Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by matt4077 » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 11:04 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #17

natch wrote: post #13

Very interesting. Visited Noisebridge a while back and there was a post on the door telling visitors what to do when the FBI visits to ask about the TOR exit node. I wonder how this tool avoids the exit node problem. Also, from the FAQ: >Can't NSA just hack into this too? >No. Because of its fully decentralized approach, distributed architecture, and the size of the global network, Orchid cannot be easily hacked by a…

Ugh. FWIW: we agree. That FAQ answer was rewritten, and it failed to go on the website. Here is the updated text that was written a couple nights ago by one of the people who helped design the protocol with me after being confused by the answer on the website. > Yes. Our initial release targets China as the adversary, which is a more tractable problem. We may implment full Chaumian mixes in the future (which are immu…

Would you consider changing "China" to something like "Chinese government"? Or, if I'm understanding it correctly, maybe something like "Our initial release operates with a threat model of an authoritarian government's internet censorship, such as those seen in China, Turkey, or Russia."

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

#42

Post by saurik » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 11:05 PM UTC

diaperIITB wrote: post #35

How is the route decided? If it uses a centralized server for that, then wouldn't it be easy to block that.

We definitely do not have any centralized servers. The currently-specified mechanism to determine routes is that they are decided by connecting to a distributed peer-to-peer network that is modeled in many ways after a distributed hash table, at which point you do lookups of random keys in the hash space, which results in a randomized scalable lookup. There are mechanisms in play (and which I assume are already described in our in-progress whitepaper) to protect against eclipse attacks, sybil attacks, and some other miscellaneous attacks on the routing infrastructure. That said, this is also some ongoing work, and we are actively engaging with and being reviewed by people both in academia and in the field with respect to our techniques.

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

#43

Post by jampekka » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 11:06 PM UTC

g_simonsson wrote: post #34

jampekka wrote: post #27

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)

Are there any public details on the Simple Agreement for Future Tokens?

Sorry for nagging, but I'm one of those skeptical of greedy people acting maximally greedy saving the world as a process waste.

Edit: typo

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

#44

Post by kovek » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 11:06 PM UTC

tbodt wrote: post #40

As soon as I see "Ethereum" I stop reading.

Why? Do you understand Ethereum? I'd like to understand it better

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

#45

Post by dsr_ » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 11:08 PM UTC

saurik wrote: 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…

1. The web page says open source repeatedly. Where's the code repo?

2. What's your privacy policy? What do you log, and what could you log (but swear you aren't)?

3. What's the open source license?

4. What's your code rights assignment document?

5. Does this differ from "Tor, but supported with a cryptocoin to buy exit bandwidth instead of hoping for donations"

6. That's a lot of investors. How long do you expect to have to supply servers and bandwidth before the network reaches self-sufficiency?

7. What are the threat models this addresses?

9. Are you planning on making this affordable by civil rights activists in poorer regions of the world? How so?

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

#46

Post by saurik » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 11:10 PM UTC

someguydave wrote: post #38

saurik wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Oh, I'm sorry: because I have been living and breathing this for months, it is very easy for me to assume context :(. Once you connect to the network, you are able to judge the size of the network to know you aren't on a fake network (this is a scenario similar to judging the size of the longest chain of Bitcoin blocks) and you are able to verify signatures of routing table entries (which have been built up as the network was formed by nodes verifying reachability properties of other nodes), which itself is more trustworthy due to proof-of-work and "cryptographic puzzles" which are used to make the cost of sybil and eclipse attacks prohibitively high.

Given that context, you really just need the address of any node, not the address of a particularly "trustworthy" node, so you can get one from a friend's client or from a random website. We have discussed some alternatives, such as being able to put out a bounty on an existing peer-to-peer cryptocurrency blockchain (one which would have to not itself be fully blocked for you, of course). We also have been getting interest from some people in academia who have a number of other techniques, which again are mostly viable because of the background that "what if we can provide enough mitigations in the network itself and use what has been learned from blockchains to mean you don't need to find a trustworthy node".

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

#47

Post by woodandsteel » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 11:16 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #16

zzalpha wrote: post #11

How is this different from Freenet or Tor?

(edit: When I wrote this answer, the person I was responding to had not yet added "or Tor".) Freenet builds its own domain of content where people post websites that are hosted in a distributed fashion by the platform. What we are working on with this initial implementation is a fully-decentralized tunneling service to access existing content posted on the internet (so if you were to compare it to an existing technol…

Is this a darknet or a way of accessing the clearnet or both?

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

#48

Post by saurik » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 11:17 PM UTC

forapurpose wrote: post #37

saurik wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 censore…

As these are more answers of opinion rather than factual questions about the network, I'm going to add a massive disclaimer here that "opinions may differ about what is or is not concerning".

1) No, because I would personally advise people in China do not whitelist sites whose purpose is to access such content. It is not even clear to me that people in China would want to run an exit node at all. There are billions of people in the world in countries other than China that can run exit nodes for that content so people in China will be able to access it without fear, and without anyone in China taking on that level of liability.

2) No, but with the great benefit that because everyone is using the same network, even if somehow (and I do not think this will be the case) there are only a small number of nodes willing to access that content (and one would expect that, in the eventual limit, this number should not be smaller than the number of Tor exit nodes that currently exist; though again: I think it will be much larger), then they will be cloaked within the content everyone else is accessing.

Essentially, it doesn't work to say "people who need access to a secure messaging service should use a secure protocol and everyone else can use Snapchat", and it also doesn't work to say "people who need to access criticism of President Xi can use Tor and everyone else can use the regular Internet". I want a billion people who are also doing things that would be considered insane on Tor--like browsing Netflix!--to be using this service, and to pull that off we need lots of exit nodes, which in turn means incentivized traffic and whitelists.

Put another way: I don't care if there are only 0.0001% of nodes that let you access criticism of President Xi if that is 0.0001% of some insanely large number and the result is "at least as many nodes as Tor", as that itself solves the #1 problem using Tor: that even accessing the Tor website already marks you as someone who is suspicious (as it is here in the United States and the surveillance programs we see).

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d73yd7/how-the-ns...

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

#49

Post by Ao7bei3s » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 11:21 PM UTC

saurik wrote: 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…

1. Based on the paper, it seems ORCHID by itself (without bandwidth burning. not sure if this is trivial to get right. is there tooling?) is as vulnerable to traffic correlation attacks as one might expect. Are there any other known weaknesses? I would expect a "limitations" section in red letters on the front page, instead of the nebulous and likely wrong "the NSA can't hack it either" claim.

2. Given that todays secure overlay networks generally offer extremely bad performance in the Mbit region compared to using the underlay where 10G uplinks are becoming widespread for servers, and the extra hops increase latency, do you think secure overlays will ever be near enough to underlay speed to become widely used? Do you have experience how well ORCHID scales up? And out?

[edit: Don't mean to sound too harsh. I am very glad you're doing work in this area.]

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

#50

Post by g_simonsson » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 11:27 PM UTC

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #33

saurik wrote: 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).

The actual payment tickets (a small data structured signed by the sender) may be sent every 100 packets - we have yet to configure this. The cool thing is that we could send one ticket per packet, but likely that would be too much CPU overhead (ECDSA verification is bottleneck when verifying a ticket)