Brave Variations (Griffin)

Griffin is Brave's version of Google's Finch - A backend for Chromium's variation service. This repository contains resources to compile, publish and inspect the so called seed file, which contains definitions for all variations.

See the Wiki to learn more about what variations are and how to use them for (1) staged rollouts, (2) parameter updates and (3) experiments.

Overview

A continuous integration server (CI) serializes and signs the updated seed file before publishing it to a CDN endpoint at https://variations.brave.com/seed. To browse the contents of the seed file a dashboard is hosted at https://griffin.brave.com. The repo is organized as follows:

• /crypto contains a util to create key pairs and sign the seed file.
• /seed contains a deprecated JSON seed definition and serialisation code.
• /src contains the web dashboard to browse the seed contents, the tracker code to track seed changes and the current seed generator. See src/README.md for details.
• /studies contains the studies used to generate the seed.

Git flow for studies

1. Run npm install after checking out the repository.
2. Create or modify a study file in studies directory, following the protobuf schema in src/proto/study.proto.
3. Run npm run seed_tools lint -- --fix and address found issues.
4. Create a Pull Request targeting the main branch.
5. Follow the PR instructions to verify that everything works as intended.

Key Generation and Exchange

On initial deployment and subsequent key rotations a new key pair has to be generated. The public key is exchanged by patching the hard-coded public key bytes in variations_seed_store.cc:

1. Generate a key pair with $ go run ./crypto/crypto_util.go keygen.
2. Update the patched public key in brave-core.
3. Store the private key in a secure vault and ensure it is accessible by CI.

Seed Serialization, Signing and Serving

The following steps are performed by CI to publish the updated seed file:

1. Run $ npm run seed_tools create to compile the protobuf.
2. Sign the seed file with $ go run /crypto/crypto_util.go sign.
3. Update the X-Seed-Signature response header.
4. Update the ETAG header with the contents of serialnumber.
5. Gzip the seed and set Content-Encoding: gzip response header.

Constraints:

• All studies are one time randomized.
• Platform and channel filters must be applied.
• Brave Ads studies must contain the substring "BraveAds" in their study name. Only one ads study with page visible side effects is allowed to run. Multiple studies without visible side effects can run simultanesouly.

Some Notes on using variations in the Browser

• Studies only take effect after restarting the browser.
• Pull from staging endpoint with --variations-server-url=https://variations.bravesoftware.com/seed.
• Precedence rules for feature overrides (starting with highest precedence):
  • Flags via brave://flags
  • CLI overrides with --disable-features="..." --enable-features="...", e.g. enable feature FooBar with parameters param1=2 and param3=4 via --enable-features=FooBar:param1/2/param3/4
  • Variations overrides as defined in the seed
  • hard-coded base::feature defaults
• Filter rules might include
  • Countries: The ISO country code is set in the X-Country response header and is inferred from the source IP by the CDN but can be faked with e.g. --variations-override-country=US
  • Channels: Use e.g. --fake-variations-channel=beta to override the channel of your build.
• To verify if the browser signed up for any studies eight augment logs with --vmodule="*/variations/*"=1 or inspect brave://version/?show-variations-cmd under the "Variations" section.
• for logging add --vmodule="*/variations/*"=1 or higher

Dashboard

To build the dashboard:

1. Install dependencies $ npm install
2. Bundle resources $ npm run build