Posts

Gave a talk on hole punching in libp2p at FOSDEM 2022. Peer-to-peer hole punching without centralized infrastructure How libp2p can traverse NATs and firewalls without coordination through central STUN and TURN servers. libp2p is a universal, cross-platform, multi-language, modular peer-to-peer networking library powering multiple large-scale networks, for example IPFS. In the first part of the talk we’ll present the basic building blocks of the library and explain how they fit together. In the second part, we’ll take a closer look at the recently added decentralized hole punching feature, allowing NAT and firewall traversal without the need for any central coordination servers (STUN and TURN). ...

Gave a talk on the state of libp2p at FOSDEM 2022. State of libp2p Status quo and future roadmap of the peer-to-peer networking library libp2p. libp2p is a universal, cross-platform, multi-language, modular peer-to-peer networking library powering multiple large-scale networks, for example IPFS, Ethereum 2, Filecoin or Polkadot. We will discuss the current state of the project, eyeball the various language implementations, take a look at the many live networks running on top of libp2p today and finally cover the project roadmap for the years to come. ...

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. ...