Yggdrasil – Early-stage implementation of an end-to-end encrypted IPv6 network

No comprehensive account of Norse mythology was ever written down by those who believed in it, or if it was, those records or references to them have not survived to this day. The only accounts we do have are those compiled by Christian monks who were converting the old Norse believers, right at the end of the pagan era.

These accounts are heavily colored by the expectations and the worldview of those monks, and we do not know where the ideas that the Norse actually believed in end and where the ideas of what the monks thought religion is supposed to be begin. For example, much of the popular conception of Ragnarok is heavily influenced by Christian eschatology, instead of the original Norse beliefs. To complicate it even further, the Norse beliefs were in no way static, and as the influence of Christianity spread, the beliefs might have morphed to absorb concepts from Christianity.

It is. The written sources we have for norse mythology are 13th century, and those are compilations of earlier (lost) writings and oral traditions. There are written fragments from the 10th century referring to the norse gods.

There are even 6th century writings referencing a germanic mythology with many similarities to the norse mythology.

It is.

First of all, it's a branch of Indo-European mythology, as are the Greek, Roman, and Hindu pantheons. So it has existed in some form for thousands of years. But "Norse mythology" as we know it was mostly written down in the 13th century - so 700+ years ago.

In parts of Europe it's quite common (at least in Sweden and Norway I know it's true) to learn the IPA so you can make sense of the alphabet and its phonemes, no need to be a language nerd to have a passing knowledge of IPA.

I recommend you studying it a little, it's really not that hard, just looks weird.

Lifted from the Wikipedia article: Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X, or LGX (pronounced igg-drah-sill)

Don’t need to be a language nerd to understand that.

You start by having someone tell you about man -k. That, plus playing (typos → error messages → more words to look up) is probably sufficient.

Sounds more like a brand name prescription drug than a Linux distro.

My point is that I don't think there's anything during key generation that requires the resulting key to be secure / chosen 'well', so an attacker might exploit key generation as a way to target a particular spot in the line, where having an insecure/easily compromised key doesn't matter to them even though that may be detrimental to the health of the network. But at least with preimage resistance any public key is just as likely as any other to get a particular spot that they desire so there's no incentive to exploit key generation to get it, they might as well generate a bunch of secure keys if they want to use a bitcoin-style brute force strategy.

Quite different. ZT is centralized config, direct peer to peer, automatic key exchange, virtual switch.

YG is decentralized, direct peer to peer and multi hop routing, manual key exchange for direct peering, virtual internet (each node is a router to another nodes)

ZT (and Tailscale) requires a central node coordinator for automatic config and peer key exchanges, peers directly to each node to create a flat virtual network, not multi hop routing, between two peers you need a reachable IP or port mapping (supports UPNP) by one of them (fixed in config there are private TCP relays when carrier NAT/double NAT/ restrictive firewalls are in place, very slow), Uses UDP for the links, mimics a virtual switch and support custom IPV4 / IPV6, good for virtual private networks.

YG (and CJDNS) is kinda an overlay public network, is fully decentralized, it supports automatic routing between nodes to mimic a virtual Internet, each node is a router too, needs to register each key for every direct peer node connection (config needs peer key, reachable ip and port, but supports automatic key exchange for local networks), YG uses TCP for the links, support self-healing routing, every peer has an IPV6 address derived by its public key.

ZT (and Tailscale) can mimic a mesh network and node routing because supports bridge nodes between networks (routing between virtual switches), but is not self-healing and somewhat heavy work to config. ZT is fully open source, can be config with your own node coordinator and discovery helpers (Controllers and Moons in ZT), not easy. Only Taislcale client is open source, can't be config with your own node coordinators for free.

You can mix ZT and YG, weird side effects warranted but works. (Edited post - some grammar fixes)

It's an overlay network (a software defined network that runs on top of another network... like you internet service providers network).

It's closer to bittorent than a VPN. It has end-to-end encryption and each node (the app that runs on your PC) distributes routes to each other (similar to how routing works on the Internet between large networks). It appears to be a flat spanning-tree style network.

They mention that it is using similar code and ideas as the cjdns project.

No, it's a kind of virtual public network.

A mesh VPN, or kinda a mesh TOR really.

it's fairly circular actually - we used Yggdrasil in some of the earlier P2P Matrix POCs. This showed up some limitations, so we worked on solutions for them (alongside Yggdrasil) which became Pinecone on the Matrix side, and Ironwood on the Yggdrasil side. Then Yggdrasil 0.4 is incorporating them for general purpose IP overlay routing, while Pinecone is focusing on Matrix-specific application layer overlay routing. Perhaps the two will converge in the end, but until then they're somewhat overlapping friendly sister projects :)

I'm getting sub 100ms latencies across the continent with multi hop routes through public peers.

This is really helpful; thank you