On Tuesday 20th of July I gave a talk introducing libp2p, a modular network stack. Recording Slides

In our previous session we looked into Mixnets, more specifically Loopix. With this session we stayed in the space, talking about a network adopting many concepts from Loopix, namely Nym. As a preparation, we read section 1 through 4 of the Nym whitepaper. Introduction Network-level surveillance The Nym Network Design Mixnet for Network-Level Privacy Diaz, Claudia, Harry Halpin, and Aggelos Kiayias. “The Nym Network.” (2021). https://nymtech.net/nym-whitepaper.pdf

34th session was on Mixnets as lots of people suggested in the past. As a preparation we read the Loopix paper. Piotrowska, Ania M., et al. “The loopix anonymity system.” 26th {USENIX} Security Symposium ({USENIX} Security 17). 2017. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity17/sec17-piotrowska.pdf The corresponding talk by Ania Piotrowska is very much worth watching as an additional resource. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-yEqLX_UvI

In our third BGP session we focused on BGP security, more specifically we discussed how to perform hijack and interception attacks using BGP. The primary paper of the session was: Birge-Lee, Henry, et al. “Sico: Surgical interception attacks by manipulating bgp communities.” Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. 2019. A good introduction to RPKI can be found here.

After our first BGP session, introducing the protocol based on the convergence problem of BGP, our second session on BGP covered route propagation and tuning. The primary paper was: Gray, Caitlin, et al. “BGP Beacons, Network Tomography, and Bayesian Computation to Locate Route Flap Damping.” Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference. 2020.

Below is a summary of our efforts to optimize flow control in the Rust Yamux implementation. While not a novel approach, I still find the end result worth sharing thus my forum post. https://discuss.libp2p.io/t/optimizing-yamux-flow-control-sending-window-update-frames-early/843

We decided to turn our interest to BGP which we will devote 3 sessions to. In today’s session - the first one - we introduced BGP, looked at the convergence problem, as well as the solution suggested in the paper below. Gao, Lixin, and Jennifer Rexford. “Stable Internet routing without global coordination.” IEEE/ACM Transactions on networking 9.6 (2001): 681-692. To play around with BGP as well as general Internet routing: ...

I have created a new GPG key replacing my old GPG key. I did not loose access to the old one, nor was it, as far as I am able to tell, ever compromised. As I did with the old key, I will use the new key both for signing my open source work as well as securing my e-mail communication. You can find both the old and the new key on all major key servers. Along with the new key you find a signature of the old key signing the new key. ...

What better way to start a new year than with a paper discussing how to change time? In the 30th session we discussed a paper which I think has much up its sleeves - Attacking the Network Time Protocol. First off the paper gives us a good introduction to the inner working of the network time protocol. Next up it examines the broader ecosystem as well as why we need accurate time in the first place. Once we established enough background, the paper dives into how one can attack the protocol, starting off with on-path attacks all the way to some crazy (creative) off-path attacks. Last but not least, the list of references at the end is a small treasure trove. ...

With the 28th session we jumped into the space of byzantine fault tolerant consensus protocols. We covered fault tolerant consensus with various Paxos variants in the past, but this session was the first one looking into how to solve the byzantine generals problem. Instead of using PBFT [1] as a first paper we went with Hotstuff [2] instead. The reasoning behind this choice was (a) Hotstuff presenting a somewhat easy up-to-date consensus algorithm and (b) that it provides a framework enabling one to compare other algorithms (e.g. PBFT) in the space. ...