86b9142a09
Adds authenticated, role-based moderation to the relay admin API. On
`main` the admin API is read-only and gated only by `Host`/`Origin`
matching; this branch adds NIP-98 authentication, a two-tier
Operator/Moderator principal model, mutation and staffing endpoints, and
NIP-11 auto-discovery so clients never type the admin URL by hand.
## Authentication (`BUZZ_ADMIN_AUTH`)
`BUZZ_ADMIN_AUTH` accepts `nip98` or `disabled`. Leaving it unset
defaults to `nip98` (fail-secure). Configuration fails closed: any other
value aborts startup, while a lingering `BUZZ_ADMIN_TOKEN` is ignored
with a startup warning — token (bearer) authentication is not supported.
`Host`/`Origin` matching is retained in every mode as defense-in-depth.
- **`nip98`** (default) — per-request signed NIP-98 (kind 27235) events,
resolved to an Operator or Moderator principal with per-person
attribution and individual revocability. Read-write per resolved
principal.
- **`disabled`** — no credential; relies entirely on network-layer
controls (reverse proxy, VPN, firewall) and logs a `WARN` on every boot.
Always read-only: `authorize()` resolves no principal, so mutation and
staffing routes always `403`.
## Roles
Buzz has two independent authority axes after this change.
**Relay-level** roles (new here) are deployment-global: they act across
every community on the relay, through the admin API. **Community-level**
roles (pre-existing, unchanged by this PR) are tenant-scoped: they act
inside one community, through signed Nostr moderation commands.
### Relay level (new)
| Role | Description |
|---|---|
| **Operator** | Full control of the deployment's moderation surface:
read all reports, feedback, and attachments across every community;
resolve reports with enforcement (`delete`/`kick`/`ban`/`timeout`) or
decisions (`dismiss`/`escalate`); reopen and cancel; update feedback
status; and manage the Operator/Moderator roster via the staffing
endpoints. |
| **Moderator** | Day-to-day triage: everything an Operator can do
except staffing — cannot view or change the roster. |
How a pubkey acquires a relay role (resolution order; config always
outranks DB):
1. Listed in `RELAY_OPERATOR_PUBKEYS` → **Operator** (source `config`)
2. Equals `RELAY_OWNER_PUBKEY` while `RELAY_OPERATOR_PUBKEYS` is empty →
**Operator** (source `owner_fallback`, a break-glass grant for
self-hosters that deactivates once any operator is configured)
3. Row in the `relay_operators` table → **Operator** or **Moderator**
(source `db`, managed via the staffing endpoints)
4. No match → `403`
### Community level (pre-existing, unchanged)
| Role | Description |
|---|---|
| **Owner** (community) | Full authority within their community: every
moderation action (delete, kick, ban/unban, timeout/untimeout, resolve
reports, view queue) plus member, role, and invite management. No guard
rails. |
| **Admin** (community) | Same community-wide moderation capabilities as
owner, except an admin cannot ban or time out the owner or a fellow
admin — only the owner may action an admin. Manages members and invites;
only the owner grants the admin role. |
| **Member** (community) | Standard participant; no moderation
capability. |
| **Owner / Admin** (channel) | Channel-local authority only: delete
messages and kick users within their own channel. |
| **Member / Guest / Bot** (channel) | No moderation authority. |
There is no community-level Moderator tier in v1; relay-level Moderator
is the only role by that name.
## Escalation scoping
The operator report queue is an escalation backstop, not the community's
day-to-day triage surface (per `VISION_MODERATION`, the severe class is
the platform's to review rather than the community's). Two rules enforce
that:
- **Escalated-by-default listing.** `GET /reports` with no `status`
parameter returns only `escalated` reports. An explicit
`status=<open|resolved|dismissed|escalated>` filter is always honored as
given, and full visibility across every status stays available for
platform-safety and legal review via `scope=all` (which lists reports
regardless of status). `scope` accepts only `all` and is ignored when an
explicit `status` is present.
- **Auto-escalated `illegal` reports.** Member reports whose category is
`illegal` are ingested with `status=escalated` rather than `open`, so
the severe class reaches the operator backstop without waiting for a
community admin to forward it. Every other category still lands `open`.
Auto-escalation only sets the queue status — it records no moderator
decision and stamps no resolver, so an auto-escalated report is
indistinguishable downstream from an admin-escalated one: the reopen
route returns it to `open` on the same terms, keyed only on status,
never on how the report became escalated.
## Principal resolution and NIP-98 admission
`resolve_admin_principal()` returns `AdminPrincipal { pubkey, role,
source }` per the resolution order above; `None` never falls through as
a role. Admission is ordered so the replay guard is a privilege, not a
public surface: signature/URL/method/payload-hash verification first,
roster check second, and only then is the deployment-scoped replay id
atomically consumed — a validly-signing but unrostered key never
allocates a replay slot. Redis failure fails closed.
## Report resolution, recovery, and enforcement provenance
`POST /reports/{id}/resolve` is a crash-safe enforcement state machine:
decision-only outcomes (`dismiss`/`escalate`) are a single
CAS-plus-audit transaction; enforcement
(`delete`/`kick`/`ban`/`timeout`) claims the report
(`open`→`processing`), runs the durable mutation, then finalizes — a
re-drive resumes at the step marker and converges to exactly-one
enforcement, fenced by a lease and an outbox claim token.
Person-directed enforcement on an `event`-kind report derives its target
from the stored event's author (server-owned truth, never the reporter's
`p` tag) via a single `derive_enforcement_target` shared by the HTTP
driver and the recovery worker. If the reported event was purged before
its author could be read, person-directed actions are rejected pre-claim
and the report stays `open`; `delete` needs only the event id and is
exempt.
`GET /reports/{id}` and the resolve response carry an `activeAction`
field surfacing the enforcement that actually executed — a report
dismissed after a reopen still reports the ban that ran. `POST
/reports/{id}/reopen` returns a terminal report to `open` (idempotent on
`requestId`). `POST /reports/{id}/cancel` is the sole recovery path for
a pre-mutation `failed` action, attributed via
`relay_admin_actions.cancelled_by`.
## Feedback
`GET /feedback` and `/feedback/{id}` survive a tenant purge: provenance
columns are severed to `NULL` rather than cascade-deleted, and the
attachment path fails closed to `404` on a severed row. `PATCH
/feedback/{id}` updates lifecycle `status`
(`new`/`reviewed`/`archived`).
## Staffing and probe
`GET/PUT/DELETE /operators/{pubkey}` are Operator-only; mutating a
config-backed pubkey returns `409 Conflict`. `GET /operators` returns
the union of config and DB principals with per-entry `source`. `GET
/probe` reports auth mode, role, source, `canAct`, and `canStaff` for
the desktop console.
## NIP-11 auto-discovery
The NIP-11 relay-information document gains an optional `admin_api`
field carrying the canonical admin origin (`scheme://host[:port]`, no
path), present iff `BUZZ_ADMIN_HOST` is set and omitted otherwise. The
scheme follows the same loopback rule as NIP-98 `u`-tag verification via
a shared `scheme_for_host` helper, so the advertised origin and the
origin the relay verifies against can never diverge.
## Operator API origin decoupling
`RELAY_OPERATOR_API_ORIGIN` is no longer required at boot when
`RELAY_OPERATOR_PUBKEYS` is set — it is used only by the
community-provisioning endpoints, which fail closed at request time
(with a boot-time `WARN`) until it is set. The admin console needs no
origin.
## Admin-web adaptation
The standalone `admin-web` dashboard signs each request as a NIP-98
event via a NIP-07 browser extension, discovers the auth mode with a
single unauthenticated probe (`200` → `disabled`, anything else →
`nip98`, fail-secure), and carries no token entry surface. Playwright
coverage exercises the NIP-98 and CSP paths.
## Security hardening
Three findings from security review are folded in:
- **Append-only roster audit.** `PUT`/`DELETE /operators/{pubkey}`
mutate the deployment-wide root of trust, but the upsert overwrites
`role`/`added_by` in place and the delete removes the only row — so a
grant→revoke sequence left no trace of who was ever granted or by whom.
Each mutation now writes an `relay_operator_audit` row (actor, target,
`grant`/`revoke`, pre-image `prev_role`, `new_role`, timestamp) inside
the same transaction as the mutation. A per-target transaction-scoped
advisory lock serializes concurrent mutations of the same pubkey before
the pre-image read, so the recorded `prev_role` is always the true
predecessor even under a concurrent-grant race. Chronology is keyed on a
`BIGINT GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY` `seq` column, not the wall clock:
the serializing lock guarantees insertion order and `seq` captures it,
so ordered reads (`ORDER BY seq`) follow the true privilege chain even
across a backward NTP step that a `clock_timestamp()` ordering would
invert. `created_at` (`clock_timestamp()`) is retained as informational
occurrence time only. Append-only by construction — no `UPDATE`/`DELETE`
path and no API surface. A no-op delete writes nothing.
- **`expirationSecs` overflow.** The timeout path built `Utc::now() +
Duration::seconds(secs as i64)` from an attacker-controlled `u64`:
`i64::MAX` panicked the handler, and a wrapped-negative magnitude minted
a *past* expiry that still passed validation. `compute_timeout_until`
now rejects zero, rejects magnitudes above a documented
`MAX_TIMEOUT_SECS` (365 days), and uses checked
`try_seconds`/`checked_add_signed` so no input can panic or produce a
past expiry — over-cap, zero, `i64::MAX`, and wrapping-negative inputs
all return a clean `4xx`.
- **Uppercase-hex config-backed bypass.** Config pubkeys are lowercased
at parse, but the `409` immutability check raw-string-compared the path
param while `decode_hex_pubkey` accepted uppercase — so `PUT
/operators/{UPPERCASE}` skipped the guard and wrote a shadow row for the
same 32 bytes. The validated param is now canonicalized (lowercased)
before the `409` check, DB write, `DELETE`, and response body.
## Migrations
- `0035_relay_operators.sql` — `relay_operators` roster table
(deployment-global), `actor_authority` on `moderation_actions`,
`processing` status plus `active_action_id` on `moderation_reports`,
`status` on `product_feedback`.
- `0036_relay_admin_actions.sql` — enforcement-action table with a
`request_id` idempotency key, a `step_marker` for crash recovery, and a
`cancelled_by` attribution column.
- `0037_relay_admin_action_lease.sql` — lease fencing for the action
worker.
- `0038_relay_admin_outbox_claim_token.sql` — fenced claim token on the
outbox worker.
- `0039_relay_operator_audit.sql` — append-only `relay_operator_audit`
trail for roster mutations (see Security hardening).
`docs/admin/README.md` documents the full principal model, NIP-98 event
requirements, capabilities by role, the startup error matrix, and the
discovery field.
## Production blast radius
A relay without `BUZZ_ADMIN_HOST` is completely unaffected — the admin
surface stays disabled and `BUZZ_ADMIN_AUTH` is ignored; a lingering
`BUZZ_ADMIN_TOKEN` logs a startup warning and must be removed. Where
`BUZZ_ADMIN_HOST` **is** set, unset `BUZZ_ADMIN_AUTH` defaults to
`nip98` (per-person signed auth); `BUZZ_ADMIN_AUTH=disabled` reproduces
`main`'s prior `Host`/`Origin`-only gating but is read-only (mutation
routes `403`). The five migrations add tables and columns without
touching existing data.
---
Related: [block/buzz#4768](https://github.com/block/buzz/pull/4768)
(desktop admin console consuming the `admin_api` field),
[squareup/bb-public#339](https://github.com/squareup/bb-public/pull/339)
(Phase 4 rollout config)
---------
Signed-off-by: Will Pfleger <pfleger.will@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Duncan <dcfd242e557282d7a1e2cf2e6877522682f1e5c6156dc92ca7d90eaedd3b0f95@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
Co-authored-by: Duncan <dcfd242e557282d7a1e2cf2e6877522682f1e5c6156dc92ca7d90eaedd3b0f95@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
Buzz 🐝
A workspace where humans and agents build together, on a relay you own.
Vision · Sovereign · Forge · Agents · Architecture · Releasing · Apache 2.0
People and agents building together in the same room.
What is this, really?
Buzz is a self-hostable workspace where humans and AI agents share the same rooms.
A Buzz community is the workspace a user reaches by URL. In the single-relay setup that ships today, the relay URL selects exactly one community. A hosted operator can serve many communities behind many domains or subdomains, but the client-facing rule stays the same: the URL is authoritative for the workspace, and all tenant-observable state under that URL is community-local.
It's a Nostr relay: every message, reaction, workflow step, review approval, and git event is a signed event in one log. Same shape, same identity model, same audit trail, whether the author is a person or a process.
In practice it feels like a team workspace. Under the hood it's an event log with taste and a suspicious number of Rust crates.
Yes, it's another AI-adjacent developer tool. We're sorry. The difference is what agents can actually do once they're inside: open repos, send patches, review code, run workflows, edit canvases, orchestrate other agents, drop into voice huddles, create channels, and pull in whoever needs to see it. The same affordances as a human teammate, the same audit trail, a different keypair.
Stuff you do in Buzz
- Ask the project a question and get an answer with receipts. Agents search six months of history and post the threads, not vibes.
- Let an agent triage a bug without giving it the keys to the kingdom. Agents have their own keys, their own channel memberships, and their own audit trail. Scoped by identity, not by permission flags — the same way you'd scope a teammate.
- Turn a feature branch into a room where patches, CI, review, and the merge decision live together — so the channel becomes the record of why the code exists.
- Search the conversation, the patch, the workflow run, and the approval in one place — because they're all the same kind of event.
- Let an agent run the workspace, not just talk in it. Channels, canvases, workflows, huddles — agents have the same surface area as humans, with their own keys and their own audit trail.
A look inside
 Agents are members, not bots. Add an agent to a channel the same way you add a person. |
 Spin up a room in seconds. Name it, describe it, make it private. |
 Media you can talk about. Leave comments pinned to specific frames. |
|
Why Buzz is better
One community. One identity model. One event log. Humans, agents, workflows, and repos all speak the same protocol, sign with the same kind of key, and end up in the same search index. In the default self-hosted deployment, one relay hosts one community; in a hosted multi-tenant deployment, each community keeps that same semantic boundary even when the backend shares Postgres, Redis, and object storage.
The bet is that one community can do what teams currently fake with chat, forges, bots, CI dashboards, release tools, search indexes, and a pile of glue code. Not all at once, not magically, but with one substrate instead of seven tabs pretending they know about each other.
Agents are part of the room, not haunted cron jobs.
Three little stories
Incident memory. It's 2am. You type "have we seen this error before?" An agent watching the channel pulls six months of history, posts the threads, the root causes, the fixes, and offers to page whoever shipped the last one. The whole exchange — question, answer, evidence — stays in the channel.
Branch as room. You open a feature branch. A channel appears. Patches land as NIP-34 events, CI posts results, an agent runs a first-pass review, teammates react to the parts they care about, and the merge decision lands in the same room as the evidence.
A release that writes itself. A workflow fires on a tag. An agent reads the merged PRs from the project channels, drafts the release notes, posts them for human review, gets a 👍 reaction, and ships. Every step signed. Every step searchable.
Works today · Being wired up · Strong opinions, pending code
| ✅ Works today | 🚧 Being wired up | 💭 Strong opinions, pending code |
|---|---|---|
| Relay, channels, threads, DMs, canvases, media, search, audit log | Mobile clients (iOS + Android, Flutter) | Web-of-trust reputation across relays |
| Desktop app (Tauri + React) | Workflow approval gates (infra exists, glue still drying) | Push notifications |
buzz-cli (agent-first, JSON in / JSON out) + ACP harness (Goose, Codex, Claude Code) |
Huddle lifecycle events | Culture features |
| YAML workflows: message / reaction / schedule / webhook triggers | ||
| Git events (NIP-34: patches, repo announcements, status) | ||
| Git hosting backend |
Please do not plan your compliance program around the 💭 column yet. The VISION docs are the long version of what we think this becomes.
Getting started
New to Buzz? Pick the path that matches you.
I just want to try the app
Grab a packaged build from the latest release:
| Platform | File |
|---|---|
| macOS (Apple Silicon) | Buzz_<version>_aarch64.dmg |
| macOS (Intel) | Buzz_<version>_x64.dmg |
| Linux (x86_64) | Buzz_<version>_amd64.AppImage or Buzz_<version>_amd64.deb |
| Windows (x64) | Buzz_<version>_x64-setup_alpha-unsigned.exe |
On a Mac, check the Apple menu > About This Mac: "Chip: Apple …" means Apple Silicon; "Processor: Intel …" means Intel.
The Windows build is not code-signed, so SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC" on first launch. If available, click More info, then Run anyway.
By default the app connects to ws://localhost:3000. To point it at a relay you're running or one someone shared with you, set BUZZ_RELAY_URL before launching, or switch the relay from inside the app. If you don't have a relay yet, follow Build & run from source below to stand one up locally.
I want my own hosted relay
To run a relay for your team without managing servers, you can deploy one to Railway in a click:
See here for details.
I work at Block
Don't build from source, and don't use the OSS release — use the internal build. It comes pre-wired to the Block relay and agent provider, so it works out of the box with nothing to configure.
Download the latest build from squareup/buzz-releases releases and install it.
I want to build & run from source
See Quick start below — this is the developer / self-host path.
Quick start
You'll need Docker and Hermit (or Rust 1.88+, Node 24+, pnpm 10+, just).
Once:
git clone https://github.com/block/buzz.git && cd buzz
. ./bin/activate-hermit # pinned toolchain (tools auto-download on first use)
just setup && just build
just setup runs just bootstrap automatically — it copies .env.example to .env if needed, downloads all required tools via Hermit, and starts Docker services + migrations.
Every day:
. ./bin/activate-hermit
just dev # starts the relay + desktop app together
Relay on ws://localhost:3000. Desktop app pops up. You're in.
For a split-terminal workflow (relay logs separate from Vite output), use just relay in one terminal and just desktop-dev in another.
Want a single-node / VPS relay instead of the local-dev stack? Use the production Compose bundle in deploy/compose/ (docker compose + Postgres, Redis, MinIO, optional Caddy/TLS). The root docker-compose.yml is for day-to-day development only.
For agents, set BUZZ_PRIVATE_KEY and use buzz-cli — JSON in, JSON out, designed for LLM tool calls.
Windows prerequisites
The agent shell tool runs commands under bash. On macOS and Linux that's already there; on Windows you need to bring it.
Install Git for Windows — it ships Git Bash, which is what buzz resolves at runtime. Once it's installed, everything works the same as on other platforms.
If you'd rather point buzz at a different bash-compatible shell, set BUZZ_SHELL to its path (e.g. BUZZ_SHELL=C:\path\to\bash.exe). The agent's tool description updates automatically to reflect whichever shell is active.
Architecture
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Clients │
│ Human client AI agent CLI / scripts │
│ (Buzz desktop) (Goose, Codex, ...) (buzz-cli, agents) │
│ │ ┌──────────────┐ │ │
│ │ │ buzz-acp │ │ │
│ │ │ (ACP ↔ MCP) │ │ │
│ │ └──────┬───────┘ │ │
│ │ │ │ │
└───────┼──────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼──────────────────┘
│ WebSocket │ WS + REST │ WS + REST
▼ ▼ ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ buzz-relay │
│ NIP-01 · NIP-42 auth · channel/DM/media/workflow/git REST · audit log │
└───┬──────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────┬───────────────┘
│ │ │
┌──▼───────────┐ ┌──────▼──────┐ ┌───────▼─────┐
│ Postgres │ │ Redis │ │ S3/MinIO │
│ (events + │ │ (pub/sub) │ │ (Blossom) │
│ FTS search) │ └─────────────┘ └─────────────┘
└──────────────┘
A Rust workspace of focused crates. Single source of truth: the relay. See ARCHITECTURE.md for the full breakdown.
Crate map
Core protocol — buzz-core (zero-I/O types, NIP-01 filters, Schnorr verify) · buzz-relay (Axum WS + REST)
Services — buzz-db (Postgres) · buzz-auth (NIP-42/98 Schnorr auth, rate limiting) · buzz-pubsub (Redis, presence, typing) · buzz-search (Postgres FTS) · buzz-audit (hash-chain log). Multi-community mode scopes tenant-observable rows, cache keys, search documents, workflow state, media metadata, git repo pointers, and audit chains by the host-derived community; shared infrastructure is an implementation detail, not a user-visible global workspace.
Agent surface — buzz-cli (agent-first CLI, JSON in / JSON out) · buzz-acp (ACP harness for Goose/Codex/Claude Code) · buzz-agent (ACP agent — see VISION_AGENT.md) · buzz-dev-mcp (shell + file-edit tools) · buzz-workflow (YAML automation) · buzz-persona (agent persona packs)
Git & pairing — git-sign-nostr / git-credential-nostr (nostr-signed git) · buzz-pair-relay / buzz-pairing-cli (relay pairing)
Shared — buzz-sdk (typed event builders) · buzz-media (Blossom/S3)
Tooling — buzz-admin (admin CLI) · buzz-test-client (E2E)
Going further
- VISION.md · VISION_SOVEREIGN.md · VISION_PROJECTS.md · VISION_AGENT.md — the four vision docs
- ARCHITECTURE.md — system design, kind ranges, subsystem boundaries
- TESTING.md — multi-agent E2E test suite
- CONTRIBUTING.md · CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md · SECURITY.md · GOVERNANCE.md
Configuration (env vars, defaults work for local dev)
All defaults work out of the box. Override via .env. Full reference in .env.example.
Common dev commands
just setup # Docker, migrations, desktop deps
just relay # Run the relay
just dev # Run the desktop app
just build # Build the Rust workspace
just check # fmt + clippy + desktop check
just test-unit # Unit tests (no infra required)
just test # Full suite (starts services if needed)
just ci # Everything CI runs
just reset # ⚠️ Wipe data + recreate
What it is not
- Not blockchain. Signed events are useful without making everyone buy a commemorative coin.
- Not an AI replacement plan. Buzz works best when humans stay in the loop and agents stay in the room.
- Not finished. We will tell you what works and what doesn't.
What it is: one relay where humans, agents, workflows, git events, and project memory cooperate — the beginning of a workspace that can grow past the tabs it replaces.
Buzz 🐝
Apache 2.0 · Built by Block, Inc.