Live data from Hacker News

Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

orchidprotocol.com

31–40 of 196 posts

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#31
post #5

Hello! My name is Jay Freeman (saurik), and I was both deeply involved in the design of Orchid's protocol as well as in charge of the initial implementation of the networking and routing logic, and am happy to try to answer any questions people might have about what we are working on! (edit:) g_simonsson, who now has an account on Hacker News and has joined this thread, is Gustav Simonsson, another developer working…

The FAQ says you can break through the Great Firewall of China. I believe that you can in some limited way now by flying under the radar, but I absolutely do not believe you could maintain that ability if this became widely used and targeted specifically by the authorities. What would you do if they started really cracking down on Orchid?

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#32
post #5

Hello! My name is Jay Freeman (saurik), and I was both deeply involved in the design of Orchid's protocol as well as in charge of the initial implementation of the networking and routing logic, and am happy to try to answer any questions people might have about what we are working on! (edit:) g_simonsson, who now has an account on Hacker News and has joined this thread, is Gustav Simonsson, another developer working…

Is this anonymous like tor or i2p? if so, how do you do it?

That is a very broad question that I keep looking back to and thinking "I'll answer other questions and get back to this one ;P", but I'm thinking maybe I should simply refer you to the almost 50-page whitepaper on our website. I am here to answer any questions you might still have (and I totally believe you will, as that whitepaper is a draft)!

https://orchidprotocol.com/whitepaper.pdf

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#33
post #5

Hello! My name is Jay Freeman (saurik), and I was both deeply involved in the design of Orchid's protocol as well as in charge of the initial implementation of the networking and routing logic, and am happy to try to answer any questions people might have about what we are working on! (edit:) g_simonsson, who now has an account on Hacker News and has joined this thread, is Gustav Simonsson, another developer working…

Whitepaper abstract says you use "A blockchain-based stochastic payment mechanism with transaction costs on the order of a packet". But how is such a blockchain transaction scalable to the entire internet when considering that it does a transaction for every packet? (pretend you're talking to someone who won't read the article).

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#34

So the business plan is to become the oligarchs of the new network?

Hopefully not! Ideally token allocations are fair and do not skew ownership towards any individual or entity while still providing good incentives (we're still working on figuring out what good allocations look like)

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#36
post #5

Hello! My name is Jay Freeman (saurik), and I was both deeply involved in the design of Orchid's protocol as well as in charge of the initial implementation of the networking and routing logic, and am happy to try to answer any questions people might have about what we are working on! (edit:) g_simonsson, who now has an account on Hacker News and has joined this thread, is Gustav Simonsson, another developer working…

The FAQ says you can break through the Great Firewall of China. I believe that you can in some limited way now by flying under the radar, but I absolutely do not believe you could maintain that ability if this became widely used and targeted specifically by the authorities. What would you do if they started really cracking down on Orchid?

We actually received that question from a reporter yesterday, and I wrote an answer (one which is in the new version of the FAQ that hasn't been pushed :/) that I vetted against the other security people working on our protocol, so before I write something one-off, I'll copy/paste that and see if it is sufficient (as I'd prefer to not accidentally make any security claims that we are not prepared to stand by ;P).

> We are working on techniques involving "traffic steganography" that will make the the traffic used by Orchid look like "normal" internet traffic (such as web requests and video calls). There are also existing simpler techniques such as "domain fronting", where you send your traffic to a large company such as Amazon--one which uses a CDN to efficiently route traffic--and cause their CDN to forward your traffic to your servers; this has been used successfully against the Great Firewall of China in the past.

> Of course, we also need to hide the list of destination servers, as otherwise these could be collected by the adversary and blocked outright. Our current solution to this involves cycling through large numbers of random IP addresses on various hosting solutions, which we believe will force anyone trying to block our traffic to end up blocking large areas of the internet--such as every server being hosted on Amazon Web Services--which would cause a serious problem for Chinese businesses and residents.

> For more information on this, see our discussion of Firewall Circumvention Features (Section 12) of our whitepaper.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#37
post #15

The FAQ says "Bandwidth contributors simply install Orchid and activate their Internet connected device as a node - either as a relay or proxy - and then they set permissions like sites they want to blacklist or whitelist, and they earn tokens into their Orchid wallet for sharing their bandwidth." So hopefully the blacklisting will eliminate the problem of nasty content that plagues anonymous networks like Tor.

That is absolutely our intention! While users who run nodes can choose to forward content to anywhere on the Internet, we want to provide people a feeling of control over the usage of their bandwidth, as we believe that (along with being paid to forward traffic!) will increase the number of people who are willing to provide bandwidth to the service. Being able to say "I am only willing to help users get to Wikipedia,…

> While users who run nodes can choose to forward content to anywhere on the Internet, we want to provide people a feeling of control ...

Are you concerned that,

1. If node operators have the power to control content, they will be held responsible for the content by authorities? For example, consider a node operator in mainland China who allows access to criticism of President Xi.

2. Unpopular content will be censored by node operators just like it is now by more centralized powers?

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#38
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you solve the problem of penetrating NATs and firewalls without relying on a central coordination server?

If I understand your question correctly, and you are looking at "how do we do hole punching and NAT traversal without a way to get your canonical external IP address", in addition to techniques that don't require that kind of functionality (such as modern routers with UPnP port forwarding support), other nodes on the network can run something analogous to ICE servers (we have yet to decide if it should literally be S…

>so all you will need is the address and public key of another node (which you will need anyway in order to connect to the network).

But this begs the question. How does the user get the public key and address of a node without connecting to a public directory? How does he know he's connecting to something trustworthy?

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#39
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what are the benefits over Tor?

It seems intended to be more anonymous and decentralized than Tor, and safer thanks to the strength of numbers, but their whitepaper is diseharteningly incomplete and disingenuous, particularly about problems that are shared with Tor. For example: "The distribution of Entry Nodes is a difficult topic. If oppressive governments are able to access this list, they will block user’s abilities to access the list." Or simp…

Certainly incomplete as it is still a draft, though I'd contest "dishearteningly". Also, why do you find it disingenuous? We're not shying away from what entry nodes and bootstrap of user clients is one of the hardest problems to solve.
Post reply on HN