A question that frequently comes up: when will iroh support webrtc, or BLE, or LoRa, or ...
Iroh as of now supports only IPv4, IPv6 and relay transports out of the box. There is such a large variety of potentially interesting transports out there that we can't support all of them without turning the codebase into an unmaintainable maze of feature flags.
But we have added the ability to implement custom transports. That way your transport implementation can live in a completely separate crate.
Existing experimental custom transports include Tor, Nym and BLE. https://github.com/mcginty/iroh-ble-transport
Here is how custom transports work under the hood: https://www.iroh.computer/blog/iroh-0-97-0-custom-transports...
I'm trying to understand it's limitations, if I used this to build a p2p client / server setup or even two peer machines, what else do I need to setup to be able to have connections between the two applications?
For example, could I create an application that runs on my phone and another that runs on my laptop and finally get a direct secured working connection between the two of them? Or is this solving a different problem? =)
-[0]: p2p chat, in rust, from scratch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogN_mBkWu7o
Here is a video of frando from our team demoing media over QUIC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3qqyu1mmGQ
If you use the default setup you are still depending on a tiny bit of cloud infrastructure such as our public relays to faciliate the hole punching. However, we also have optional local discovery using e.g. mDNS.
> Tor
you are using a Tor daemon in it. tor has a rust implementation and when used with rust has stream objects etc.
an example of how it's used can be found in https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/oniux
Arguably directly embedding the rust tor implementation would be more useful for the typical iroh user that wants an embeddable library. I just did not get to it yet.
But thanks for the link.
Last year, I was trying to choose between the two and went with that I know... but it feels like there's real momentum on Iroh's side.
How current is the PyPI package? https://pypi.org/project/iroh/
So you might get a lot of traffic. You can configure rate limiting, as we do on our public relays.
The traffic is fully encrypted and can not be decrypted by the relay. The only information the relay has is what is necessary for it to function - the endpoint id and ip addresses of the endpoints that are connected to it at any given time, as well as endpoint pairings.
You relay encrypted traffic with no egress to the open internet. So if you want to compare it with Tor, it would be like a tor guard/middle relay, not an exit node.
Nice. I already do rate limiting, traffic balancing using sch cake. This looks like an interesting project. I could envision open source NVR's implementing this. I also like the name of the project.
Strategy patterns and code-centralised feature management ftw :)
Only the owner of the corresponding private key can initiate a connection from their public key, or receive a connection attempt to their public key.
Let's say you have alice and bob talking via a relay. Even if you have the private key of alice, you can impersonate alice to bob, but not vice versa. So you can't initiate a connection between the two.
To really intercept data you would need the private keys of both participants.
I am not aware of a LoRa custom transport yet, but that is not unexpected given that the custom transport API is relatively new, and our main focus has been on getting iroh 1.0 out of the door.
There is already IPv6 and quic, you need vendor and major software to have any traction in that field.
Here is a concrete problem we solve. You have one device in your home WLAN behind a NAT. Your other device is in a 4g network, or behind another NAT at work.
In most cases we can give you a direct connection between the two devices very quickly via hole punching, so you get the highest possible bandwidth and the lowest possible latency.
This was not a solved problem until now.
p2p apps need direct connections.
> there is one giant "network" of all your nodes
From what I understand they're saying, the point is that you get easy connections to things that aren't "your" nodes, sort of like allowing me to connect one of my tailscale nodes ad-hoc to one of your tailscale nodes, when our accounts are not related in any way prior to us doing that, and without me having to allow your node onto my network or you allow one of mine onto your network and have to deal with the specialized ACLs for that, since it's just a direct connection between two nodes.
The similarities are in an application lib to connect, and that tail net IPs correspond to device keys like in Iroh. The service using the Go library has its own Tailscale identity.
Here this is a decentralized network with a lot of existing public relays. But in principle a VPN can solve a lot of the same problems. It's just that commercial VPNs are not decentralized, and doing your own wireguard setup is a pain.
This allows you to provide information to an arbitrary person (a friend/coworker/etc) to let them access the thing without them having to jump through all the extra hoops of joining your tailnet/them joining yours/adding a VPN/etc.
There are policies defining who can talk to what; they are deployed from a GitHub repository with defined rules on who can modify them and who has to review them; there are zero scenarios where I want an alternative way of granting access to any device or service under our control.
If I wanted to share something internal with a friend I would use ngrok or any of the million alternatives.
Anyway, this is exactly why my top-level comment says that this project needs a "versus" page in the docs.
So libp2p builds many things on top of the underlying transport where we use QUIC directly and use existing mechanisms such as TLS ALPNs for protocol negotiation.
We also use the stream multiplexing that is built into QUIC instead of putting a stream multiplexer on top of QUIC.
You can think about it like this: libp2p abstracts transports as streams, and then puts many required features on top (protocol negotiation, stream multiplexing)
Iroh uses QUIC and abstracts transports below QUIC. We can work with any unreliable datagram transport that has (or can be hacked to have) a minimum MTU of 1200 bytes (needed to be QUIC compliant).
Iroh is still awesome.
You’ve asserted “THIS is not a solved problem,” which suggests everyone is clear on what THIS means. I think that is not a good assumption.
Lack of a true session layer in TCP/IP is why vmotion is normally only possible in a single broadcast domain because in this situation you only really use mac addresses for addressing and can thus use the IP as a stable identifier when the MAC address changes after a vmotion. And the switch mac address table handles the mapping.
And if you have another suitable system, you can also plug it in. E.g. you might want to use another DHT that allows mapping from a key to some address data.
> But to finance the development of it, we offer additional services to make it easier to deploy and run it, especially for larger or more specialized use caes.
Interesting (and somewhat proven) idea to finance it, smart :)
Did you guys started doing this already on a case-by-case basis and have some experience of it already, and if so what are the common things you typically help out with exactly? I'm just curious what sort of things a company who'd use a protocol like that might need help with, that they wouldn't have experience with in-house, since they're going down a P2P road already (assuming that, maybe maybe need help with greenfield projects)?
If you use their offering, you probably get some kind of web interface for metrics that isn't open-source.
https://docs.iroh.computer/concepts/relays https://www.iroh.computer/services/hosting
"we want to be infrastructure for people, and a business towards professionals."
stuck between "we need cash to operate" and "we want to be a public good infrastructural system." , with the negative parts of a for-profit whisked away with "Well it's open source."
it's a business concept i'm okayish with as long as the "Well it's open source." caveat doesn't come with a total bespoke and unusable code base to figure out.
Our code is as good as we can make it, and everything is modular and well documented. For example our QUIC implementation noq which underlies every iroh connection can also be used as a standalone QUIC impl that implements QUIC multipath.
https://docs.rs/noq/latest/noq/
If we wanted to have "total bespoke and unusable code" we would have inlined all of this into the iroh repo to make it unusable.
Tailscale is a great service that happens to be open source, but Iroh is clearly structured as a library that you can build into whatever you want.
If you want to run an ISP or AS, believe me it will cost you a decent chunk of money.
1. How does Iroh handle key rotation / leakage? Could you build some kind of hot/cold system on top of it, where you'd have a cold "identity key" in airgapped, secure storage, used only to issue certificates for your hot "traffic acceptance" key?
2. Is there any kind of peer discovery / DHT, either built-in directly or through some semi-official higher-level protocol, like DNS for IP?
3. What about human-friendly peer names? Those are almost required for end-user friendly applications. Most solutions of that problem either assume that every single user is willing to dedicate their life to configuring DNS, rely on a trusted third party, or delegate the responsibility to a blockchain.
4. What are the channel reliability properties, and are they configurable? Can you decide how to handle out-of-order or lost packets, or does the protocol enforce a decision? If you're willing to tolerate loss, duplication and reordering, can you avoid head-of-line blocking?
5. Is peer anonymity a goal?
6. What about two mostly-offline peers who wish to communicate (think smartphone apps that can't be connected 24/7 due to battery concerns)?
Overall, cool project.
This isn't Tailscale because it does secure P2P connections between any pair of devices, whether or not they have Tailscale. This enables real end-user P2P for, e.g., local-first apps with no server infrastructure except relays for resilience. And even if you lose the relay servers, things keep on working the same for any hosts that don't need them.
Seems like it'll be a hard sell since steam is already so dominant and enterprise is dominated by tailscale... I see the proposal for being able to work with many different networks from different companies at the same time, but it's a pretty rare usecase and nothing some iptables can't solve.
I can see the argument for chat in heavily censored regions of the world, but not sure if there's any advantages that iroh can offer over other solutions.
Market fit will be hard to find, but best of luck.
Here there seems to be no mention of ddos mitigation or shorter routes due to infrastructure. Yes you need a key to connect but your iroh relay server can still be attacked. I suppose you could roll your own distributed anycast system for this.
I love Tailscale, it's deployed on all my devices. But I might check this out for the transports part in particular.
IIUC you just send someone 'here is the connection information' and it just works automatically.
I love MagicDNS - A long time ago I wrote a stupid Python script to have it continually generate MagicDNS names until one of them contained a word I was looking for.
Tailscale is great for bringing devices/apps into a secure network when I cannot modify them in any way. If I have full access to the source code for everything, the story changes completely.
I think this tech (modern p2p) represents what agent-to-agent (a2a) should be built on.
Every agent should be reachable to each other without hosting itself as an http server.
related prototypes
You need urgently a "versus" page that talks about tailscale/netbird/netmaker/zerotier/twingate/openziti
Looking at the use cases, right now I don't see anything that cannot be done with Tailscale...
From what I see, relay servers are doing a job that is equivalent to Stun + Turn + SignalingServer in WebRTC.
This is great for simplicity, but having Stun Turn and Signaling live in the same server would make it harder to secure. For example, since in webrtc signaling is up to the user, it is most common to have signaling implemented as a web server, this allows you to have it behind cloudflare with the signaling server ip never exposed to the internet. If you are not interested in supporting turn, there is plenty of public Stun servers that can be used and Stun itself is a really cheap server to run.
For iroh, it seems if I wanted to self host relay servers I'd be forced to expose their IP to the web which would make them really expensive to run if one wanted to make them DDoS proof.
If you look at an iroh connection using wireshark, it is just a QUIC connection. You can use all the existing tools, and a lot of things you learn when using iroh transfers to traditional QUIC connections and vice versa.
Most iroh contributors come out of the p2p world, and you could say that we had a bit of abstraction fatigue after working on regular P2P networks for some years.
We have also so far resisted the temptation to write a DHT, opting instead to use the biggest existing DHT, bittorrent mainline, for our p2p address lookup needs. Many traditional P2P networks come with their own implementation of a DHT for discovery.
Note that there are some "regular p2p networks" that use iroh under the hood, e.g. holochain https://blog.holochain.org/dev-pulse-154-holochain-0-6-1-is-... as well as various p2p chat apps.
https://blog.holochain.org/dev-pulse-154-holochain-0-6-1-is-...
Bravo, because they always get it wrong.
DHTs used for decentralized DNS-like naming purposes have truly unique scaling requirements; you have to use a connectionless protocol (like bittorrent does) but everybody seems to be fixated on connection-oriented protocols like TCP, HTTP, and QUIC. The latter just don't work for this extreme use case.
No other use case on the entire internet requires such an extremely large out-degree for end-user nodes in the node connection graph. Allocating connection-state, even a very small amount, opens up the least-powerful nodes to easy DoS attacks. And from there it's easy for a motivated attacker to push the network away from decentralization and force it in to a highly-centralized state.
Mainline is incredibly frugal in terms of resource use, but we want it disabled by default so mobile apps don't look like bittorrent clients and get flagged by the OS.
When we do a p2p address lookup, every mainline server node could possibly be responding. Any bep_0044 record gets stored on 20 random mainline server nodes.
So a bittorrent client that participates in the DHT as a server and is long running enough to be included into the DHT routing tables will respond, yes.
Iroh is kinda just a connection protocol. If you get given a public key for another computer, you can establish a connection. Like you would an IP address. The magic is in being able to establish that connection regardless of where either device is, and keeping that connection alive through changing network conditions.
Iroh addresses are (currently Ed25519) keys. They are not scarce, so you can create them on demand and keep them as you move from one network to another.
If IPv6 was everywhere I guess the hole punching feature of iroh would become less important, but the dial by key feature would remain just as important.
Regarding security, one thing to be aware of is that iroh connections are just standard QUIC connections secured using standard TLS with the (also standard) raw public keys in TLS extension.
We don't roll our own crypto. What little non-standard crypto we had previously was removed on the path to iroh 1.0.
So iroh connections are just as secure as the QUIC/TLS connections your browser makes to your banking app. Whenever there are some new concerns like for example post quantum security, we can benefit from industry standards.
E.g. we do already support optional post quantum key exchange to secure connections.
Congrats iroh team!
The fundamental component of Iroh is p2p routing by key, and the main utility provided by Zenoh is message semantics. The two seem complementary.
However, I'm confused on the open source vs. commercial offerings. How do they differ? How do they work together?
For example: dns control, tls certification bans (just this month both let’s encrypt and globalsign started revoking Russian certificates), once google starts really complaining about https it gets ugly.
Russia aside, anyone else is closely watching (europe, brics, what have you)
E.g. you could write an excellent encrypted chat app using iroh, the Tor or Nym custom transport, and BLE or direct wifi for local connections.
You have to be careful though to make sure you configure the transports correctly in order not to expose data you don't want exposed. Iroh can be used in highly restricted environments, but the defaults favour performance over complete metadata privacy.
Besides, as a lot of people have mentioned already, if you want a dedicated server there are a lot of existing options.
We did write a few small dedicated applications to show off iroh, sendme https://www.iroh.computer/sendme and dumbpipe https://www.dumbpipe.dev/ .
How does it support semi-connected devices, intermittent connection failures, etc?
Iroh is built for environments where connectivity is unreliable or intermittent, so it can be a good fit for use cases involving connection failures, offline periods, or semi-connected devices.
We provide a range of peer-to-peer protocols that don't require a central server, including key-value stores, blob transfer, collaborative documents, and streaming audio/video. These protocols are designed to synchronize devices back to a consistent state, even after long disconnections or network interruptions.
If you'd like to explore whether iroh could work for your use case, we're happy to chat. Feel free to email us at support@iroh.computer, and we can set up a call.
Up to now our users are mostly teams that have a rust or C/C++ core, such as https://delta.chat/ . But now that we have bindings teams who use other languages should be able to use iroh.
So you can write e.g. an android and ios app that uses iroh direct connections under the hood, and the app user does not have to know or care about this at all.
About tailscale: It's similar, but iroh is not a VPN, so it doesn't add a TUN interface. Instead, you'd build iroh directly into your application. Using iroh you can build a VPN, and there are projects that do so (iroh-lan/iroh-vpn are some hobbyist projects). The upside of building it into your application is that it doesn't need special permissions and is easy to ship to the user.
Is there an android SDK available?
A great thing about iroh is that due to it being just QUIC, when you learn about iroh you also learn about details of QUIC that are useful and transferrable for traditional p2p QUIC connections.
Also, they are very principled when it comes to peer to peer purity, whereas iroh is a bit more pragmatic. We use dedicated relays to faciliate hole punching, whereas holepunch tries to use other peers as a temporary relay for hole punching messages.
Another difference is that holepunch have their own DHT, where we have a less decentralised address lookup service by default and use the mainline DHT as a fully p2p alternative.
So TLDR if you are doing js in the browser, holepunch.to might be a good fit. If you work on native mobile apps or embedded devices, iroh will be better since it is pretty frugal. If you work with node.js, both will work. Just evaluate them both and use what works better for you.
E.g. we support tiny embedded devices such as esp32. https://www.iroh.computer/blog/iroh-on-esp32
IP isn't going anywhere any time soon, but we add two capabilities on top. The ability to dial an endpoint by key, and the ability to get direct connections whenever possible.
That being said, if some other technology becomes popular that actually replaces the IP address paradigm, iroh is well positioned to make use of it. From the point of view of an iroh application developer nothing would change. You still dial by key, and iroh will just make sure under the hood to get you the best possible connection, IP or otherwise.
I think that with Kotlin support, the creation of some android/multi-platform gui apps can be made easier if they want to use Iroh.
That being said, if IP ever gets replaced, your iroh based app will continue to work pretty much unchanged. Iroh will just get you the best possible connection (IP or whatever) under the hood.
So in theory a go implementation is possible using a go QUIC implementation that supports the multipath extension.
Our focus is the rust implementation, since it is very easy to use from compiled languages such as rust, C and C++ and to embed into languages such as js and python.
But there are some other projects that attempt to provide a native go implementation: https://github.com/tmc/go-iroh
Edit: since iroh is just a library, it is also possible to link iroh into a go program. Linking a go program from other native languages is a bit of a pain, but linking a C or rust library into a go program is relatively straightforward and high performance.
Our QUIC implementation noq is a standards compliant QUIC implementation that in addition to RFC9000 also implements the QUIC multipath draft RFC.
We try very hard not to invent new things unless absolutely necessary. In a few places we had to implement draft RFCs, QUIC multipath and QUIC NAT traversal. And there are some corners where we had to add our own extensions. But we try very hard to keep this to an absolute minimum.
Also you can join our discord and there's #showcase https://iroh.computer/discord
So basically they want to find out who is who. In other words: sniffing.
It's interesting how the discussion is currently shifting to meta-explain why sniffing is necessary. I noticed this at universities in the last years; people now either have a tablet or a smartphone or a yubico key. This will be extended in the future, there is no doubt about that. And they are selling it with fancy words, just as Iroh showed.
But as someone who's not a network specialist, I fail to see how this is not a glorified P2P DNS.
Maybe this example helps:
https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh#rust-library
const ALPN: &[u8] = b"iroh-example/echo/0";
let endpoint = Endpoint::bind().await?;
// Open a connection to the accepting endpoint
let conn = endpoint.connect(addr, ALPN).await?;
// Open a bidirectional QUIC stream
let (mut send, mut recv) = conn.open_bi().await?;
// Send some data to be echoed
send.write_all(b"Hello, world!").await?;
send.finish()?;
// Receive the echo
let response = recv.read_to_end(1000).await?;
assert_eq!(&response, b"Hello, world!");
// As the side receiving the last application data - say goodbye
conn.close(0u32.into(), b"bye!");
// Close the endpoint and all its connections
endpoint.close().await;IP addresses break, dial keys instead
Modular networking stack for direct, peer-to-peer connections between devices
iroh establishes direct connections whenever possible, falling back to relay servers if necessary. Get fast, efficient, reliable connections that are authenticated and encrypted end-to-end using QUIC.
> IP addresses can break, without warning, and it's outside of your device's control.
We have DNS?
> Keys, however, are created & controlled by you. They stay the same as your device moves, and are yours to throw away, or not.
So are domain names? This page does not do a good job of helping me find what it is that I'm missing.
Our default enabled address lookup service is using DNS in a creative way, but we also have a service that is fully peer to peer and is using the mainline DHT, specifically the bep_0044 extension that allows you to store a tiny bit of arbitrary data for an Ed keypair that you control.
https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0044.html
Some custom transports such as TOR hidden services have a discovery system built in. In these cases we can just use the existing discovery system.
See for example https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-tor-transport
None of them require an API key.