federation/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

[0.18.0-dev] - unreleased

Added

• Work has started on ActivityPub support 🎉

Changed

• Backwards incompatible. Lowest compatible Python version is now 3.6.

• Backwards incompatible. Internal refactoring to allow adding ActivityPub support as the second supported protocol. Highlights of changes below.

  • Reversal of all the work previously done to use Diaspora URL format identifiers. Working with the Diaspora protocol now always requires using handles and GUID's as before the changes introduced in v0.15.0. It ended up impossible to construct a Diaspora URL in all cases in a way that apps only need to store one identifier.
  • The id and possible target_id are now either URL format identifiers (ActivityPub) or a handle or GUID (Diaspora, depending on entity). Additionally a new actor_id has been added which for ActivityPub is an URL and for Diaspora a handle. Note, Diaspora entities always have also the guid, handle, target_guid and target_handle as before v0.15.0, depending on the entity. When creating Diaspora entities, you must pass these in for sending to work.
  • The high level fetchers.retrieve_remote_content signature has changed. It now expects an id for fetching from AP protocol and handle, guid and entity_type to fetch from Diaspora. Additionally a sender_key_fetcher can be passed in as before to optimize public key fetching using a callable.
  • The high level fetchers.retrieve_remote_profile signature has changed. It now expects an id for fetching from AP protocol and handle for fetching from Diaspora. Additionally a sender_key_fetcher can be passed in as before to optimize public key fetching using a callable.
  • The generator class RFC3033Webfinger now expects instead of an id the handle and guid of the profile.
  • NodeInfo2 parser now returns the admin user in handle format instead of a Diaspora format URL.
  • The high level inbound and outbound functions inbound.handle_receive, outbound.handle_send parameter user must now receive a UserType compatible object. This must have the attributes id and private_key. If Diaspora support is required then also handle and guid should exist. The type can be found as a class in types.UserType.
  • The outbound function outbound.handle_send parameter recipients structure has changed. It must now for Diaspora contain either a handle (public delivery) or tuple of handle, RSAPublicKey, guid for private delivery. For AP delivery either url ID for public delivery or tuple of url ID, RSAPublicKey for private delivery.

Removed

• Backwards incompatible. Support for Legacy Diaspora payloads have been removed to reduce the amount of code needed to maintain while refactoring for ActivityPub.

[0.17.0] - 2018-08-11

Fixed

• Switch crypto library pycrypto to pycryptodome, which is a more up to date fork of the former. This fixes CVE-2018-6594 found in the former.

  Deployment note. When updating an application, you must uninstall pycrypto first, otherwise there will be a conflict if both the versions are installed at the same time. To uninstall, do pip uninstall pycrypto.

[0.16.0] - 2018-07-23

Added

• Enable generating encrypted JSON payloads with the Diaspora protocol which adds private message support. (related issue)

  JSON encrypted payload encryption and decryption is handled by the Diaspora EncryptedPayload class.

• Add RFC3033 webfinger generator (related issue)

  Also provided is a Django view and url configuration for easy addition into Django projects. Django is not a hard dependency of this library, usage of the Django view obviously requires installing Django itself. For configuration details see documentation.

• Add fetchers and parsers for NodeInfo, NodeInfo2, StatisticsJSON and Mastodon server metainfo documents.

• Add NodeInfo2 generator and Django view. See documentation for details. (related issue)

• Added new network utilities to fetch IP and country information from a host.

  The country information is fetched using the free ipdata.co service. NOTE! This service is rate limited to 1500 requests per day.

• Extract mentions from Diaspora payloads that have text content. The mentions will be available in the entity as _mentions which is a set of Diaspora ID's in URI format.

Changed

• Send outbound Diaspora payloads in new format. Remove possibility to generate legacy MagicEnvelope payloads. (related issue)

• Backwards incompatible. Refactor handle_send function

  Now handle_send high level outbound helper function also allows delivering private payloads using the Diaspora protocol. (related issue)

  The signature has changed. Parameter recipients should now be a list of recipients to delivery to. Each recipient should either be an id or a tuple of (id, public key). If public key is provided, Diaspora protocol delivery will be made as an encrypted private delivery.

• Backwards incompatible. Change handle_create_payload function signature.

  Parameter to_user is now to_user_key and thus instead of an object containing the key attribute it should now be an RSA public key object instance. This simplifies things since we only need the key from the user, nothing else.

• Switch Diaspora protocol to send new style entities (related issue)

  We've already accepted these on incoming payloads for a long time and so do all the other platforms now, so now we always send out entities with the new property names. This can break federation with really old servers that don't understand these keys yet.

Fixed

• Change unquote method used when preparing Diaspora XML payloads for verification (related issue)

  Some platforms deliver payloads not using the urlsafe base64 standard which caused problems when validating the unquoted signature. Ensure maximum compatibility by allowing non-standard urlsafe quoted payloads.

• Fix for empty values in Diaspora protocol entities sometimes ending up as None instead of empty string when processing incoming payloads.

• Fix validation of Retraction with entity type Share

• Allow port in Diaspora handles as per the protocol specification

  Previously handles were validated like emails.

• Fix Diaspora Profile mapping regarding last_name property

  Previously only first_name was used when creating the Profile.name value. Now both first_name and last_name are used.

  When creating outgoing payloads, the Profile.name will still be placed in first_name to avoid trying to artificially split it.

[0.15.0] - 2018-02-12

Added

• Added base entity Share which maps to a DiasporaReshare for the Diaspora protocol. (related issue)

  The Share entity supports all the properties that a Diaspora reshare does. Additionally two other properties are supported: raw_content and entity_type. The former can be used for a "quoted share" case where the sharer adds their own note to the share. The latter can be used to reference the type of object that was shared, to help the receiver, if it is not sharing a Post entity. The value must be a base entity class name.

• Entities have two new properties: id and target_id.

  Diaspora entity ID's are in the form of the Diaspora URI scheme, where it is possible to construct an ID from the entity. In the future, ActivityPub object ID's will be found in these properties.

• New high level fetcher function federation.fetchers.retrieve_remote_content. (related issue)

  This function takes the following parameters:

  • id - Object ID. For Diaspora, the only supported protocol at the moment, this is in the Diaspora URI format.
  • sender_key_fetcher - Optional function that takes a profile handle and returns a public key in str format. If this is not given, the public key will be fetched from the remote profile over the network.

  The given ID will be fetched from the remote endpoint, validated to be from the correct author against their public key and then an instance of the entity class will be constructed and returned.

• New Diaspora protocol helpers in federation.utils.diaspora:

  • retrieve_and_parse_content. See notes regarding the high level fetcher above.
  • fetch_public_key. Given a handle as a parameter, will fetch the remote profile and return the public_key from it.
  • parse_diaspora_uri. Parses a Diaspora URI scheme string, returns either None if parsing fails or a tuple of handle, entity_type and guid.

• Support fetching new style Diaspora protocol Webfinger (RFC 3033) (related issue)

  The legaxy Webfinger is still used as fallback if the new Webfinger is not found.

Changed

• Refactoring for Diaspora MagicEnvelope class.

  The class init now also allows passing in parameters to construct and verify MagicEnvelope instances. The order of init parameters has not been changed, but they are now all optional. When creating a class instance, one should always pass in the necessary parameters depnding on whether the class instance will be used for building a payload or verifying an incoming payload. See class docstring for details.

• Diaspora procotol receive flow now uses the MagicEnvelope class to verify payloads. No functional changes regarding verification otherwise.

• Diaspora protocol receive flow now fetches the sender public key over the network if a sender_key_fetcher function is not passed in. Previously an error would be raised.

  Note that fetching over the network for each payload is wasteful. Implementers should instead cache public keys when possible and pass in a function to retrieve them, as before.

Fixed

• Converting base entity Profile to DiasporaProfile for outbound sending missed two attributes, image_urls and tag_list. Those are now included so that the values transfer into the built payload.

• Fix fallback to HTTP in the fetch_document network helper in the case of ConnectionError when trying HTTPS. Thanks @autogestion.

• Ensure handle is always lower cased when fetching remote profile using retrieve_remote_profile. Warning will be logged if an upper case handle is passed in.

[0.14.1] - 2017-08-06

Fixed

• Fix regression in handling Diaspora relayables due to security fix in 0.14.0. Payload and entity handle need to be allowed to be different when handling relayables.

[0.14.0] - 2017-08-06

Security

• Add proper checks to make sure Diaspora protocol payload handle and entity handle are the same. Even though we already verified the signature of the sender, we didn't ensure that the sender isn't trying to fake an entity authored by someone else.

  The Diaspora protocol functions message_to_objects and element_to_objects now require a new parameter, the payload sender handle. These functions should normally not be needed to be used directly.

Changed

• Breaking change. The high level federation.outbound functions handle_send and handle_create_payload signatures have been changed. This has been done to better represent the objects that are actually sent in and to add an optional parent_user object.

  For both functions the from_user parameter has been renamed to author_user. Optionally a parent_user object can also be passed in. Both the user objects must have private_key and handle attributes. In the case that parent_user is given, that user will be used to sign the payload and for Diaspora relayables an extra parent_author_signature in the payload itself.

[0.13.0] - 2017-07-22

Backwards incompatible changes

• When processing Diaspora payloads, entity used to get a _source_object stored to it. This was an etree.Element created from the source object. Due to serialization issues in applications (for example pushing the object to a task queue or saving to database), _source_object is now a byte string representation for the element done with etree.tostring().

Added

• New style Diaspora private encrypted JSON payloads are now supported in the receiving side. Outbound private Diaspora payloads are still sent as legacy encrypted payloads. (issue)
  • No additional changes need to be made when calling handle_receive from your task processing. Just pass in the full received XML or JSON payload as a string with recipient user object as before.
• Add created_at to Diaspora Comment entity XML creator. This is required in renewed Diaspora protocol. (related issue)

Fixed

• Fix getting sender from a combination of legacy Diaspora encrypted payload and new entity names (for example author). This combination probably only existed in this library.
• Correctly extend entity _children. Certain Diaspora payloads caused _children for an entity to be written over by an empty list, causing for example status message photos to not be saved. Correctly do an extend on it. (issue)
• Fix parsing Diaspora profile tag_string into Profile.tag_list if the tag_string is an empty string. This caused the whole Profile object creation to fail. (issue)
• Fix processing Diaspora payload if it is passed to handle_receive as a bytes object. (issue)
• Fix broken Diaspora relayables after latest 0.2.0 protocol changes. Previously relayables worked only because they were reverse engineered from the legacy protocol. Now that XML order is not important and tag names can be different depending on which protocol version, the relayable forwarding broke. To fix, we don't regenerate the entity when forwarding it but store the original received object when generating a parent_author_signature (which is optional in some cases, but we generate it anyway for now). This happens in the previously existing entity.sign_with_parent() method. In the sending part, if the original received object (now with a parent author signature) exists in the entity, we send that to the remote instead of serializing the entity to XML.
  • To forward a relayable you must call entity.sign_with_parent() before calling handle_send to send the entity.

Removed

• Post.photos entity attribute was never used by any code and has been removed. Child entities of type Image are stored in the Post._children as before.
• Removed deprecated user private key lookup using user.key in Diaspora receive processing. Passed in user objects must now have a private_key attribute.

[0.12.0] - 2017-05-22

Backwards incompatible changes

• Removed exception class NoHeaderInMessageError. New style Diaspora protocol does not have a custom header in the Salmon magic envelope and thus there is no need to raise this anywhere.

Added

• New style Diaspora public payloads are now supported (see here). Old style payloads are still supported. Payloads are also still sent out old style.
• Add new Follow base entity and support for the new Diaspora "contact" payload. The simple Follow maps to Diaspora contact entity with following/sharing both true or false. Sharing as a separate concept is not currently supported.
• Added _receiving_guid to all entities. This is filled with user.guid if user is passed to federation.inbound.handle_receive and it has a guid. Normally in for example Diaspora, this will always be done in private payloads.

Fixed

• Legacy Diaspora retraction of sharing/following is now supported correctly. The end result is a DiasporaRetraction for entity type Profile. Since the payload doesn't contain the receiving user for a sharing/following retraction in legacy Diaspora protocol, we store the guid of the user in the entity as _receiving_guid, assuming it was passed in for processing.

[0.11.0] - 2017-05-08

Backwards incompatible changes

Diaspora protocol support added for comment and like relayable types. On inbound payloads the signature included in the payload will be verified against the sender public key. A failed verification will raise SignatureVerificationError. For outbound entities, the author private key will be used to add a signature to the payload.

This introduces some backwards incompatible changes to the way entities are processed. Diaspora entity mappers get_outbound_entity and entity utilities get_full_xml_representation now requires the author private_key as a parameter. This is required to sign outgoing Comment and Reaction (like) entities.

Additionally, Diaspora entity mappers message_to_objects and element_to_objects now take an optional sender_key_fetcher parameter. This must be a function that when called with the sender handle will return the sender public key. This allows using locally cached public keys instead of fetching them as needed. NOTE! If the function is not given, each processed payload will fetch the public key over the network.

A failed payload signature verification now raises a SignatureVerificationError instead of a less specific AssertionError.

Added

• Three new attributes added to entities.
  • Add protocol name to all entities to attribute _source_protocol. This might be useful for applications to know which protocol payload the entity was created from once multiple protocols are implemented.
  • Add source payload object to the entity at _source_object when processing it.
  • Add sender public key to the entity at _sender_key, but only if it was used for validating signatures.
• Add support for the new Diaspora payload properties coming in the next protocol version. Old XML payloads are and will be still supported.
• DiasporaComment and DiasporaLike will get the order of elements in the XML payload as a list in xml_tags. For implementers who want to recreate payloads for these relayables, this list should be saved for later use.
• High level federation.outbound.handle_send helper function now allows sending entities to a list of recipients without having to deal with payload creation or caring about the protocol (in preparation of being a multi-protocol library).
  • The function takes three parameters, entity that will be sent, from_user that is sending (note, not necessarely authoring, this user will be used to sign the payload for Diaspora for example) and a list of recipients as tuples of recipient handle/domain and optionally protocol. In the future, if protocol is not given, it will be guessed from the recipient handle, and if necessary a network lookup will be made to see what protocols the receiving identity supports.
  • Payloads will be delivered to each receiver only once. Currently only public messages are supported through this helper, so multiple recipients on a single domain will cause only one delivery.

Changed

• Refactor processing of Diaspora payload XML into entities. Diaspora protocol is dropping the <XML><post></post></XML> wrapper for the payloads. Payloads with the wrapper will still be parsed as before.

[0.10.1] - 2017-03-09

Fixes

• Ensure tags are lower cased after collecting them from entity raw_content.

[0.10.0] - 2017-01-28

Added

• Add support for new Diaspora protocol ISO 8601 timestamp format introduced in protocol version 0.1.6.
• Tests are now executed also against Python 3.6.

Fixes

• Don't crash federation.utils.diaspora.retrieve_diaspora_webfinger if XRD parse raises an xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError.

[0.9.1] - 2016-12-10

Fixes

• Made Profile.raw_content optional. This fixes validating profiles parsed from Diaspora hCard's.

[0.9.0] - 2016-12-10

Backwards incompatible changes

• Image no longer has a text attribute. It is replaced by raw_content, the same attribute as Post and Comment have. Unlike the latter two, Image.raw_content is not mandatory.

Added

• Entities can now have a children. These can be accessed using the _children list. Acceptable children depends on the entity. Currently, Post, Comment and Profile can have children of entity type Image. Child types are validated in the .validate() entity method call.

Fixed

• Diaspora protocol message_to_objects method (called through inbound high level methods) now correctly parses Diaspora <photo> elements and creates Image entities from them. If they are children of status messages, they will be available through the Post._children list.

[0.8.2] - 2016-10-23

Fixed

• Remove legacy splitting of payload to 60 chars when creating Diaspora payloads. Diaspora 0.6 doesn't understand these any more.

[0.8.1] - 2016-10-18

Fixed

• federation.utils.network.send_document incorrectly passed in kwargs to requests.post, causing an error when sending custom headers.
• Make sure federation.utils.network.send_document headers are treated case insensitive before passing then onwards to requests.post.

[0.8.0] - 2016-10-09

Library is now called federation

The name Social-Federation was really only an early project name which stuck. Since the beginning, the main module has been federation. It makes sense to unify these and also shorter names are generally nicer.

What do you need to do?

Mostly nothing since the module was already called federation. Some things to note below:

• Update your requirements with the new library name federation.
• If you hook to the old logger social-federation, update those to listen to federation, which is now the standard logger name used throughout.

Other backwards incompatible changes

• federation.utils.diaspora.retrieve_and_parse_profile will now return None if the Profile retrieved doesn't validate. This will affect also the output of federation.fetchers.retrieve_remote_profile which is the high level function to retrieve profiles.
• Remove unnecessary protocol parameter from federation.fetchers.retrieve_remote_profile. We're miles away from including other protocols and ideally the caller shouldn't have to pass in the protocol anyway.

Added

• Added Retraction entity with DiasporaRetraction counterpart.

[0.7.0] - 2016-09-15

Backwards incompatible changes

• Made guid mandatory for Profile entity. Library users should always be able to get a full validated object as we consider guid a core attribute of a profile.
• Always validate entities created through federation.entities.diaspora.mappers.message_to_objects. This is the code that transforms federation messages for the Diaspora protocol to actual entity objects. Previously no validation was done and callers of federation.inbound.handle_receive received entities that were not always valid, for example they were missing a guid. Now validation is done in the conversion stage and errors are pushed to the federation logger in the event of invalid messages.
  • Note Diaspora Profile XML messages do not provide a GUID. This is handled internally by fetching the guid from the remote hCard so that a valid Profile entity can be created.

Added

• Raise a warning if unknown parameters are passed to entities.
• Ensure entity required attributes are validated for None or empty string values. Required attributes must not only exist but also have a value.
• Add validation to entities with the attribute public. Only bool values are accepted.

Changed

• Function federation.utils.diaspora.parse_profile_from_hcard now requires a second argument, handle. Since in the future Diaspora hCard is not guaranteed to have username and domain, we now pass handle to the parser directly.

[0.6.1] - 2016-09-14

Fixed

• New style Diaspora Magic Envelope didn't require or like payload data to be cut to 60 char lines, as the legacy protocol does. Fixed to not cut lines.

[0.6.0] - 2016-09-13

Added

• New style Diaspora Magic Envelope support. The magic envelope can be created using the class federation.protocols.diaspora.magic_envelope.MagicEnvelope. By default this will not wrap the payload message in <XML><post></post></XML>. To provide that functionality the class should be initialized with wrap_payload=True. No changes are made to the protocol send methods yet, if you need this new magic envelope you can initialize and render it directly.

Changed

• Deprecate receiving user key attribute for Diaspora protocol. Instead correct attribute is now private_key for any user passed to federation.inbound.handle_receive. We already use private_key in the message creation code so this is just to unify the user related required attributes.
  • DEPRECATION: There is a fallback with key for user objects in the receiving payload part of the Diaspora protocol until 0.8.0.

Fixes

• Loosen up hCard selectors when parsing profile from hCard document in federation.utils.diaspora.parse_profile_from_hcard. The selectors now match Diaspora upcoming federation documentation.

[0.5.0] - 2016-09-05

Breaking changes

• federation.outbound.handle_create_payload parameter to_user is now optional. Public posts don't need a recipient. This also affects Diaspora protocol build_send method where the change is reflected similarly. #43
  • In practise this means the signature has changed for handle_create_payload and build_send from from_user, to_user, entity to entity, from_user, to_user=None.

Added

• Post.provider_display_name is now supported in the entity outbound/inbound mappers. #44
• Add utility method federation.utils.network.send_document which is just a wrapper around requests.post. User agent will be added to the headers and exceptions will be silently captured and returned instead. #45
• Add Diaspora entity utility federation.entities.diaspora.utils.get_full_xml_representation. Renders the entity XML document and wraps it in <XML><post>...</post></XML>. #46

[0.4.1] - 2016-09-04

Fixes

• Don't quote/encode Protocol.build_send payload. It was doing it wrongly in the first place and also it's not necessary since Diaspora 0.6 protocol changes. #41
• Fix identification of Diaspora protocol messages. This was not working in the case that the attributes in the tag were in different order. #41

[0.4.0] - 2016-07-24

Breaking changes

• While in early stages, doing some renaming of modules to suit the longer term. federation.controllers has been split into two, federation.outbound and federation.inbound. The following methods have new import locations:
  • federation.controllers.handle_receive -> federation.inbound.handle_receive
  • federation.controllers.handle_create_payload -> federation.outbound.handle_create_payload
• Class federation.hostmeta.generators.DiasporaHCard now requires guid, public_key and username for initialization. Leaving these out was a mistake in the initial implementation. Diaspora has these in at least 0.6 development branch.

Added

• Relationship base entity which represents relationships between two handles. Types can be following, sharing, ignoring and blocking. The Diaspora counterpart, DiasporaRequest, which represents a sharing/following request is outwards a single entity, but incoming a double entity, handled by creating both a sharing and following version of the relationship.
• Profile base entity and Diaspora counterpart DiasporaProfile. Represents a user profile.
• federation.utils.network.fetch_document utility function to fetch a remote document. Returns document, status code and possible exception. Takes either url or a host + path combination. With host, https is first tried and optionally fall back to http.
• Utility methods to retrieve Diaspora user discovery related documents. These include the host-meta, webfinger and hCard documents. The utility methods are in federation.utils.diaspora.
• Utility to fetch remote profile, federation.fetchers.retrieve_remote_profile. Currently always uses Diaspora protocol. Returns a Profile entity.

Changed

• Unlock most of the direct dependencies to a certain version range. Unlock all of test requirements to any version.
• Entities passed to federation.controllers.handle_create_payload are now converted from the base entity types (Post, Comment, Reaction, etc) to Diaspora entity types (DiasporaPost, DiasporaComment, DiasporaLike, etc). This ensures actual payload generation has the correct methods available (for example to_xml) whatever entity is passed in.

Fixes

• Fix fetching sender handle from Diaspora protocol private messages. As it is not contained in the header, it needs to be read from the message content itself.
• Fix various issues with DiasporaHCard template after comparing to some real world hCard templates from real pods. Old version was based on documentation in Diaspora project wiki.

[0.3.2] - 2016-05-09

Changed

• Test factories and other test files are now included in the package installation. Factories can be useful when creating project tests.
• Bump allowed lxml to 3.6.0
• Bump allowed python-dateutil to 2.5.3

Fixes

• Don't raise on Post.tags if Post.raw_content is None

[0.3.1] - 2016-04-13

Added

• Support for generating .well-known/nodeinfo document, which was forgotten from the 0.3.0 release. Method federation.hostmeta.generators.get_nodeinfo_well_known_document does this task. It requires an url which should be the full base url of the host. Optionally document_path can be specified, but it is optional and defaults to the one in the NodeInfo spec.

[0.3.0] - 2016-04-13

Added

• Support for generating NodeInfo documents using the generator federation.hostmeta.generators.NodeInfo. Strict validation is skipped by default, but can be enabled by passing in raise_on_validate to the NodeInfo class. By default a warning will be generated on documents that don't conform with the strict NodeInfo values. This can be disabled by passing in skip_validate to the class.

[0.2.0] - 2016-04-09

Backwards incompatible changes

• Any implementations using the Diaspora protocol and Post entities must now use DiasporaPost instead. See "Changed" below.

Added

• Support for using validate_field() methods for entity fields and checking missing fields against _required. To use this validation, validate() must specifically be called for the entity instance.
• Base entities Comment and Reaction which subclass the new ParticipationMixin.
• Diaspora entity DiasporaComment, a variant of Comment.
• Diaspora entity DiasporaLike, a variant of Reaction with the reaction = "like" default.

Changed

• Refactored Diaspora XML generators into the Diaspora entities themselves. This introduces Diaspora versions of the base entities called DiasporaPost, DiasporaComment and DiasporaLike. Any implementations using the Diaspora protocol and Post entities must now use DiasporaPost instead.

Fixes

• Entities which don't specifically get passed a created_at now get correct current time in created_at instead of always having the time part as 00:00.

[0.1.1] - 2016-04-03

Initial package release

Supports well Post type object receiving over Diaspora protocol.

Untested support for crafting outgoing protocol messages.