Cryptosphere - Encrypted P2P web application platform | Hacker News Reader

Cryptosphere - Encrypted P2P web application platform

github.com

73 pointsmike_esspe14 comments

I might be the square here, but for something as serious as an encrypted P2P platform that is meant to evoke trust and privacy and security, the silliness of that README is an odd match.

And I don't think that's a trivial thing, as this is meant to be a foundational product used to build secure systems, and the marketing of the product (the GitHub README) contributes to how people will see it, whether they decide to use it, and is ultimately is a part of the landscape of the development of secure, encrypted systems.

I think they're trying to say that they're at a stage that they don't want to evoke trust, they want to evoke scrutiny and perhaps play testing.

Ah, that makes sense. I'd prefer a big red box that says "Not for production use" and a clean README to be more direct, but I suppose this works.

http://i.imgur.com/4dZq0ZI.png

Like that?

More information is on their Philosophy page:

https://github.com/cryptosphere/cryptosphere/wiki/Philosophy

An interesting selection of anti-establishment crypto primitives and protocols... although, if I'm not mistaken, DJB has been involved with every single one.

If anyone saw Dan Kaminsky talk at LISA 2013[0], you can really see what he means about NIST being replaced by "some guy".

[0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/rethinking-dogma

Their internal cryptocurrency for P2P is not far fetched. In fact, something similar has been deployed by scientists and used on small scale since 2007: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=666351...

Disclaimer: dev of this system

There are simple and compelling reasons penned by the creator[0]. I ain't an expert in security, although the key idea of a local backend with P2P activities makes intuitive sense to secure data from eavesdropping.

Ideas from a related project[1] like de-centralization, self-management of small servers (as opposed to server farms) distributed around the globe could be leveraged in cryptosphere? Diagram explaining interactions in Elijah[2]

[0] http://tonyarcieri.com/the-cloud-isnt-dead-it-just-needs-to-...

[1] http://elijah.cs.cmu.edu/

[2] https://github.com/cmusatyalab/elijah-cloudlet/blob/master/d...

I think that having an internal cryptocurrency, like bitcoin would improve the system. For example it would allow me to mine some coins by sharing my 2Tb HDD for 2 months and then have a place to backup my 100Gb of data for one or two years without worrying that my node will be down and my backed up data will be deleted from the network. What do you think?

It seems to be a deliberate choice they made. See this page of their wiki: https://github.com/cryptosphere/cryptosphere/wiki/Philosophy.

Hmmm.. I don't understand much of what that says. It seems that the bartering system basically means, between participants: I will store some of your data and you will store some of my data. And I will provide bandwidth for your data and vice versa. Both nodes agree to this deal. That way, nodes establish long-term relationships exchanging storage and bandwidth. Is that correct?

But, is there a way to buy/sell storage or bandwidth, without bartering? Could there be an economic incentive to run large-scale nodes providing service for buying customers?

Sounds like an interesting idea. I don't think it is able to execute code in a p2p fashion so it's probably better to call it a web publication/storage platform

Has any thought been paid to network attacks like black holes, white holes, gray holes? Attempted network partitioning with sleeper agents? Etc.

Check the code, search through the wiki and then you can create an issue. Claiming something without even knowing the facts is really convenient, isn't it?

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