Glossary

Visor: A Skywire network node identified by a secp256k1 public key. Runs applications, establishes transports, and routes packets.

Transport: A bidirectional, encrypted line of communication between two visors (transport edges). Identified by a UUID (Transport ID) and a type (STCPR, SUDPH, STCP, DMSG).

Transport Edge: One of the two visors connected by a transport.

Transport ID: A UUID that uniquely identifies a transport. Derived deterministically from the two edge PKs and the transport type.

Transport Type: The underlying protocol implementation: STCPR (TCP with address resolution), SUDPH (UDP hole-punch), STCP (TCP with local PK table), DMSG (relayed through DMSG server).

Transport Label: Metadata indicating the origin of a transport: skycoin (created by TPS), automatic (created by autoconnect), user (created manually).

Route: A unidirectional path through one or more transports. Each hop is governed by a routing rule.

Route Group: A pair of forward and reverse routes forming a bidirectional connection between two visors. Wrapped in Noise encryption after the handshake.

Routing Rule: An entry in the routing table that tells the router how to handle a packet: Forward (next hop), Consume (deliver locally), or IntermediaryForward (blind forward).

Route ID: A uint32 value identifying a routing rule within a visor's routing table. Allocated by the visor on request from the RSN.

Route Setup Node (RSN): A trusted node that coordinates multi-hop route establishment by connecting to each visor along the path, reserving route IDs, and distributing routing rules.

Transport Setup Node (TPS): A node that remotely manages transports on visors — can create, list, and remove transports with skycoin or automatic labels.

DMSG (Distributed Messaging System): A relay-based communication layer. DMSG clients connect to DMSG servers and communicate via multiplexed, Noise-encrypted streams.

DMSG Server: A relay that bridges DMSG client sessions. Identified by PK and TCP address. Registered in DMSG Discovery.

DMSG Discovery: A centralized service mapping visor PKs to their DMSG server connections (delegated servers).

Transport Discovery (TPD): A centralized service that registers and queries transport entries. Provides bandwidth metrics, uptime tracking, and version statistics.

Address Resolver (AR): A service mapping visor PKs to IP addresses for direct transport establishment (STCPR, SUDPH).

Route Finder (RF): A service that computes multi-hop route paths from the transport graph using BFS.

Service Discovery (SD): A registry for Skywire application services (VPN, proxy, visor) with geo-location and version data.

Packet: A data unit transmitted over routes. 7-byte header (type, route ID, payload size) followed by variable-length payload.

Noise Protocol: ChaCha20-Poly1305 authenticated encryption used for route group encryption. Handshake pattern: XX for routes.

Skynet Port Forwarding: Exposing local TCP ports over the Skywire network via skynet and/or DMSG transports. Configured per-port with metadata (label, description, whitelist).

Resolving Proxy: An embedded SOCKS5 proxy that resolves .dmsg or .skynet domain suffixes by routing requests through the visor's DMSG or skynet connections.

Porter: The ephemeral port allocator used by the DMSG client for stream management. Ports 49152-65535 are allocated dynamically; well-known ports (listeners) are reserved explicitly.

Circuit Breaker: Per-destination failure tracking on the RSN. Opens after consecutive failures to fast-fail subsequent requests, preventing wasted dial attempts to known-bad visors.