This is the Session Push Notification Server (SPNS) used by Session mobile clients to enable "fast mode" phone notifications for new messages in 1-on-1 conversations and groups.
The SPNS manages communication with three different parties:
- Android or iOS Session clients (who have enabled "Fast Mode" message notifications)
- The Oxen network's storage servers
- The relevant service (Apple, Google, Huawei) to which the requested notifications will be pushed
The Session clients (but only ones who have opted in to received messages) make an onion request to the SPNS to subscribe to notifications; it provides the notification type (e.g. "apns" for iOS), a upstream service-provided device ID, an encryption key, as well as a signed swarm subscription signature that is stored by the SPNS to subscribe to updates in the user's message swarm for new incoming messages.
The SPNS then maintains persistent connections to all of the network's service nodes and submits this subscription signature to all of the nodes in a subscriber's swarm; the swarm members then push requests to the SPNS server back along this open connection for the SPNS to deal with as soon as they arrive.
When such a notification arrives the SPNS encrypts both the received message along with metadata about the message (such as the message hash) using the encryption key the user provided, then sends this encrypted payload to the provider's push notification service (APNS for iOS, Firebase for Android, and so on), where the phone makers proprietary notification service allows waking the phone up in a way that is impossible for third party apps. This then wakes up Session to decrypt and display the incoming message.
Throughout the process the data stays encrypted and metadata protected as much as possible: while the SPNS itself has the keys to monitor public messages sent to your account, it does not have the ability to read the data or do anything else in your account. The service-specific token provided to the SPNS server has no purpose at all other than delivering Session push notifications; and the services themselves never see anything useful (they just see an encrypted blob that only your device can decrypt).
SPNS is a mix of Python and C++ with a postgresql database for persistent storage. The core that manages connections to the swarm, processes messages, and interacts with the database is C++, with some bits of Python for initialization and dealing with configuration files. The web front-end (which proxies subscriptions from clients to the core) and the code that communicates with the notification services are written in Python.
These components run independently, but communicate together using OxenMQ: there is one main high-performance process, called "hivemind", which provides an interface for notifier services and the web service to connect to. The hivemind takes care of all subscription logic, receives notifications, performs encryption, and so on; once the final notification is ready to be passed off to a notification service it then passes the message along with needed details (such as the unique iOS or Android identifier) to an attached notifier for delivery.
To build the C++ code you must have the following libraries (and dev versions of the packages) installed on the system:
- libsodium 1.0.18+
- oxen-encoding 1.0.4+
- oxen-mq 1.2.14+
- nlohmann-json 3.7.0+
- libsystemd
- libpq
- CMake 3.18+
- a C++ compiler capable of C++17
The two oxen- packages can either be built directly, or on Ubuntu/Debian systems can be obtained
from our deb repository (the two required package names are liboxenmq-dev
and liboxenc-dev).
Some other libraries are also included as submodules, and will be built as part of the project. Make sure you have updated the project submodules using
git submodule update --init --recursive
To run the code (which all start via Python, even the C++ parts) you need a few more Python packages to be installed:
- Python 3.8+
- python3-systemd
- python3-flask
- uwsgi-core
- uwsgi-plugin-python3
- uwsgi-emperor (not required, but nice especially if you have multiple uwsgi applications on the system)
- python3-uwsgidecorators
- python3-coloredlogs
- python3-oxenmq (available in our repository)
- python3-session-util (available in our repository)
Okay here you go (for a recent Ubuntu or Debian installation):
sudo curl -so /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/oxen.gpg https://deb.oxen.io/pub.gpg
echo "deb https://deb.oxen.io $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/oxen.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install cmake g++ lib{sodium,oxenmq,oxenc,systemd,pq}-dev nlohmann-json3-dev \
python3 python3-{systemd,flask,uwsgidecorators,coloredlogs,oxenmq,session-util} \
uwsgi-plugin-python3 uwsgi-emperor
The top-level project contains a simple Makefile will configure and build the C++ code when you
run make, e.g.
make -j6
If you know a bit about cmake and want to poke around some more with the process you can build yourself via:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j6
This will build the C++ code into a file such as spns/core.cpython-311-x86_64-linux-gnu.so (in the
project root, not the build directory) that contains all the C++ code, suitable built to be
invoked from Python.
If you upgrade packages on the system that break your installation, it may be necessary to repeat
these steps to rebuild against updated dependencies (you can reuse the same build directory and just
start from the cmake .. step).
A spns.ini.example file is included in the project root; you should copy this to spns.ini and
edit it to suite your requirements. The settings inside it are full of comments to guide you
further in this initial setup, including details on how to create the necessary key for receiving
onion requests.
The notifiers require various magic special files obtained after pleading with the powers that be to oh-please-let-us-into-your-blessed-walled-garden! Here there be dragons because the business model of Google and Apple is all about making things pretty and smooth for end-users but they really don't put much effort into making things nice or convenient for devs.
So after much mucking around, perhaps involving paid accounts and whatnot, you can eventually coax the systems into giving your the required magic tokens needed to connect with their servers. If you are unhappy with this situation, no doubt Google and Apple management will be receptive to your suggestions as to how they might improve their systems.
There are two supported modes of operation: an "all-in-one" that runs all the components under uwsgi; and alternatively a mode that uses uwsgi just for the web interface and uses systemd to manage the other components.
The package is designed to run from the project directory, i.e. it there is no "install" step.
The systemd setup is recommended; it requires slightly more setup, but is generally more robust and easier to manage.
Copy the three files in the systemd/ directory into /etc/systemd/system. You will likely have
to modify the paths in these files to match where you have the project checked out.
To run the main hivemind service you then systemctl enable --now spns-hivemind. (If you don't
want to make it persistently start after a reboot, use systemctl start spns-hivemind instead.)
The individual services are controlled by the spns-notifier@.service service template. For
example, to start and persistently enable to firebase notifier (for Android push notifications) you
would use:
systemctl enable --now spns-notifier@firebase.service
or for APNS:
systemctl enable --now spns-notifier@apns.service
You can enable any number of services this way; each service corresponds to one of the notifier scripts in the spns/notifiers/ directory (e.g. spns/notifiers/firebase.py).
For the web front-end, see below.
Whether you opt for systemd or uwsgi, you still require uwsgi to process HTTP subscription requests (and proxy them into the hivemind process).
A sample uwsgi configuration file is provided as uwsgi-spns.ini. This file will likely need some
path updates to function properly; then the file is used to configure uwsgi to service requests from
a spns.wsgi socket.
This socket is then mapped to requests from a nginx or Apache server for the domain on which the push notification server runs. For example, for nginx this configuration snippet will properly forward the requests:
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
server_name push.example.org;
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
include /etc/nginx/uwsgi_params;
uwsgi_pass unix:///home/push/session-push-notification-server/spns.wsgi;
}
}
As an alternate mode of operation you can configure UWSGI to run all of the components of the SPNS, each as a "mule" process that uwsgi runs alongside your regular uwsgi process for serving HTTP requests.
This is easier for a one-shot setup, but, for our official server, was more difficult to manage and diagnose versus using separate processes. Nevertheless, the support still exists.
To enable it, uncomment the lines in the bottom half of the uwsgi-spns.ini configuration file; you
will need one mule for the hivemind process, and one additional mule for each notification service
that you want to run.
Logging depends on how you run; for systemd, use journalctl (for instance, to view the live logs
for the spns-hivemind service: journalctl -u spns-hivemind -af). For uwsgi, you configure a log
file in the uwsgi-spns.ini configuration file where all logging ends up for all the processes.
See DOCUMENTATION.md.
SPNS is deliberately designed to be extensible to new backends: a backend is written in Python and only needs to worry about checking the validity of tokens (when subscribing) and pushing out notifications (when so instructed).
See the (live) versions in the spns/notifiers/ directory for examples.
This is the second version of the SPNS, which rewrote the project and how it worked considerably;
this version launched in September 2023. Earlier versions are preserved in the project history
under the v1 branch. A working prototype of the v2 approach written entirely in Python (i.e.
without the C++ core) is deliberately preserved in the v2 history, though was never used in
production for performance reasons.