Projects Overview

Introduction

The Interpeer Project aims to provide a full human-centric networking that supports all web use cases, and considers human rights preservation a first class objective.

Because that is a big undertaking, a major design decision up front was to break as much of this stack up into individual packages with minimal dependencies on each other. This keeps every package easier to maintain and test, development milestones clearer, etc. – but it also permits for more experimentation and re-use.

The exception to this are foundational libraries such as liberate and s3kr1t, which are relatively thinly scoped platform abstraction libraries. Using those should reduce platform-specific code in most other packages to a minimum.

Human-Centric Networking

Human-Centric Networking, or HCN for short, refers to a shared concept of which exist different implementations. The concept is an evolution of information-centric networking and peer-to-peer (p2p) networks, and a shift away from traditional networks.

In HCN, one does not address target machines to connect to, but instead connects to shared resource directly. In this way, applications become unaware of where a resource is located. The HCN stack can take care of finding the best match of a machine to connect to.

It’s possible to realize an HCN approach on top of existing internet protocols, both for ease of implementation and adoption. However, HCN is likely to realize its potential particularly well when pushed lower down the ISO/OSI stack.

HCN and Human Rights

The HCN approach is a particular good fit for treating human rights as a first class concern, because of the way HCN removes the notion of a specific machine to connect to.

The implication of this is that any machine can act as a cache for resources. Since those machines cannot always be trusted, a modern HCN approach must necessarily take care that information leakage is not possible and end-to-end encrypt any resource that is not public. Only then is it feasible to treat arbitrary machines as safe for caching.

A side-effect of this is that content introspection as the HTTP stack provides is no longer feasible, which immediately solves a subset of human rights issues on the internet, such as protection from surveillance capitalism or for whistleblowers, etc.

Architecture

The full architecture specification contains details on the architecture. However, the following diagram helps locate individual projects of the Interpeer HCN stack in the ISO/OSI layers.

Figure: System Architecture with ISO/OSI layers

  • Network Layer: it’s feasible/planned to create packeteer connectors that operate directly on data link layer protocols.
  • Transport Layer: channeler has its own addressing scheme; given a routing protocol, it could operate on the data link layer directly. In practice, however, building on IP or other network layer protocols is best.
  • Session Layer: mostly, channeler uses packeteer’s socket API abstraction, in particular AF_LOCAL and UDP sockets. Moldoveanu is intended to be an enhanced (and incompatible) version of Kademlia. Hubur is intended to be a streaming protocol operating at the vessel extent level of granularity for resource access.
  • Presentation Layer: CAProck integrates with vessel, but also exposes an API upwards for managing distributed authentication. vessel is a streaming-optimized container file format with multi-authoring considerations built in. Finally, wyrd is an API and plugin framework for representing files as a series of incremental modifications via a CRDT.
  • Application Layer: The GObject and Android SDKs provide application developer APIs for the stack, with other SDKs feasible.
  • Layer Spanning: liberate is a platform abstraction library used in multiple projects. Similarly, s3kr1t encapsulates crypto libraries such that their respective APIs do not need to be known in the other code bases.

Technology Tree

Another way of looking at these projects is a technology tree, as you would perhaps see in some games. This mixes projects and project features as milestones with dependencies on each other.

It’s possible to work on a milestone without having the dependencies in place, but this can then only be a placeholder; something that demonstrates a principle.

Figure: Technology Tree

In this view, the colours represent various stages of completion:

  • Salmon: indicates perpetually ongoing work, which grows alongside other milestones. This applies to e.g. documentation work, or base libraries.
  • Green: means feature complete, with only minor tweaks or bugfixes expected.
  • Teal: shows that an initial implementation was completed, but it will need more work for feature completeness. This is distinct from having a new feature milestone, and may e.g. mean work to clean up to the code base or add a smaller feature.
  • Purple: indicates that a project is currently in progress. If you do not see any purple here, however, this does not mean there is no progress being made. It just means this graphic is outdated.
  • Light gray: shows planned milestones, perhaps with a design outline already in existence.

Future

Human rights on the internet cannot be fully protected in a networking stack. That much is clear.

For example, dark patterns in user interface design can trick people into making choices that are bad for them, apparently consenting to violations of their rights that they may not agree with.

Should such topics be part of the Interpeer Project? Probably.

But for now, the technical work required to build a full HCN stack is enough for the resources we have.

If you would like to help reach such a future faster, you can always participate in one of the projects – or make a small donation.