LSL Protocol/Ganymedia OpenMAIP v1.0 Specification

Preamble

NOTE: THIS IS AN ALPHA DRAFT SPECIFICATION. IT IS A WORK IN PROGRESS AND SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE.

• Important changes: The DTL frame format has changed with the addition of new fields. The former IP address data format has changed from IPv4 to IPv6, and there are now four address fields rather than two to permit forward-on routing. The CIDR mappings below still stand, but should be taken as IPv6 rather than IPv4 addresses with larger assigned ranges. The protocol revision constant has incremented from 0x0100 to 0x0101 to reflect this change. --Ganymede Ceriaptrix 03:01, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

This document reflects the current Beta testing version of Ganymedia OpenMAIP Engine: 0.7.5

The Ganymedia OpenMAIP v1.0 Specification ALPHA FIRST DRAFT

Copyright (C) 2010 Ganymede Ceriaptrix <ganymedia@gmail.com>

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Ganymede Ceriaptrix <ganymedia@gmail.com> is responsible for maintenance and specification of this protocol. It is used extensively in Ganymedia Engineering's in-world applications and server-side PHP solutions, and interoperability with those applications may be achieved by conformance to this specification.

Introduction

Ganymedia OpenMAIP v1.0 (the Ganymedia Open Metaverse Application Internetworking Protocol) provides a common standard datagram communications protocol for Second Life script applications, each fulfilling their own respective functionality contracts to exchange interoperable messages by exposing query-discoverable command services and command syntax to external objects.

However, OpenMAIP's scope goes beyond chat messaging; it supports a series of communications methods, ranging from direct chat transmission to HTTP relay and e-mail, allowing potential communication between scripts running on Linden Labs' servers and third-party OpenSim grids, and even other virtual worlds systems on which an OpenMAIP implementation has been created (or is simulated via an HTTP server). Therefore, it is useful for a whole range of applications, from simple attachment-to-attachment communications, to object-to-attachment interaction, to cross-simulator and cross-grid object communications.

OpenMAIP is byte-oriented -- it consists of ASCII-armoured hex string messages rather than Unicode character representations of data and list delimiters, breaking from the SL norm; therefore it is better suited to script-to-viewer communications than traditional "loose" multi-type LSL protcols or delimited lists and, indeed, could potentially be encapsulated directly within UDP and other TCP/IP network services in the future. It has been designed with this ultimate goal in mind, for future integration of server-side networking services directly with in-world application scripts.

OpenMAIP supercedes the functionality provided by the Ganymedia Open Cryptographic Exchange Protocol, and is backwards-compatible with it. The basic notion of OpenMAIP is that it provides a common network discovery, service query and message communication framework; therefore, applications such as attachments may query for other OpenMAIP-supporting devices in their vicinity that support common functionality protocols, and also query those devices for acceptable command formats. The provision of challenge/response RC4 authentication allows conformance with closed protocols to be verified as well; it is expected that the RC4 challenge/response authentication keys will be published by architects of open protocols.

At its higher implementation levels, OpenMAIP provides industry-standard cryptographic message exchange for secure script-script, script-viewer and viewer-viewer communications across the Second Life chat messaging system. (By secure, in the sense of scripts "talking" to one another, this is meant "secure" as in "with high immunity to interception by other residents"; any individual with access to the LSL script engine would, of course, be capable of eavesdropping.)

Multimodal Transmission Layer (MTL): OSI Layer 0/1 (Physical)

Chat Channel Transport (CCT)

• Chat Channel Transport (CCT) is the preferred method of communication, consisting of the encapsulated frame being transmitted over the current simulator's chat channel system. This is possible when both the frame sender and recipient are present within the same simulator, and MUST be used if possible. It is also the method by which OpenMAIP messages are relayed to an OpenMAIP-capable Second Life viewer application, the method by which script-to-viewer communications MUST occur.

External Relay Transport (ERT)

• If the recipient is not present on the same simulator as the sender, and an HTTP-based route to a relay server is possible (the nature of which is implementation-dependent), the message SHALL be relayed via that HTTP relay to the destination simulator for retransmission over CCT.

Object E-mail Transport (OET)

• Failing the above two preferred transport methods (if a route via ERT is not known in the host routing table to a distant sender), the encapsulated frame SHALL transmitted via the simulator's local e-mail functionality to the destination object's key. In the case of the Linden Lab servers, this behaviour results in an e-mail message being sent to <key>@lsl.lindenlab.com. Implementations forwarding to other providers' virtual world grids MAY be specific to e-mail transport behaviour on that simulator or simulator-like environment. In this case, the recipient_domain field present within the frame SHALL be used to determine the domain suffix.

Datagram Routing Layer (DRL): OSI Layer 2 (Network)

Constants

Constant

Value Hex

Value Dec

Description

Static routing subnets

Domain	Allocated CIDR Range	Description	Host Numbering Scheme
*.agni.lindenlab.com	TBA	Deprecated. Host prefix for OpenMAIP clients running within Linden Lab main grid simulators (LSL scripts that implement OpenMAIP).	number as secondary host prefix (see above), where number is sim[number].agni.lindenlab.com from the simulator's hostname. This can be obtained in LSL implementations using llGetSimulatorHostname(). Revision 1.1 (Engine 0.7.5) does not use this scheme any more. IPv6 addresses are assigned for *all* domains via stateless address autoconfiguration, prefixed by the IP address of the local simulator.
*.phrygia.ganymede-labs.com	TBA	Host prefix for Ganymedia Engineering's servers.	To be published.
MULTICAST_ALL_HOSTS	224.0.0.1	If frames are addressed to MULTICAST_ALL_HOSTS, they MUST be processed by all receiving hosts in the current subnet.	Single-address.

Datagram Transport Layer (DTL): OSI Layer 3 (Transport)

Constants

Constant	Value Hex	Value Dec	Description
FRAME_START_TOKEN	0x6A24		6A 24 - Magic number to signify start of frame
FRAME_END_TOKEN	0x0404		04 04 - Magic number to signify end of frame (EOT EOT)
FRAME_COUNT_MAX	0x00FF	255	Max 255 frames per message
FRAME_SIZE_MAX	0x0200	512	Max 512 bytes of payload per frame
CURRENT_VERSION	0x0101		Protocol version: xx00 - major revision; 00xx - minor revision

Constant	Value Hex	Value Dec	Description
ENCODING_INVALID	0x0000	0	This frame does not contain a payload of recognised encapsulation format.
ENCODING_PASSTHROUGH	0x0001	1	Not recommended. The payload of this frame is unencapsulated (the datastream is environment-dependent, and in the case of LSL strings, the payload will be in local Second Life Unicode text). Avoid use of this mode, as preservation of verbatim character data cannot be guaranteed should the frame be forwarded over HTTP.
ENCODING_BINHEX_ASCII	0x0002	2	The input payload string is converted into ASCII character values, which in turn are binary-hexadecimal encoded (BINHEX) into a string of undelimited hexadecimal octets. This is the preferred mode; note, however, that non-ASCII character values MUST be stripped out, and so any special characters will be lost. Please use ENCAP_HEX_UTF16 if Unicode characters are expected in payload data. Note that all other transmitted frame data SHALL be encoded in this format.
ENCODING_BINHEX_UTF16	0x0003	3	Optional - implementation of this mode may be omitted. As ENCODING_BINHEX_ASCII, except characters are transliterated into hexadecimal octets representing an RFC 2781 Unicode-encoded string, which MUST be prefixed with an appropriate Byte Order Mark.
ENCODING_BINHEX5	0x0004	4	Optional - implementation of this mode may be omitted. Lempeurer application/binhex BinHex 5.0 encoded UTF-16 (which is not a binary hexadecimal format; it is a compressed character representation scheme). Due to the computational complexity of the BinHex 5.0 format, attempts to use in LSL implementations are not recommended for performance reasons.

Frame format (Revision 0101)

#	Byte Index	Byte Len	Field Name	Field Type	Desc	Validity rule
0	0	2	ident	FRAME_START_TOKEN	Frame start indicator sequence	ident = FRAME_START_TOKEN
1	*	16	current_recipient	<openmaip_ipv6>	Next destination (current hop); pseudo-IPv6 address (128-bit)	not validated at this layer
2	*	16	final_recipient	<openmaip_ipv6>	Final destination (ultimate recipient); pseudo-IPv6 address (128-bit)	not validated at this layer
3	*	16	forwarder	<openmaip_ipv6>	Source of the datagram (the forwarder); pseudo-IPv6 address (128-bit)	not validated at this layer
4	*	16	originator	<openmaip_ipv6>	Origin of the datagram (the sender); pseudo-IPv6 address (128-bit)	not validated at this layer
5	*	1	version	<uns_int>	Protocol version identifier	version <= CURRENT_VERSION
6	*	1	frame_count	<uns_int>	Total length, in frames, of the entire datagram	1 <= n <= FRAME_COUNT_MAX
7	*	1	index	<uns_int>	Index of this frame within the datagram (zero-based)	0 <= frame_index <= frame_count <= FRAME_COUNT_MAX
8	*	2	size	<uns_int>	Length, in bytes of data, that this frame contains	0 <= frame_size <= FRAME_SIZE_MAX
9	*	1	encoding	<uns_int:const>	Encapsulated data encoding (see above constants)	valid constant
10	*	n	data	<bin>	Payload	byte_length(data) = frame_size <= FRAME_SIZE_MAX
11	* + n	2	terminator	FRAME_END_TOKEN	End-of-transmission (EOT) characters	terminator = FRAME_END_TOKEN

Notes:

• Whilst it may seem odd that version is in field 5 (after the address header block) in the frame, having the current recipient address immediately after the frame start token means that the first 18 bytes of any frame can be identified as being addressed to the receiving node, without any former tests having taken place. This allows extremely simple implementations of the protocol to perform this simple check to determine whether to process a frame or not, and screening "background" packets prior to frame tear-down using this simple test improves efficiency in LSL implementations.