Projects Overview

Introduction

The Interpeer Project aims to provide a full information-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.

Information-Centric Networking

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

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

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

ICN and Human Rights

The ICN approach is a particular good fit for treating human rights as a first class concern, because of the way ICN 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 ICN 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 following architecture diagram helps locate individual projects of the Interpeer ICN stack in the 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.

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 ICN 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.