lwsf

This project is NOT a part of the official monero "core" code, but may be merged into that project.

This project is correctly incomplete, so the instructions here are for the truly adventurous.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• About this project
• License
• Compiling lwsf from source
  • Dependencies
  • Cloning the repository
  • Build Instructions
• Running lwsf

Introduction

Monero is a private, secure, untraceable, decentralised digital currency. You are your bank, you control your funds, and nobody can trace your transfers unless you allow them to do so.

Privacy: Monero uses a cryptographically sound system to allow you to send and receive funds without your transactions being easily revealed on the blockchain (the ledger of transactions that everyone has). This ensures that your purchases, receipts, and all transfers remain absolutely private by default.

Security: Using the power of a distributed peer-to-peer consensus network, every transaction on the network is cryptographically secured. Individual wallets have a 25 word mnemonic seed that is only displayed once, and can be written down to backup the wallet. Wallet files are encrypted with a passphrase to ensure they are useless if stolen.

Untraceability: By taking advantage of ring signatures, a special property of a certain type of cryptography, Monero is able to ensure that transactions are not only untraceable, but have an optional measure of ambiguity that ensures that transactions cannot easily be tied back to an individual user or computer.

Decentralization: The utility of monero depends on its decentralised peer-to-peer consensus network - anyone should be able to run the monero software, validate the integrity of the blockchain, and participate in all aspects of the monero network using consumer-grade commodity hardware. Decentralization of the monero network is maintained by software development that minimizes the costs of running the monero software and inhibits the proliferation of specialized, non-commodity hardware.

About this project

The tl;dr is that you if you import this project into your wallet, you can choose at runtime between a Monero "full" wallet that does all of the transaction scanning locally, or a Monero "light" wallet that does all of the scanning remotely. A single C++ virtual interface has two different implementations for Monero wallet processing.

The longer version -

This is a client library for the Monero light-wallet REST API (i.e. MyMonero compatible) that implements the wallet2_api.h interface. Downstream projects/wallets can write code that calls into the wallet2_api.h functions to manage a Monero wallet, and select a "standard" monero wallet by calling Monero::WalletManagerFactory::getWalletManager() or select a light-wallet by calling lwsf::WalletManagerFactory::getWalletManager().

lwcli illustrates how this works. The main function calls a different "factory" function depending on the CLI arguments. The lwcli TUI "draw" code is then given a single Monero::WalletManager interface object that can be one of two implementations. The lwsf manager requires the user to specify a LWS server, whereas the Monero manager requires a monero daemon RPC. The light-wallet implementation can have quicker sync time, whereas the monerod implementation will have better privacy guarantees. If you run your own LWS server, the privacy is identical.

The projects use different file formats for storing data, so you have to manully import a wallet via seed if you want to change backends. The files output by the Monero factory function are compatbile with monero-gui and monero-wallet-cli, as it uses the same code.

License

See LICENSE.

Compiling lwsf from source

Dependencies

The following table summarizes the tools and libraries required to build.

Dep	Min. version	Vendored	Debian/Ubuntu pkg	Arch pkg	Void pkg	Fedora pkg	Optional	Purpose
GCC	7	NO	build-essential	base-devel	base-devel	gcc	NO
CMake	3.5	NO	cmake	cmake	cmake	cmake	NO
Boost	1.66	NO	libboost-all-dev	boost	boost-devel	boost-devel	NO	C++ libraries
monero	master branch	NO					NO	Monero libraries
OpenSSL	basically any	NO	libssl-dev	openssl	libressl-devel	openssl-devel	NO	sha256 sum
libzmq	4.2.0	NO	libzmq3-dev	zeromq	zeromq-devel	zeromq-devel	NO	ZeroMQ library
libunbound	1.4.16	NO	libunbound-dev	unbound	unbound-devel	unbound-devel	NO	DNS resolver
libsodium	?	NO	libsodium-dev	libsodium	libsodium-devel	libsodium-devel	NO	cryptography
Doxygen	any	NO	doxygen	doxygen	doxygen	doxygen	YES	Documentation
Graphviz	any	NO	graphviz	graphviz	graphviz	graphviz	YES	Documentation

Follow the guide from the Monero projdect for dependency installation and cloning the Monero repository. Stop after you've finished the cloning section for Monero, as lwsf will build Monero separately for you.

Cloning the repository

Clone recursively to pull-in needed submodule(s):

git clone --recursive https://github.com/vtnerd/lwsf.git
cd monero-lws && git submodule init && git submodule update

Build instructions

Monero uses the CMake build system. Create a folder for the build, and specify both the Monero source directory and lwsf source directory:

mkdir build_lwsf && cd build_lwsf
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DMONERO_SOURCE_DIR=/home/user/monero_source /home/user/lwsf_source
cmake --build

Running lwsf

When complete, you should have lwsf-ledger executable in /home/user/build_lwsf/src and a lwsf-api.a file in the same folder. Run the -h option on lwsf-ledger to test against a LWS server.

lwsf-api.a

This file is a little tricky to use outright as it doesn't contain the entire code needed. The remainder of the code is in .a files in the Monero source directory. The best way to include lwsf into another project is to use Cmake with the FetchContent function. After running those few lines, you will have a lwsf-api target in Cmake:

project(your_project)
include(FetchContent)
FetchContent_Declare(lwsf SOURCE_DIR "${your_project_SOURCE_DIR}/external/lwsf")

if (NOT lwsf_POPULATED)
  FetchContent_MakeAvailable(lwsf)
endif ()

add_library(your_library ...)
target_link_libraries(your_library lwsf-api)