108 lines
4.4 KiB
Markdown
108 lines
4.4 KiB
Markdown
<h1> Introduction to Reliable Message Bus (RMB) </h1>
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<h2> Table of Contents </h2>
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- [What is RMB](#what-is-rmb)
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- [Why](#why)
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- [Specifications](#specifications)
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- [How to Use RMB](#how-to-use-rmb)
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- [Libraries](#libraries)
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- [Known Libraries](#known-libraries)
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- [No Known Libraries](#no-known-libraries)
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- [What is rmb-peer](#what-is-rmb-peer)
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- [Download](#download)
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- [Building](#building)
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- [Running tests](#running-tests)
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---
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## What is RMB
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Reliable message bus is a secure communication panel that allows `bots` to communicate together in a `chat` like way. It makes it very easy to host a service or a set of functions to be used by anyone, even if your service is running behind NAT.
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Out of the box RMB provides the following:
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- Guarantee authenticity of the messages. You are always sure that the received message is from whoever is pretending to be
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- End to End encryption
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- Support for 3rd party hosted relays. Anyone can host a relay and people can use it safely since there is no way messages can be inspected while using e2e. That's similar to `home` servers by `matrix`
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## Why
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RMB is developed by ThreefoldTech to create a global network of nodes that are available to host capacity. Each node will act like a single bot where you can ask to host your capacity. This enforced a unique set of requirements:
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- Communication needed to be reliable
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- Minimize and completely eliminate message loss
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- Reduce downtime
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- Node need to authenticate and authorize calls
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- Guarantee identity of the other peer so only owners of data can see it
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- Fast request response time
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Starting from this we came up with a more detailed requirements:
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- User (or rather bots) need their identity maintained by `tfchain` (a blockchain) hence each bot needs an account on tfchain to be able to use `rmb`
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- Then each message then can be signed by the `bot` keys, hence make it easy to verify the identity of the sender of a message. This is done both ways.
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- To support federation (using 3rd party relays) we needed to add e2e encryption to make sure messages that are surfing the public internet can't be sniffed
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- e2e encryption is done by deriving an encryption key from the same identity seed, and share the public key on `tfchain` hence it's available to everyone to use
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## Specifications
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For details about protocol itself please check the [specs](rmb_specs.md).
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## How to Use RMB
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There are many ways to use `rmb` because it was built for `bots` and software to communicate. Hence, there is no mobile app for it for example, but instead a set of libraries where you can use to connect to the network, make chitchats with other bots then exit.
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Or you can keep the connection forever to answer other bots requests if you are providing a service.
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## Libraries
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If there is a library in your preferred language, then you are in luck! Simply follow the library documentations to implement a service bot, or to make requests to other bots.
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### Known Libraries
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- Golang [rmb-sdk-go](https://github.com/threefoldtech/rmb-sdk-go)
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- Typescript [rmb-sdk-ts](https://github.com/threefoldtech/rmb-sdk-ts)
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### No Known Libraries
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If there are no library in your preferred language, here's what you can do:
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- Implement a library in your preferred language
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- If it's too much to do all the signing, verification, e2e in your language then use `rmb-peer`
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## What is rmb-peer
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think of `rmb-peer` as a gateway that stands between you and the `relay`. `rmb-peer` uses your mnemonics (your identity secret key) to assume your identity and it connects to the relay on your behalf, it maintains the connection forever and takes care of
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- reconnecting if connection was lost
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- verifying received messages
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- decrypting received messages
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- sending requests on your behalf, taking care of all crypto heavy lifting.
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Then it provide a simple (plain-text) api over `redis`. means to send messages (or handle requests) you just need to be able to push and pop messages from some redis queues. Messages are simple plain text json.
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> More details can be found [here](rmb_specs.md)
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## Download
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Please check the latest [releases](https://github.com/threefoldtech/rmb-rs/releases) normally you only need the `rmb-peer` binary, unless you want to host your own relay.
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## Building
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```bash
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git clone git@github.com:threefoldtech/rmb-rs.git
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cd rmb-rs
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cargo build --release --target=x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
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```
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## Running tests
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While inside the repository
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```bash
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cargo test
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```
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