Morphis: Encrypted distributed datastore

Data is broken up into 32k blocks. (That might change to 512k blocks as it gives it a 10x throughput improvement with less CPU / overhead.)

Random of those blocks, based on your nodes ID and the hash of each block's data, are stored on your computer. Before they are, your node encrypts them and throws away the key. All that is ever stored on your harddrive is random encrypted data and no key. The key is the original key that the uploader is provided with. The encryption key is the hash of the data, the ID of the data is a hash of that key. Your node knows only the ID, it cannot derrive the key to decrypt the data. Your node cannot be tricked into storing unencrypted data.

Now, a soon future version will support seeding v1. This is the ability to essentially 'like' a file/website/etc, and that will ensure that your node never throws out the data blocks it does store for that file/site/files_that_site_links_directly. This is mostly UI work that is missing. This feature will also automatically seed for example your Dmails, comments, trust publications, own site, Etc. (Although a UI will let you control it).

After that, more distant, will be seeding v2. This will be more like the file sharing that is similar in concept to how https://peeriodproject.github.io/dl/peeriod_an-anonymous-app... envisions file sharing. Their paper came out as I was coding and I noticed they were the closest in many ideas to mine of any papers I've seen. Their project seems stalled, as most coming out of the academic world are. That is why I started with code and not a paper :) I will write the paper before 0.9 release.

FYI, your nodes ID is a SHA-512 hash (everything is SHA-512 hash) of your node's RSA-4096 public key. (All crypto is: SHA-512, RSA-4096, and DH-group14-sha1 (for compatability with openssh)).

That relation of your node's ID is one of the Sybil proofing measures designed early on.

I designed everything to be transparent and modular with crypto so I can switch to better algos as they become available (quantum proof, I am watching you!). The first addition will likely be ECC once I have decided upon a safe (as in non NSA backdoored) ECC curve which I believe the community has not proven yet as safe as RSA-4096.

Thanks for your reply. Pretty good project you have there, and your overall mission, well, it looks like a moonshot but it's noble and pure. I like that.

Have you measured how many requests per second (reads/writes) can you get at max? (For some given hardware configuration)

Thank you very much!

Yes, on my 2nd generation low power i3 running my normal desktop at the time, I get individual ~200ms response time, and that is with 115 32kbyte requests per second.

I am rewriting the high level protocol code that is a bit rickety because it is snowballed from the earliest code in the project other than the asyncio SSH library I implemented from scratch.

When that rewrite is done (a week or two), that will decrease latency greatly, and improve efficiency greatly, and thus should even improve throughput (although that is already max out your pipe with actual data as it is low overhead).

If I switch from 32k blocks to 512k blocks which I did some testing on (Freenet is 1meg blocks), that gives me a 10x !! throughput improvement with same CPU usage and no increase in latency of per request.

The only reason I am 32k blocks originally was the ssh protocol is 35k max packet size and I don't want to break spec so as to be able to hide as normal ssh traffic :) The 512k blocks test I did as multiple packets and was 10x faster, because that means 512k per FindNode operation instead of just 32k :) I was sitting on the fence on switching to it because I want to do the rewrite of the high level code first because the multiple data packets per request complicates that snowballed code even more :)

Also, I am using pycrypto which initial tests show is actually much slower than the other library I will likely switch to (it is called simply cryptography, it wraps platform openssl instead of implementing itself as pycrypto does). I went with pycrypto to minimize dependencies. I will have it detect if you have cryptography installed and use that optionally. I've already abstracted the pycrypto api so I can easily have it switchable at runtime. This should decrease latency a good amount as well.

I should have mentioned one very important point with the figure I provided. That is 115 requests per second on /one/ i3 /core/. The network itself isn't sweating. Every user of a distributed Reddit for example would be getting those 115 requests per second themselves if they weren't a sizable portion of the network. So 100 users and your figure is matched. The bittorrent mainline DHT has multiple millions of simultaneous nodes at any one time. MORPHiS as is already deprecates bittorrent so is destine to absorb all those nodes. Also, the network scales log, and not just log base 2. Kademlia has an 'accelerated lookup' where you can control the base with memory cost to achieve O(log base 2^b) lookups. A b=3 is a resonable value for memory usage.

I should have mentioned, it is currently limited to one core, due to python. I will make it multicore probably before 1.0. It will be relatively easy to do with the block based design of morphis and the multiprocessing pool api of python. I already use the multiprocessing to great effect in the proof of work and prefix generation.

Also, this is written in a scripting language, Python. Also it is first draft and unoptimized.

If the 115 requests is enough of a problem, which I don't see it being because that is per node, not of the whole network. If that is a problem and can't be improved enough with python, the idea was originally to port it to Rust. Rust wasn't even 1.0 when I started coding, never mind their asyncio io library didn't exist until a couple months ago. Come the Rust port using their newly released asyncio library which performs nearly as well as the libev C well known one, we will be talking the kind of performance you are talking, although 10k requests per second just isn't needed on one node. It is certainly doable though if given the time! Remember, a distributed app doesn't run on one node, and thus need all 10k requests per second on one node.