EDN
- 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). Our vision is to provide a more 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 privacy tuned services running on local individual or public infrastructure and meets our 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
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' servers.
These accumulate data, including metadata, which is the basis to derive people's social graphs, movement patterns and even psychological profiles.
Further centres of data accumulation are services like Facebook, Twitter or Youtube.
They profited by peoples' wish to reach as many people as possible specifically their friends.
This has led them to focus on using certain services - known as the Network Effect - rather than privacy and security aspects.
This not only helped these services grow significantly, but also led
to huge data accumulations in few locations.
These have its own value for several groups and provoke criminal activity to access and misuse it.
To make things worse DNS (Domain Name System) and BGP routing (Border Gateway Protocol) - basic internet protocols - are vulnerable to a number of attacks, which open ways to undermine even overlaying structures, such as Tor, deanonymizing its users and hidden services by traffic correlation.
These conditions facilitate:
- Censorship: On plattforms and by countries;
- Passive Mass Spying;
- Active Intrusion on a global scale;
It is most likely that patches like overlay networks can only ease the shortcomings of the current internet but not fix it using this vulnerable basis for confidential communication. This may be less critical for high latency networks over the Internet or Sneakernets that do not use the internet at all. Alternative networks, however suffer from the following problems. Their network is unlikely to gain enough users, due to shortcomings in their accessibility and usability. Thus, it will not be attractive for most people wanting to communicating with their friends. Moreover, such a small user group might also jeopardize the users anonymity and privacy, as each user is deemed suspicions and errors in the network stack take longer to get fixed. Finally, this cast doubt on the whole idea of an alternative network. To break this cycle, we think that multiple well tuned secure solutions must be brought together focusing on accessibility and usability, to combine and increase their small user groups and kick start the required Network Effect.
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.
Privacy Software Projects
The privacy and security software landscape is highly fragmented. This has implications for their quality and therefore for their users' privacy and security. We found over 80 Free Software Privacy Projects and this is nowhere near complete regarding this survey. All compete for contributors, funding, users, bandwidth while implementing redundant, often mediocre solutions which is no wonder since most of them lack resources 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. Furthermore, this is one of the reasons why there is almost no collaboration between the projects although they share the same goals.
Goal
Regarding the design flaws of the current internet, we believe that a complete new internet providing confidentiality, integrity of communication and censorship-resistance is indispensable. We envision the new stack to be
- Privacy tuned for and delivered with several services
- Convenient and attractive to use, focusing on accessibility and usability
- Able to run on local individual or public infrastructure
- Free Software
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. Moreover, we consider Bluetooth, Ultra Wideband (UWB), red light, UKW and satellite uplinks - shortly all allowed frequencies and means of digital communication.
I. Privacy and Security Criteria
The new internet should meet the following criteria. The quality of security and privacy might vary between the different exposed services. (...).
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 | ? | ? | ? |
- Social-Networking: Messaging, (Video)-Telephony, File-sharing, Blogging
- Searching contents in local and other reachable networks
- Crypto Currency/ Pay System
Beneficiaries of the new internet
In the long run everyone will benefit from the new internet, since it is censorship resistant, 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 and business communication and journalism.
Approach
We aim to unite the different forces and resources for 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 more secure and confidentiality preserving communication means to a significant part of the world-population - a new internet fitted with a set of privacy tuned services. To get there we built bridges by creating a better documentation for over 70 privacy projects during our Software Documentation Marathon™. It will include a first analysis of the project's security and privacy qualities and recommendations for collaborations between interoperable projects.
On this basis we are able to proceed with a Prototypical Realization and its evaluation.
Software Documentation Marathon
We plan a Software Documentation Marathon™, where we document and analyze over 70 Privacy Software Projects. Key elements of our work will be to assemble detailed API descriptions of the projects and its modules and to identify and highlight Interoperability between projects for collaboration or sharing code. (...).
Prototyping and Testing
The Software Documentation Marathon™ delivers our working basis to preselect a combination of projects or modules that are interoperable and meet our standard.
In this phase our objective will be to create prototypes and test them in a generic manner on a virtual and a real testbed. (...).
Best Current Practice Recommendation
The following is an essence of a Best Current Practice Recommendation.
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Instant Messaging: Ricochet
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Filesharing: Tribler
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Asynchronous Messaging: Bitmessage
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We add this one for Browsing: Tor-Browser-Bundle
Costs
Find our calculations here.
Community and Crew
We are stakeholders of GNU consensus and allies of the #youbroketheinternet project. To our crew belong software architects, a student of Fine Arts, Privacy Project developers and Privacy and Security researchers.
Contact
Be with us!
Write us in Bitmessage:
BM-NBqqoMzajZNXQru2Kz4JXqq6RbsEmeuL
Email: demos et posteo dot de, GPG, Fingerprint:
9A0E 7D84 0D22 F15A 3FE3 4756 2DB7 1A63 B093 2843
Picture References
- CCO "Six pigs" by piotr siedlecki
- CC-BY-SA "Gingerbread Puppeteer" by theyogre, decolored by dmos
- CC-BY-SA "Paper Trails" by Leland Francisco
- CCO "Delaunay Triangulation" by Inductiveload
- CC-BY-SA by Picol, arranged images by dmos with filsharing image extracted from a batch by FSF
- CCO, "Bridge"
