Read the wire
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Weald Protocol is weald-relay, version 4. It moves encrypted envelopes between members of an MLS group. The relay holds ciphertext and routing metadata and nothing more.
The spec is public at stable URLs, and a manifest of SHA-256 digests lets any copy be checked against the source.
You can implement it without talking to us.
Start here
- The specification: the envelope, the security claim, the frames, and what a conforming relay must refuse.
- The manifest: every published file with its SHA-256.
Reference
- Wire format: frames, event kinds, error registry.
- Membership: pinned ciphersuite, handshake, group.
- Identity: devices, agent delegation, what a signature attributes.
- Sync: reconciliation, documents, retention.
- Threat model: four boundaries and the attacker at each.
- Versioning: what can change, and with how much notice.
- Conformance: vector corpus and schema.
How it fits together
One relay, many devices, one group per channel or document scope. A client authenticates with a device key, subscribes to the groups its access set allows, and exchanges envelopes. Reconciliation fills in whatever it missed while offline.
| Layer | Carries | Who can read it |
|---|---|---|
| TLS | The socket | The two endpoints |
| Envelope header | Version, mode, group id, epoch, content address, size | The relay |
| MLS ciphertext | The message, the ticket, the document change | Group members |
| Media | Encrypted blobs in object storage | Group members |
The relay reads the header and never the payload. The header holds what the relay needs to route, order, deduplicate and bill. Nothing about the work itself sits in the header.
The agent contract
A .weald directory in a repository holds tickets, events, plans and QA evidence as files. An in-process MCP server on loopback lets a coding agent read and update that record.
An agent writes through the device that issued its key, under a delegation that can only narrow that device's authority. Every write is attributable to a device and a delegation. See Identity.
Out of scope
Operators can see transport metadata: envelope sizes, timing, connection counts, addresses. Content an agent sends to a model provider has left the relay boundary entirely. Both are covered in the threat model.
Some documents cite paths under specs/backend/cloud/ or specs/backend/build/. Those cover the hosted service and our build process. Neither is part of the protocol, and neither is published.