Decoding Meshtastic Channel Links

Caius Brindescu — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction
If you don't know what Meshtastic is, this video has a great introduction</a>. The TL;DR: is that it's a communication protocol using 900 MHz (in the US) LORA Radios</a>.</p>
Communication is done either via direct messages (DMs), or via channels. The channels are encrypted, so for 2 parties to communicate, they need to know the encryption key (pre-shared key or PSK, for short) for that channel. Sharing the chaneel name, key etc. is done via QR codes or URLs</a>. In this blog post, we'll look at what information is encoded when sharing channel settings, and we can decode it using a "simple" Python script.</p>

https://meshtastic.org/e/#CjQSIOsfCkgIpGY_8iW02ad-4QPaCSBISJqzIVoZKHdqKXd8GgtCbG9nQ2hhbm5lbCUEAAAAEg4IATgBQANIAVAeWBRoAQ</span></span></code></pre>
The part that we are interested in is the fragment:</p>
CjQSIOsfCkgIpGY_8iW02ad-4QPaCSBISJqzIVoZKHdqKXd8GgtCbG9nQ2hhbm5lbCUEAAAAEg4IATgBQANIAVAeWBRoAQ</span></span></code></pre>
This is a URL safe base64</a> encoded string that has the information we are looking for.</p>
Structure#</span></a>
</h2>
The message is encoded using protobuf</a>.
The structure we are interested in is defined in this file</a>.
It's reasonably well documented, so I will not get into all the details here.
But the main properties we are interested in are the channel name, and the PSK.
They are encoded as the psk</code> and name</code> properties in the top level ChannelSettings</code> message.</p>
For the rest of this post, we'll ignore the remainder of the properties, but they can be extracted using the same approach.</p>
Protobuf and Python#</span></a>
</h2>
Generating Python code from the protobuf structure#</span></a>
</h3>
The first setup is installing all the prerequisites.
There are 2 parts: the protobuf compiler and the Python protobuf library.</p>
sudo</span> apt install protobuf-compiler</span></span>
pip</span> install protobuf==</span>3.20.1</span></span></code></pre>

Note: I recommend using a virtual enviroment</a> for your python setup.
Here's a good resource for setting it up</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
Next, we'll need to get the protobuf definition "compiled" into python code, so we can the deserialize the configuration from the URL.
The protobuf definition lives in GitHub</a>, so we'll need to clone it.</p>
git</span> clone git@github.com:meshtastic/protobufs.git</span></span></code></pre>
We'll need to compile a total of four proto files to get this working.
First, let's create a new folder for our generated files to live in:</p>
mkdir</span> meshtastic</span></span></code></pre>
Then, cd</code> into the protobuf</code> folder, and run the following commands.
(You can compile all of them if you want to, but it's not needed for this use case.)</p>
protoc</span> --python_out=..</span> meshtastic/apponly.proto</span></span>
protoc</span> --python_out=..</span> meshtastic/channel.proto</span></span>
protoc</span> --python_out=..</span> meshtastic/device_ui.proto</span></span>
protoc</span> --python_out=..</span> meshtastic/config.proto</span></span></code></pre>
Finally, we need to make the meshtastic</code> folder a python "module", we we'll create an empty __init__.py</code> file inside:</p>
touch</span> meshtastic/__init__.py</span></span></code></pre>Decoding#</span></a>
</h3>
How that have all the prerequisites, let's get decoding!</p>
To start with we'll need to import the required pacakges:</p>
from</span> meshtastic.apponly_pb2</span> import</span> ChannelSet</span></span>
import</span> base64</span></span></code></pre>
We'll see the string we want to decode as a constant (for now):</p>
TO_DECODE</span> =</span> 'CjESIMC70tNI5vkpQpHZGeg0WV7y6KqEoD0_t74fM1_jCaMkGghCbG9nVGVzdCUEAAAAEg4IATgBQANIAVAeWBRoAQ'</span></span></code></pre>
Next, we'll create a new, empty object to populate with the deserialized data:</p>
channelSet</span> =</span> ChannelSet()</span></span></code></pre>
Finally, let's decode and display the channel name and PSK:</p>
channelSet.ParseFromString(base64.urlsafe_b64decode(</span>TO_DECODE</span> +</span> "=="</span>))</span></span>
</span>
for</span> s</span> in</span> channelSet.settings:</span></span>
    print</span>(</span>"Channel name: "</span> +</span> s.name)</span></span>
    print</span>(</span>"Psk: "</span> +</span> base64.b64encode(s.psk).decode())</span></span></code></pre>
A few notes on the implementation.
The settings are encoded in a "URL Safe" base64 encoding.
However, Python still expects the padding to be there, so we're adding the maximum of 2 padding characters to get around this.
If that's too many, any extras will be ignored by the decoder.
"Proper" URL Safe encoding explictly omits padding, but the Python library still requires it, so here we are.</p>
Results#</span></a>
</h2>
Running the above code, we'll get the settings we expect:</p>
$ python decode.py </span></span>
Channel name: BlogTest</span></span>
Psk: wLvS00jm+SlCkdkZ6DRZXvLoqoSgPT+3vh8zX+MJoyQ=</span></span></code></pre>
We can extract other properties if we want to, using the same approach.</p>
The End#</span></a>
</h2>

Caius' Lab - Meshtastic

Decoding Meshtastic Channel Links

Results
`$ python decode.py </span></span> Channel name: BlogTest</span></span> Psk: wLvS00jm+SlCkdkZ6DRZXvLoqoSgPT+3vh8zX+MJoyQ=</span></span></code></pre> We can extract other properties if we want to, using the same approach.</p>`
The End

The End

Caius' Lab - Meshtastic

Decoding Meshtastic Channel Links

The End#</span></a> </h2>

The End