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LocalAI/core
Ettore Di Giacinto 29a2020f3d feat(worker): dial, hold and serve the tunnel, on a credential of its own
The worker end of the tunnel. It dials wss://<register-to>/api/cluster/connect,
holds one yamux session as the CLIENT, and serves every stream the frontend
opens on it. Nothing dials into the worker, which is the point: no inbound port,
no reachable address.

Each stream opens with a length-prefixed frame naming a tag and a target, and
the worker answers before either side speaks the tunnelled protocol. The reply
is sent on every stream, not only on refusal, because the protocols carried here
are client-speaks-first and a reply sent only sometimes would arrive interleaved
with a response body. Two tags today: grpc reaches a backend process, and only
on 127.0.0.1 within this worker's own backend port range, because a tunnel
terminates inside the worker and letting the frontend name a host would make
every worker a proxy into its own LAN; http reaches the worker's file-transfer
server, whose address the frontend is not asked about.

An unknown tag, an unreachable local service and an unparseable request are
three refusals and stay three on the wire. A frontend gives up on the first and
retries the second. Each is answered AND the stream is ended: a worker that says
why and leaves the stream open has parked the caller on a request nobody will
answer, and a deadline on the far side cannot tell that from a slow worker. The
specs assert the stream ends rather than that an error occurred, which is what
phase 1 shipped in three places and held in none.

Reconnects double from 500ms to a 30s ceiling, each wait drawn between half the
interval and all of it, and the interval returns to its floor only after a
session that LASTED. Resetting on connect is how a rolling restart, where every
dial succeeds and dies moments later, becomes a retry storm against the first
replica back up. Nothing is assumed to survive a reconnect: the credential is
read at dial time, never captured.

And the credential is now real. The tunnel endpoint advertised authenticating a
worker against its own secret, but registration stored the hash of the shared
registration token, so a leak plus a known node ID still opened a tunnel.
Registration now mints a per-node secret, returns the plaintext once as
tunnel_token, and stores only its SHA-256 in a new column; the endpoint compares
against that and does not fall back to the old one. Rotating on every
registration follows from storing only the hash, since a re-registering worker
cannot be told the secret it already holds; its live tunnel is unaffected,
because the credential is checked when a tunnel is dialled and never again.

Unlike the agent API key and the NATS JWT next to it, the credential IS issued
to a node awaiting approval: the tunnel route re-reads the node's status on
every dial and refuses a pending one, so it is inert until an admin acts, and
withholding it would strand every worker that registers exactly once.

A node that has not registered since this change cannot tunnel, and the column
cannot be back-filled because the plaintext only ever existed in the response
that minted it. The boot warning that said tunnels need LOCALAI_REGISTRATION_TOKEN
is replaced: it was true while the tunnel authenticated against that token's
hash, and says the wrong thing now. What is still true, and is what it warns
about instead, is that without one, registration itself is unauthenticated.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-01 12:28:00 +00:00
..
2026-03-30 00:47:27 +02:00