omnivox-rs/PARITY-CONTRACT.md

RETIRED 2026-09. The port it governed was completed and proven (all golden vectors + both cross-directions passed), then superseded by protocol v2 (PROTOCOL-V2.md) in 0.14.0: a red-team review found replay, frame portability, and pre-auth allocation flaws baked into the v1 wire format, unfixable behind parity. The v2 handshake rejects v1 traffic. This file remains as the historical record of the port — what was preserved, what was dropped, and the C++ byte formats the Cereal codec still speaks for payloads.

OmniVox Port — Parity Contract

Source: omnivox/ (C++17/20, asio + cereal + CryptoPP + fmt) Target: omnivox-rs/ (Rust, tokio + RustCrypto) End state: A — replacement. Rust crate + example binaries ship; C++ deleted at cut-over. Seam: the TCP network boundary. C++ and Rust must interoperate byte-for-byte at any mix.

Unit of parity

The byte stream on the wire at the TCP boundary, and the callbacks the library delivers to the application (connect / data / disconnect with their context).

Wire format (recovered — this is normative)

All integers little-endian (x86 native memcpy/cereal, never htonl'd anywhere).

• Framing: u32 payload-length prefix, then that many bytes. Read in two async steps (header, then body) with separate timeouts.
• AeadPacket (cereal binary archive = raw fields, no magic/header): nonce[12] || tag[16] || u64 len || ciphertext[len]
• DatagramPayload: u16 id || u64 qword || u64 len || bytes[len]
• AEAD: ChaCha20-Poly1305 per RFC 8439 (CryptoPP impl is RFC-conformant). No AAD. Random 12-byte nonce per message (AutoSeededRandomPool).
• Key: scrypt per RFC 7914, N=2^17, r=8, p=1, dkLen=32, passphrase = raw password bytes, salt = raw salt bytes. Both peers must set the identical key.

Not acceptable (any difference = regression)

• Any wire byte: framing, field layout, key derivation, AEAD construction.
• Tamper behavior: DecryptAndVerify failure → message dropped, error logged, connection stays open (exception caught in processMessage).
• Limits: MAX_MESSAGE_SIZE = 5 MiB; header 0 or > 5 MiB → log + disconnect.
• Timeouts: per-message header-wait = timeoutMs (server, per client arg); body stall = 5000 ms fixed. Server per-client stall timers; client side has no timers (ctx.id == serverContext.id path).
• Client IDs: server assigns from 1, monotonic (nextClientId), visible in ConnectionContext.id.
• Callback order on accept: allow → client registered & reading before the connect log; deny → socket closed, disconnect callback fires.
• sendToServer returns false unless socket open and status Connected; sendToClient returns false if id unknown.
• Malformed/undecryptable message: logged, skipped, connection survives.

Acceptable (do not chase)

• Log text, wording, timestamps; steady-clock creationTime values.
• Thread structure (pool + io_context → tokio tasks); task scheduling.
• Message processing order: C++ server processes on a worker pool and can reorder concurrent messages; Rust may differ in interleaving. Per-connection stream order must still be preserved.
• Exact race outcomes under B1/B3 below (timing-dependent in C++ itself).
• TCP_NODELAY: C++ leaves Nagle ON (NODELAY_OPT never defined); Rust matches default. Never observable in payload bytes.

Bug/quirk inventory — preserved, NOT fixed (fixes = separate commits after parity)

#	Source	Behaviour	Port decision
B1	OmniVox.h:914	Bad header size logs + handleDisconnect without returning — proceeds to read a body of that size (0-byte read succeeds and processes an empty packet → decrypt error logged)	Preserve: disconnect + best-effort body read; races allowed
B2	OmniVox.h:990	Decrypt/parse errors are swallowed (log only), connection kept	Preserve
B3	OmniVox.h:630	sendToClient does a blocking asio::write while holding the clients lock	Rust holds the connection write lock across the full write; log as follow-up improvement
B4	OmniVox.h:960	Processing on thread pool → concurrent reordering	Acceptable-difference above
B5	OmniVox.h:869	Client mode never arms stall timers	Preserve
B6	OmniVox.h:782	timeoutCheckerThread/timeoutCheckerRunning — dead code, never started	Not ported (dead)
B7	OmniVox.h:99	inline std::optional<WorkGuard> global — shadowed by member, dead	Not ported (dead)
B8	client.cpp:101	Client sleeps 15 s then stops; server sleeps UINT32_MAX hours	Examples mirror this

Deliberately not ported

B6/B7 dead code; the cereal/cryptopp/asio vendored trees; PackedValue64 union (only .qword is ever serialized → port as u64 field on DatagramPayload); ThreadPool_ as a class (tokio replaces it; do not transliterate).

Verification (how parity is proven)

1. Vector tests: golden scrypt + cereal-layout + AEAD vectors generated by C++ (cppgen helper in omnivox-ref/) checked into tests/vectors/.
2. Differential cross-tests over loopback: C++ server ↔ Rust client, Rust server ↔ C++ client — echo handshake must round-trip.
3. Tamper test: flip a ciphertext byte mid-stream → receiver logs and survives.
4. Differential harness reports inputs-compared and differences-found.

cargo test --all-features && cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features && cargo fmt --check