bitlogin/README.md

BitLogin

login for normies.

A static, relay-backed portable account protocol: a familiar login name and password that unlocks a portable Nostr identity, plus an independent 12-word recovery phrase. Encrypted account material lives on public Nostr relays — no account server, no password-reset email, no database.

This repo implements the protocol from docs/spec.md (v0.4) as a modular system any static site can embed for login and Nostr signing.

Layout

packages/
  core/    @bitlogin/core   — protocol implementation: crypto, capsules, Nostr
                              relay I/O, account flows. Framework- and DOM-free,
                              runs in Node or a browser/worker.
  widget/  @bitlogin/widget — <bitlogin-auth> custom element + a NIP-07-shaped
                              window.nostr provider, backed by a dedicated
                              crypto Web Worker. Built with Vite into two
                              static files any site can <script> in.
  demo/    @bitlogin/demo   — plain static site (no build step of its own)
                              consuming the widget: a landing/branding page,
                              an integration guide, and an account-manager
                              page (create/login/recover, password rotation,
                              identity export).

Quick start

npm install                       # installs all three workspaces
npm test                          # runs @bitlogin/core's test suite (vitest)
npm run build                     # builds core, then widget
npm run dev:demo                  # assembles + serves the demo at :4173

@bitlogin/demo's npm run build copies the built widget into packages/demo/dist/vendor/bitlogin/ alongside the static HTML — the result in packages/demo/dist/ is a complete, ready-to-host static site.

Embedding BitLogin in your own static site

<script type="module" src="/vendor/bitlogin/bitlogin.js"></script>
<bitlogin-auth
  vault-relays="wss://relay-one.example,wss://relay-two.example,wss://relay-three.example"
  discovery-relays="wss://discovery-one.example,wss://discovery-two.example">
</bitlogin-auth>

bitlogin.js and cryptoWorker.js (plus the shared chunk they both import) must be deployed side by side — the main script resolves the worker's URL at runtime relative to its own location, so this works from any path, not just the site root.

Once a user signs in, window.nostr is installed with the de facto NIP-07 shape (getPublicKey, signEvent, getRelays, nip44.encrypt/decrypt), so existing Nostr web apps work against it unmodified. Private keys never leave the worker; the main thread only ever sees public keys, signed events, and ciphertext. See packages/demo/public/docs.html for the full integration guide, and packages/demo/public/account.html for a working example (create → confirm recovery phrase → sign an event → rotate password → export identity).

The <bitlogin-auth> element also mirrors window.nostr directly on the element instance (getPublicKey, signEvent, nip44Encrypt, nip44Decrypt) — prefer this over window.nostr when your host page holds a reference to its own widget instance, since window.nostr is a single global slot that whichever provider signed in last currently owns.

Integration gotcha: the element's disconnectedCallback terminates its crypto Web Worker (that's the correct cleanup when the element is genuinely being removed). If your host app re-renders its own DOM by resetting an ancestor's innerHTML — a common pattern in hand-rolled UI without a framework's reconciler — and the widget happens to be a descendant of that subtree, this silently kills the in-progress session: getPublicKey() already resolved before the render still looks fine, but every call after that hangs forever, because the worker is gone and nothing ever replies. Mount <bitlogin-auth> into a container that your own re-renders never replace (toggle visibility with the hidden attribute instead of removing it from the DOM), not into a template string that gets thrown away and rebuilt. See packages/demo/public/account.html for a working single-page example. The BitRoad project (a sibling Nostr commerce app that embeds BitLogin as a sign-in option) hit exactly this bug during integration and fixed it by giving the element a permanent, never-replaced mount point in its static shell HTML, only toggling hidden — see its src/nostr/bitloginAdapter.mjs and the #bitloginMount container in its index.html for a worked example of the pattern.

Another integration gotcha, now fixed: some NIP-07 browser extensions install window.nostr as a non-configurable, non-writable property specifically to stop another script from overwriting it. claimSigner() (called automatically after every sign-in) used to do a plain window.nostr = ... assignment with no guard, so on a page where such an extension is active, that line threw TypeError: Cannot assign to read only property 'nostr' of object '#<Window>' — and since it ran synchronously before the widget dispatched bitlogin-login or moved to the dashboard screen, this froze account creation/import at the final "verify your recovery phrase" step, with that raw TypeError as the only (confusing) feedback. claimSigner() now catches this, returns false instead of throwing, and every caller proceeds to complete sign-in regardless — a host page using this element's own methods (as documented above) was never actually affected by the failed window.nostr takeover anyway. The widget's own dashboard now also shows a plain-language warning in this case ("Another Nostr signer (browser extension) is active in this browser and couldn't be replaced...") using the same warning banner already shown for rollback and relay-disagreement conditions.

Theming

<bitlogin-auth> renders in a shadow root, but its colors, radius, font, and max-width are all read from CSS custom properties on :host — and custom properties inherit through the shadow boundary, so a host page can override every one of them from ordinary light-DOM CSS (a rule targeting the element, or an inline style), without touching the widget's internals:

bitlogin-auth {
  --bl-accent: #3d9bff;       /* primary button / link / focus ring color */
  --bl-accent-hover: #2f86e0; /* primary button hover */
  --bl-accent-fg: #04101f;    /* text color on top of --bl-accent */
  --bl-bg: #12151f;           /* card background */
  --bl-fg: #eaeef6;           /* body text */
  --bl-muted: #98a2b6;        /* secondary text */
  --bl-border: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.10);
  --bl-input-bg: #1a1e2b;     /* input/credential-box background */
  --bl-danger: #ff6b6b;
  --bl-danger-bg: rgba(255, 107, 107, 0.16);
  --bl-warn: #ff6b6b;
  --bl-warn-bg: rgba(255, 107, 107, 0.16);
  --bl-radius: 14px;
  --bl-font-family: Inter, ui-sans-serif, system-ui, sans-serif;
  --bl-max-width: none;       /* default 380px keeps it a fixed-width card;
                                  override to fill a wider container */
}

All of these have defaults (a light theme, with a prefers-color-scheme: dark media-query fallback and a data-theme="dark"|"light" attribute override for host pages with their own theme toggle), so overriding none of them is a valid choice — the widget just uses its own look. See BitRoad's bitlogin-auth { ... } rule in src/styles.css for a real integration that maps every one of these to its own design tokens.

Deployment

The demo site deploys to Vercel: vercel.json at the repo root sets the build command (core → widget → demo) and output directory, so importing this repo at vercel.com/new needs no manual configuration. GitHub Pages was evaluated but dropped — Pages requires a paid plan for private repositories, whereas Vercel's free tier deploys a private repo without that restriction.

Because the deployed demo serves the built widget files as plain static assets at /vendor/bitlogin/, any other site can point directly at the Vercel deployment today without installing anything locally:

<script type="module" src="https://bitlogin.network/vendor/bitlogin/bitlogin.js"></script>
<bitlogin-auth></bitlogin-auth>

bitlogin.network and www.bitlogin.network are attached to the same Vercel project as production domains (bitlogin.vercel.app keeps working as the underlying *.vercel.app alias regardless). DNS for a domain bought outside Vercel has to be pointed at it separately — see "Custom domain DNS" below if you're standing this project up on a new domain yourself.

This is fine for prototyping across multiple projects; for production use in someone else's app, self-hosting the built files (or a future published npm package / CDN release) avoids depending on this demo deployment's uptime.

Custom domain DNS

Vercel doesn't manage DNS for a domain unless its nameservers are delegated to Vercel; with third-party DNS (this project's domains sit on Cloudflare nameservers, registrar-agnostic), add these records at whichever provider actually serves the zone:

A       bitlogin.network         76.76.21.21
A       www.bitlogin.network     76.76.21.21

Run vercel domains inspect bitlogin.network (from a machine with the Vercel CLI linked to this project) to confirm the exact records currently expected — Vercel occasionally changes its recommended anycast IP, and that command always reflects the live requirement rather than whatever's written here. If the DNS host proxies through something like Cloudflare, set the record to DNS-only (grey cloud) rather than proxied — a proxying layer in front of Vercel's own edge can interfere with certificate issuance and routing.

What's implemented

This build covers the protocol's Phase 0 (cryptographic core + test vectors) and the load-bearing parts of Phase 1 (account MVP), verified two ways:

• Protocol-level tests (npm test, 79 tests): Argon2id/ScalarExpand/JCS/ padding/timestamp/NIP-44 unit tests with the spec's exact byte layouts (§11), and full end-to-end scenarios — create → clean-device login, phrase recovery → new credentials → clean-device login, password change with mandatory tombstone + NIP-09 deletion, relay-loss → replica repair (including keyless recovery-event rebroadcast), generation-rollback detection failing closed by default rather than only warning (§16.2 step 6), initial profile/relay-list publication never overwriting an existing kind 0/10002/10050 event when the everyday identity is an imported nsec (§15.8, §28.1), and registration/password-rotation refusing to overwrite another account already registered at the same locator address (§15.6, §18.1) — run against an in-memory mock relay (packages/core/src/test-support/mockRelay.ts), since this sandbox has no route to public Nostr relays. NIP-44 has additionally been cross-tested directly against the nostr-tools reference implementation (conversation keys, padding at every bucket boundary, and round trips in both directions) during the BitRoad integration — see "Changes from v0.3" in docs/spec.md.
• Real-browser verification: the same flows were driven end-to-end in actual Chromium against the built widget, confirming the crypto worker, IndexedDB storage, and window.nostr provider work together outside the test harness.

Implemented: registration (§15), any-device password login with rollback and relay-disagreement detection (§16), phrase recovery with recovery-capsule refresh (§17), known-password change with mandatory tombstone + NIP-09 deletion (§18), replica repair (§24.4), recovery export (§19.5), NIP-19 nsec/npub encoding, importing an existing Nostr nsec as the everyday identity (§28.1, §SF10 — with a preview-before-commit UI step), a NIP-44 v2 implementation for the window.nostr.nip44 surface, bootstrap/discovery relay list plumbing (§19), and the full crypto stack from §11 (Argon2id, HKDF, ScalarExpand, AES-256-GCM, JCS, fixed padding buckets).

Deferred / not in this pass:

• Phase 2 messaging (NIP-17 inbox/compose) — the NIP-44 primitive is built and tested, but no conversation UI is wired up.
• Phase 3 application redirect-auth flow (§26.3) and NIP-46/NIP-07 browser extension interop beyond the window.nostr shim.
• NIP-49 ncryptsec export (§28.2) — deliberately left out rather than shipped unverified against official test vectors; plain nsec/npub (NIP-19) export is implemented instead.
• The maintainer-signed bootstrap relay-list channel (§19.1) has the verify/merge logic implemented but ships with a placeholder maintainer public key — a real deployment needs to swap in a real one.
• Native clients, hardware-backed recovery, independent second implementation, and formal security audit (Phase 4).

Development notes

• Crypto primitives use audited libraries: @noble/curves (secp256k1 Schnorr), @noble/hashes (SHA-256, HKDF, HMAC), @noble/ciphers (ChaCha20 for NIP-44), @scure/bip39 (BIP-39), native WebCrypto (AES-256-GCM), and hash-wasm (Argon2id).
• The Argon2id profile (bitlogin-argon2id-v1) uses parallelism 1 rather than RFC 9106's recommended 4, for reasons documented in packages/core/src/crypto/argon2id.ts (§11.2 of the spec).
• Passphrases are generated from the EFF long Diceware wordlist (diceware-wordlist-en-eff), matching the spec's ~12.9-bits/word, six-word/~77-bit default (§9.2).

Contributing

MIT licensed — see LICENSE. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the dev workflow, mock-relay testing (no route to public relays in most sandboxes/CI), and the spec-first process for anything touching wire format or crypto. Found a security issue? See SECURITY.md rather than opening a public issue.