Hi Dhaavi, this looks like a great project and your vision for it is excellent.

But the consistent theme I see with similar solutions is that they ignore the commercial aspect of such solutions. I don't know if you have mass adaption in mind, but the more people use it, I would presume the privacy and anonymity properties would improve? If so, then have you considered introducing participation incentives (financial or not)? That seems to be the critical problem in this space that needs solving, standardized anonymous payment for infrastructure service providers in the network.

Currently, this is just a fun project for me. I have technical ideas, but I don't have growths plans or the like - and it is nice that it does not have to.

Yes, I would expect the privacy would increase by some degree with more users, but I don't know by how much.

Although I will be using the technology in future projects, so Mycoria will benefit from that.

Hi Dhaavi, Mycoria looks very promising and it reminded me of the early days of peer-to-peer system with Napster and Gnutella [1].

Any specific reason why you didn't use the standard based segment routing for source routing support, that can be adopted at layer 3 instead of custom layer 4 transport [2]?

For security analysis did you use BAN logic and ProVerif tool for verification [3], [4]?

[1] Gnutella:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella

[2] Segment routing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segment_routing

[3] Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Abadi%E2%80%93...

[4] ProVerif:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProVerif

Thanks!

I wasn't really aware segment routing, tbh. However, I do think with where Mycoria is going, the additional control to change things as needed will be required.

I have used VerifPal https://verifpal.com/ for security analysis before, but not yet with Mycoria.

...i wonder what happens to humankind if all there is, is only Wikipedia.

What happened to referring to individual, topic-specific sites? WP has so many issues with both its data, and their governance.

Oh i guess it's just people being lazy. _I_ don't trust WP for domain-specific knowledge at all.

Every Wikipedia page links to their sources. Have you tried reading those?

Just like the cambridge link he shared: it is a well written article with tons of references describing the source of the information.

Just ignore him. He only created his account an hour ago, he's probably just a troll.

To me that's the other way around: I would assume any non-WP link to direct me to some corporate blog, half automatically generatrd and full of trackers, whereas I trust WP to give me a broad and relatively neutral point of view with many links to go from there.

>WP has so many issues with both its data, and their governance.

Indeed. See "Canceling Disputes": https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c....

Here are some non-Wiki links:

Gnutella: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/file-sharing.htm

Segment routing: https://www.segment-routing.net/

BAN Logic: https://www.cdk5.net/security/Ed2/BANLogic.pdf

and ProVerif: https://bblanche.gitlabpages.inria.fr/proverif/

I've only read your landing page, so I don't fully understand the technical part yet.

Can you do a comparison with I2P?

I apologize, wasn't clear from the documentation: router's IPv6-like address is a fingerprint of the public key, but does it also encode geo-prefix and distance (I mean, it's hypothetically doable, I'm curious what's the approach if it is)? or the router's address has no metadata encoded, and only end-user addresses are encoded this way?

Mycoria brute forces a public key/IP pair until it matches the desired geo-prefix.

I am a little confused how the geo encoded addresses and private addresses work. It seems like the network will be overwhelmed with keeping track of switch labels?

Switch labels are effectively interface IDs on the servers, there is no data to be stored.

Geo encoding simply improves routing to unknown routers, kind of as a baseline structure to the whole network.

Great technical achievement. What is, for you, the sweet spot between VPN and TOR? What's the tradeoff there?

If you want Tor for your _whole_ existing system, not just the browser, good luck.

If you want actually good privacy with a VPN, also good luck with that. (There are very few good companies doing the best they can here, but they are still limited technologically.)

SPN can be seen as my attempt to solve both of these issues.

So, what are the tradeoffs? In some ways it’s better than both VPNs and Tor — but in what ways it’s worse?

Well, it is in the middle: Not as fast as a VPN, not as private as Tor.

Impressive design! Are you assuming bandwidth is free and abundant?

Mycoria routers, proxies, Tor exit nodes, and VPNs are difficult to run. There needs to be an global incentive, economy, or private community usually. Our Delft University students wrote "The fifteen year struggle of decentralizing privacy-enhancing technology" a decade ago. Scaling to many millions or billions is unsolved.

Have you talked to any lawyer or law professor about your MVP? "Being welcome" has known drawbacks when you operate a central DNS service.

Thanks! Well, every participant has to cover their own server/bandwidth cost. So, from my perspective, yes, bandwidth is free and abundant. Although I hope that Mycoria can/will perform well in lower bandwidth areas.

Interesting. Can you link that paper/article?

The DNS is not central. Everyone maintains their own local mapping. When accessing a website on mycoria, you open a URL like this that first creates the mapping and then forwards you to it: http://router.myco/open/speedtest.de.myco/fd13:6239:a07a:eb4...

> Can you link that paper/article?

I'm not who you asked, but this appears to be the article:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.4818

Love the inspiration from Yggdrasil with the hashed key -> IP concept. How do you enforce the geographical part? And what do you use from transport? WireGuard?

Geographical: No enforcement, but if you choose the wrong country, packets will have issues reaching you, because routing is "bucketed" into layers of regions. Routers only hold the bext x routes to each bucket.

Transport is custom in order to support source routing, but I use the WireGuard library for setting up the interface and such.

(I have experience with cryptography in network protocols from Safing/SPN - the cryptography of which was audited without fault. Also, I am _very_ cautious and keep to standards as close as possible.)

Maybe there's a way to offset this risk by testing the speed of connections?

How does peer discovery work? Where do the region buckets live?

Latency is considered in routing.

Every router announces itself on the network. Routers can optionally publish their IANA IP addresses.

Buckets live on the routers themselves.

Cities with significant internet POPs would be better than countries. 1. You control the list of locations (so Singapore not Brunei.) 2. People can easily choose from a list of cities. 3. Latency tests could make it a non-issue. 4. Local connections in semi-isolated areas (think antarctic or islands in the south pacific) can be identified by people with a config.

Interesting idea - thanks! Will think about this more.

So basically Mycoria IP addresses/keys leak information about your geographical location?

Just like the Internet we currently have, albeit less accurate, but more stable.

See https://github.com/mycoria/mycoria/blob/master/m/geo_marker....

In the future, non-routable private addresses will solve that for users that require it.

"services: - name: my-service # This is your service url: 'http://my-service.myco/' # For service listening on 0.0.0.0:80 friends: true

friends: - name: alice # This is your laptop ip: fd1f:2cd5:6feb:7aa7:d674:1b3c:c82c:dfc"

May I suggest r/friend/peer. This is not motivated by pedantry. Relational semantics that are not closed over by the domain of user-agent (in the broadest sense) should not be used in the infrastructure layer. My laptop's server is a user-agent of mine as is the instance running on my phone; they are peers.

Applications built on top of this substrate will be (generally) concerned with social relationships of users and 'friend' et al. will be of use in those layers.

Thanks for the feedback. I will re-evaluate.

Portmaster and the SPN were great, back when we used Windows! We just wish there were that sort of stuff for macOS - sure Private Relay exists, but it only works in a few first-party apps like Safari, and you never know if it's working or not, and can't force traffic to only be through it.