EDN
- We build the new internet - be with us!
Welcome
This is the official wiki of the research and software project EDN (Echt Dezentrales Netz - real decentralized network). We are stakeholders of GNU consensus.
We cherish privacy as an important aspect of a liberal society. Our vision is to create a space to unfold and guard basic civil rights such as informational self determination, freedom of assembly, secrecy of correspondence and free speech. Our final goal is a new wifi mesh-networking capable internet protocol stack that includes a set of services.
News
We aim to transfer our previous collected information (1, 2) of projects to the LibrePlanet semantic wiki. So when the stone is set for the semantic wiki, help is welcome to do so.
Here is our project diary.
- Note
- .onion addresses can be accessed via Tor Browser Bundle
Background Short
Today's communication infrastructure is predominantly centralized.
However, this makes surveillance and manipulation of arbitrary digital communications easier.
These means can be abused - and were abused - not only by dictatorships but also by democratic countries and international companies.
- There are indeed solutions like Tor or PGP which can partially patch the shortcomings of the infrastructure, but each user has to take care of that for herself. Anonymization and encryption are not in the standard configuration.
A penal action against these secret processes is nearly impossible, starting with the problem that they are not even detected by the affected parties. This status quo endangers our democracy. However, it can be countered in different ways. The following is a technical approach:
- To re-purpose and to extend existing digital communications infrastructure to make surveillance more cumbersome, especially through decentralization.
Threat model
We presume a global active attacker that does automated intrusion such as traffic shaping. We draw the line before targeted operations.
We share our threat model with Secushare.
Background Long
CC-SA by Leland Francisco
When it comes to the topic of mass spying and "cyber" attacks, most of us will readily agree, that it's performed on large scale by an ecosystem of well equipped adversaries (Snowden revelations, Botnets). Furthermore that this is a threat to a list of basic civil rights which back up our democracies. Where this agreement usually ends, however is the question of how to deal with it adequately.
Many people assume that the wild installation of a bunch of single purpose privacy tools is sufficient to protect their privacy and that cryptoparties teaching the usage of GPG, Tor or decentralized Social Networking is the solution for our problem. By focusing on single purpose solutions and the resulting need for cryptoparties, people overlook a significant number of disadvantages: First, their users are unaware of the varying privacy assertions made by these solutions. Second, these tools compete for computing and channel resources. Third, teaching users the various individual tools is very ineffective and inconvenient. This in turn, average users stick to more insecure but familiar and prevalent solutions although they know about its impact on their privacy. Fourth, the long list of existing privacy projects compete for contributors, funding and users while implementing redundant, sometimes mediocre solutions. Finally, even the current internet stack most projects utilize is known to be vulnerable to a list of attacks based on the stacks dependence on central authorities. This is true for BGP routing, DNS, and all client-server applications. Consequently, the internet stack can be seen as an accumulation of many single points of failures (SPOF) facilitating censorship, passive spying, and active intrusion on a global scale.
Yet a sober analysis of the matter reveals that the old internet stack and wild installations are a bad basis for privacy efforts. Hence, we believe that a complete new internet stack providing high confidentiality, integrity of communication and censorship-resistance natively is indispensable. In particular, we envision the new stack to be free software, decentralized, distributed, end-to-end encrypted, meta-data protected, easy to use, efficient, lightweight mesh-networking capable and well-documented. Accordingly, our goal is to evaluate the privacy and security qualities of 72 projects -- including privacy aware internet stacks and find out whether and how we could combine the resources and implementations of the best projects to achieve what none of them could do alone: A new privacy aware internet stack as a powerful means to back up civil rights to billions of people, which is
- privacy tuned for and delivered with several services
- convenient and attractive to use
- able to run on local individual infrastructure
Goal
Our goal is to use the existing resources to form a difficult-to-monitor cellphone/router/computer network by building bridges between proven projects. There are plenty of software solutions with the goal of protecting the privacy of its users. Preexisting structures are to be evaluated and combined into such a network. The communication should run, first and foremost, on top of a combination of WiFi, copper and fibre optics, but we also consider Bluetooth, Ultra Wideband (UWB), red light, ukw and satellite uplinks - shortly all allowed frequencies and ways.
I. Privacy and Security Criteria
Find all criteria here.
Services
| public | personal/private | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Text | Chat of local (neighboring) nodes | To a single person: Chat, Email or SMS | To multiple people: Chat or mailing list |
| Audio/Telephony/Video | Call among locally restricted nodes | normal call | conference call |
| Other formats | ? | ? | ? |
- crypto currency/ pay system
- Searching in local and other reachable networks including the Internet
- file-sharing
- blogging
- Private communication with embedded devices
Privacy Projects
Find our list of promising projects here.
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Approach
CCO by HebiFot
We aim to unite the different forces and resources that aim for more privacy and security such as the older and upcoming software projects, scientists, activists and others to achieve what none of them could do alone:
Provide a free confidential and integer communication means to a significant part of the world-population to backup civil rights and even functions on local individual infrastructure- a new internet- be with us!
We built bridges by creating a better documentation for over 70 privacy projects during our Software Documentation Marathon™ with them having only little effort to get it. Better documentation will lead to better maintainability of code, deployability and usability. It will include a first analysis of the project's security and privacy qualities and a lot more. We will expose intersections for projects to interoperate and make recommendations for good fits which will raise collaborations between projects and make them achieve what they could not do alone without big effort.
After the Software Documentation Marathon™ we preselect a combination of modules that fit best to meet our criteria and do a Prototypical Realisation. This will include generic testing on a virtual and real testbed.
Software Documentation Marathon
Find this chapter here.
Prototyping and Testing
Find this chapter here.
Who benefits from the new internet?
Everyone!
In long term Everyone will benefit from the new internet stack. Since it is censorship resistant and provides confidentiality and integrity preserving services, it results in:
- Average citizens regaining parts of their privacy, informational self determination, freedom of assembly, secrecy of correspondence and free speech- basic civil rights that ensure and back up our democracies.
- Safer government institutions and companies from espionage and "cyber" attacks.
Use cases are for example online banking, government communication with citizens including tax returns, diplomatic, military and business communication and journalism.
Costs
Find our calculations here.
Contact
Be with us!
Write us in Bitmessage
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--Demos