The Concept

• The server acts as temporary mailbox for peers
• Peers use basic authentication (username, password) to get or send messages
• Username can be anything: random number, UUID, public key…etc
• Whenever a peer authenticate with username and password an inbox will be created for them if it doesn’t exist
• If the username exists and the password is correct then the server will respond with the oldest message in the inbox and deletes it from it’s memory, and will respond with header X-From with the peer username that sent this message.
• If the username exists and the password is incorrect an Unauthorized arror is returned
• Now the Inbox with this username is ready to receive messages from another peer.
• A peer can use another peer username to send a message to his inbox
• The peer inbox will expire after a period of time (1 minute by default) of not asking for any message
• So peers has to keep asking the server for new messages with short delays that doesn’t exceed the timeout until they got enough information to connect to each other

Usecase

• Assuming 2 peers (Alice and Bob) want to connect with WebRTC
• Alice need to choose an identifier alice-uuid and pass it to Bob in any other medium (Chat or write it on a paper or pre share it)
• Alice uses alice-uuid as username to create her inbox and wait for messages from any peer Bob in our case
• Bob will create an inbox with any username bob-uuid and sends WebRTC offer to initiate connect to the pre shared username alice-uuid.
• Alice will ask the server for new messages with her username alice-uuid
• The server responds with Bob WebRTC offer message in reponse body and X-From header with bob-uuid as value
• Alice will send WebRTC answer to bob-uuid
• Bob Asks the server for new messages
• The server responds with Alice webRTC answer message and X-From header with alice-uuid
• Bob sends Alice ICE candidates information in a message each time he’s aware of new candidate
• Alice will receive ICE candidates messages and sends Bob candidates messages
• Alice and Bob keep sending each other messages through the server until they have enough information to connect to each other
• Alice and Bob are now connected to each other directly with WebRTC
• The server will delete both inboxes after 1 minute of inactivity