::mLastUsageTS
* added check for return value of fseek in ftFileProvider
* fixed potential memory leak in pgphandler
* fixed memory leak in FileIndexStore
* fixed uninitialised memory read in RsGxsNetUtils
* fixed Chat Lobby gui complaining about wrong string passed to RsGxsId constructor
* added missing delete in p3GeneralConfig
* Added proper shutdown of the plugins with remove of the service and dlcose of the plugin handle.
* fixed unlikely but possible invalid read in formatting of bandwidth numbers
* fixed potential use after free in openpgpsdk
* fixed double free in openpgpsdk
* added missing socket close in pqissllistenbase destructor
* added missing free and fclose in FileIndex
* fixed potential invalid memory read in openpgpsdk
* Removed unload of the plugins, because it causes a crash.
* Fixed possible dereference of null pointer in NotifyPage.
* Added missing breaks to p3GxsChannels::notifyChanges.
* Fixed possible fread from a null pointer in HashCache.
* Added missing breaks to p3GxsForums::notifyChanges.
* Added missing break in p3GxsChannels::handle_event.
* added missing size check in RsGxsRecognSerialiser
* fixed password handling in deferred signature algorithm (in case of cancel, enter wrong passphrase, etc). Fixes the bug of
half-initialized identities not loading when cancel is pressed, or wrong passphrase is entered, at signature step.
* improved login system: do not re-ask for passphrase when user clicks cancel. Removed warning stating that "maybe passphrase is wrong".
* fixed another x64 serialisation bug in FeedReader (see rev8396)(thanks to Eugene Tooms)
* Added missing dlcolse to RsPluginManager::loadPlugin.
* Added proper handling of the handle of the loaded plugin.
* Added check for trailing '/' of base directory in RsAccountsDetail::setupBaseDirectory.
* avoid unwanted wait in in p3IdService that slowed down the entire app (thx to jolavillette for finding this)
* Initialized the the member aes_key of DistantChatPeerInfo with memset.
* Fixed memory leak in p3FeedReaderThread::processXPath.
* Fixed uninitialized pointer read in FlowLayoutItem::dropEvent.
* Fixed memory leak in RsGenExchange::publishGrps.
* Fixed memory leak in RsGenExchange::publishMsgs.
* Fixed memory leak in DistantChatService::locked_sendDHPublicKey.
* Added missing fclose to RsAccountsDetail::loadPreferredAccount.
* Added missing fclose to ApiServerMHD::accessHandlerCallback.
* Fixed memory leak in RsRecogn::createTagRequest
* Fixed memory leak in DistributedChatService::invitePeerToLobby when lobby not found.
* Fixed memory leak in LookupDNSAddr.
* Fixed momory leak in RsDirUtil::getFileHash when the file doesn't exist.
* Fixed memory leak when RsServicePermissionItem::deserialise failed.
* Fixed uninitialised member in bdNodeManager
* fixed another uninitialised memory read in bitdht
* fixed uninitialised memory in bdfilter
* removed 2 unused members from FileDetails in ftextralist
* fixed situation leading to uninitialised message content in MessageDialog
* fixed use of wrong variable in GxsGenExchange
* fixed uninitialised variable in RSCollectionDialog
* removed ambiguous expression that confuses coverity, in TransfersDialog
* fixed access of delete iterator
* removed false positive access beyond range of iterator
* removed possibility to access invalidated iterator in grouter
* fixed invalid use of wrong iterator in GXS reputation system
* fixed bug in using invalid iterator in ChatLobbyNotify
* fixed wrong use of flags in pqibin (wtf??)
* remove potential use of deleted item in rsRecogn
* fixed use of pointer after memory ownership transferred to QCache
* fixed potential passing of deleted item to sendChatItem when a ChatLobbyItem is too big (would probably cause a crash. Found using coverity)
* fixed call to strncpy in network interface determination code which leaves unterminated string if strlen(ifptr->if_name)==16