Transport & Encoding

1. Transport

All traffic runs over binary WebSocket (RFC 6455) on top of TCP.

• Default port: 8423 on the server (controlled machine).

• Text frames are rejected as a protocol violation.

• The transport is reliable and ordered, which the encryption layer depends on (see Encryption).

• Future: QUIC transport is planned for v2 (eliminates head-of-line blocking for concurrent streams).

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2. Encoding

Every frame is msgpack-encoded (see protocol/codec.py).

Key conventions:

• bytes values round-trip as native msgpack bin — never base64. Pixmaps, file contents, and public keys are all raw bytes on the wire.

• Python set is encoded as a msgpack array.

• Python Enum is encoded as its .value.

• Unknown fields on received frames are ignored (forward-compatible reads).

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