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Yggdrasil Network

(yggdrasil-network.github.io)
324 points BSDobelix | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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foundry27 ◴[] No.42156968[source]
The first thing I tried to find on their website and their GitHub was a protocol specification, to be able to implement it independently from the reference implementation. I thought this would be straightforward since it’s advertised as a scheme/protocol, but such a spec isn’t referenced anywhere! Digging on my own I eventually found [1] on a side-branch of one of their other GitHub projects.

Kudos to the author: I think it actually covers a lot of what you’d need to know: crypto identities, message formats, wire protocols, peering and stream semantics, spanning tree updates and root selection, the DHT, forwarding logic, sessions, etc. A couple things are TODOs like how to verify and sign root updates, and there’s some ambiguity in the tiebreaker algorithm for next-hop selection.

It seems to be very tightly coupled to TCP as the transport layer though, since all packets need to be delivered reliably and in the order they were sent, and need to be capable of being fragmented into smaller packets for varying MTU sizes.

[1] https://github.com/yggdrasil-network/yggdrasil-specs/blob/ys...

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colordrops ◴[] No.42157427[source]
Is coupling with TCP a problem? Does it do anything that goes against their goal of full decentralization?
replies(1): >>42157454 #
macawfish ◴[] No.42157454[source]
Makes it hard to do hole punching I think? At any rate, direct connections currently cannot be established between multi-hop peers, traffic gets routed through peers instead. I think this has something to do with the TCP choice.
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1. Karrot_Kream ◴[] No.42158464[source]
I think this is a pragmatic choice. NAT Hole Punching can be hit or miss no matter the method but doing peer routing guarantees even a client that can only initiate outbound connections can route packets. It can be slow though.

I also know there's support for other transports like QUIC but TCP is the main default.