eIPC — Secure Inter-Process Communication

eIPC is a transport-agnostic inter-process communication library written in Go (module github.com/embeddedos-org/eipc). It exchanges messages as framed envelopes over pluggable transports and signs every frame for integrity. It is part of the EmbeddedOS (EoS) ecosystem, where it provides the messaging layer between services.

Features

Observed in the source tree:

• Pluggable transports — TCP, Unix domain sockets, shared memory, and Windows named pipes (transport/).
• Framed binary protocol — length-prefixed frames with a header/payload codec (protocol/).
• Frame integrity — HMAC-SHA256 signing of frames (security/integrity) and sequence-based replay protection (security/replay).
• Security building blocks — auth, capability tokens, encryption, and a keyring (security/), plus optional TLS on the TCP transport (EIPC_TLS_AUTO_CERT).
• Services — broker, registry, health, policy, and audit (services/).
• C SDK — a C binding under sdk/c.

What's inside

Path	Contents
core/	Endpoint API, message envelope, router, lifecycle
protocol/	Frame/header definitions and codec
transport/	tcp, unix, shm, windows transports
security/	auth, capability, encryption, integrity, keyring, replay
services/	broker, registry, health, policy, audit
config/	Runtime configuration (e.g. listen address, TLS)
cmd/	eipc-server, eipc-client, eipc-cli binaries
sdk/c/	C SDK
examples/	hello-eipc minimal client/server
tests/	unit, functional, integration, performance, simulation
docs/	Architecture, API reference, security model

Requirements

• Go 1.22+

Build

make build          # builds bin/eipc-server and bin/eipc-client
make build-cli      # builds bin/eipc-cli
make build-all      # cross-compiles for linux/darwin/windows (amd64/arm64/armv7)

Run the example

From two terminals (see examples/hello-eipc/README.md):

# Terminal 1 — server
cd examples/hello-eipc && go run ./server/

# Terminal 2 — client
cd examples/hello-eipc && go run ./client/

The eipc-cli debugging tool can send, listen for, and ping messages against a running server:

eipc-cli send   --addr 127.0.0.1:9090 --type chat --payload '{"text":"hello"}'
eipc-cli listen --addr 127.0.0.1:9090
eipc-cli ping   --addr 127.0.0.1:9090

Test

make test           # go test -race ./...
make bench          # go test -bench=. -benchmem ./core/ ./protocol/
make vet            # go vet ./...

Documentation

Docs live under docs/ and are published with MkDocs (mkdocs.yml): https://embeddedos-org.github.io/eIPC/.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Part of embeddedos-org.