Hacker News Reader

Comment by danoctavian | Hacker News Reader

proof of concept code for making secure connections between 2 peers by knowing only each other's public keys. (no servers or IP knowledge involved, featuring NAT penetration).

uses the bittorrent DHT. code is hacky, written for fun.

As opposed to Bleep and Tox, it works right now with no extra protocol or network.

View on HN

>no servers or IP knowledge involved

when you say this you're not talking about bittorrent-dht's bootstrap nodes right[1]?

[1]https://github.com/feross/bittorrent-dht/blob/497d1e08f5bc06...

That's a good point. You still need those. I don't believe there's any way around it whenever you're using a decentralized network like the DHT, you need to somehow "get into" the network, so you need to know someone from it.

Sure, but there's numerous ways to get DHT peers. Sure there's those 3 bootstrap peers, but there's also trackers that give you peers, peer exchanges, and torrents that point to trackers. Running pretty much any torrent client that has ever been on a torrent before is likely to find you additional DHT peers even if all the bootstrap hosts are down.

The idea of piggybacking on bittorrent DHT network is great :)

Just out of interest, do you know of any other systems that do that?

Well BitTorrent's own project Bleep uses the Bittorrent network as well.

Their protocol is more complex however. Their goals are to hide who is talking who, from entities that might just be scraping the DHT. With bluntly, you can tell who is talking to who, by looking at what peers advertised on the rendezvous node.

Because they have control over the bittorrent protocol, they can go ahead and make changes to it that make NAT penetration easier (a 3rd party peer with a public address acts as a facilitator for putting 2 peers behind NAT in contact) or they can allow for arbitrary data to be stored in the DHT.

Retroshare uses Bittorrent DHT http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

Retroshare is fantastic!

I do the same in rakoshare (https://github.com/rakoo/rakoshare). Humans exchange a well-known id, from which a rendez-vous id is derived. This rendez-vous id is used for all interested peers to meet and exchange ips and ports.

After that, it's the job of every one to try to connect to the other side. Sadly, if there's a NAT on each side, it's not enough...

retroshare uses DHT

It also uses PGP keys to facilitate encryption, authenticity, and a comprehensive web of trust

Reply on news.ycombinator.com