We build the new authenticated p2p-based internet

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. Our vision is to provide a secure and confidentiality preserving communication means to billions of people: individuals, families and organisations of whatever format- a new internet fitted with a set of services running on local infrastructure via copper, wifi, bluetooth, etc that meets our high standard.

News

We have presented EDN to the people of Wau Holland Foundation recently. Thank you for your invitation!:)

Here is our project diary.

Note: .onion addresses can be accessed via Tor Browser Bundle

Status Quo

The Internet Is Broken

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A Single Point Of Failure (SPOF) in a Centralized Communication Infrastructure faciliates censorship, mass spying and intrusion

Today's communication infrastructure is predominantly centralized. That starts with all digital communication of one country going through one or just a few telecommunication providers' server. On these metadata are accumulating - the base to derive people's social graphs, movement patterns and even psychological profiles. The contents of their calls are computable since they are not end-to-end-encrypted. Peoples' wish to reach as many people possible for communication has led to a focus on using certain services that had good usability qualities - known as the Network Effect. This has let grow services like Facebook, Twitter or Youtube significantly and also to big data congregations at relatively few points. Those data congregations awaken greediness, since it has among other market value. These central points of data flow facilitate:

Censorship: e.g. Youtube blocks music videos for german users or countries interfering with the DNS to prevent people from consuming unwanted contents;
Passive Mass Spying;
Active Intrusion on a global scale;

Consequently, the internet can be seen as an accumulation of Single Points Of Failures (SPOF). To make things worse DNS and BGP routing - the basic internet structures (!) - are vulnerable to a number of attacks which open ways to undermine even (!) overlaying structures such as Tor, deanomizing its users and hidden services by traffic correlation. This shows that patches on top of this can most likely only ease the shortcommings of the current internet. It is broken by design and therefore a bad basis for integer and confidental communication. Regarding this it is the privacy projects' responsibility to be clear about the privacy and security they can provide under certain circumstances and not lull endangered groups such as journalists into a (false) sense of security here, which actually can jeopardize them!

We want to help at this point and evaluate a significant number of Privacy Software Projects' privacy and security qualities by documentation and analysis and testing based evaluation.

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.

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Threat Model

Privacy Software Projects

We found over 80 Free Software Privacy Projects and this is nowhere near complete regarding that. All compete for contributors, funding, users, bandwith while implementing redundant, often mediocre solutions which is no wonder since most of them lack ressources to do it all good. This leads to bad code documentation which consequently impedes potential help by new developers or researchers finding vulnerabilities and providing more secure solutions. And this maybe of course a crucial reason why there is nearly no collaboration between the projects although (!) they share the same goals. Having the projects share code or even collaborate to reach more than a single project could do, would help saving ressources and enbetter the chances to focus on usability and hard problems such as providing good privacy and security to their users. Making its usage a comforting experience on the other hand is a crucial point to let a project fly and gain the critical user mass for the Network Effect which on the other hand is crucial for achieving a good amount of anonymity.

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Share Code

This is what we aim at by conducting the Software Documentation Marathon. This will eventually lead to easy usable more secure and privacy preserving communication tools. Since the internet is broken, we want to go even further. The new internet stacks among these projects call for having services on top of them running and evaluated. This is what we aim at in the Prototyping and Testing phase.

Goal

City Wide Communication via local infrastructure

Regarding the design flaws of the current internet, we believe that a complete new internet providing confidentiality, integrity of communication and censorship-resistance natively is indispensable. We aim to build it and envision the new stack to be

privacy tuned for and delivered with several services
convenient and attractive to use
able to run on local individual infrastructure

The new internet uses the existing infrastructure to form a difficult-to-monitor cellphone/router/computer network. Its communication runs, 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

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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

Beneficiaries of the new internet

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.

Approach

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 of new internet stacks and services on top of them. This will include generic testing on a virtual and real testbed.