3 ms·

Most of this is feasible today using Opportunistic IPSec. What's missing is the high-level (Redis, SQLite, MongoDB, etc) application interfaces you're hinting a

by wahern 5y ago

Most of this is feasible today using Opportunistic IPSec. What's missing is the high-level (Redis, SQLite, MongoDB, etc) application interfaces you're hinting at. Opportunistic IPSec operates at the IP layer, below all of that. There are BSD socket API controls for IPSec, but Opportunistic IPSec was mostly intended to be passive except for an application (optionally) requesting or verifying that a data stream is protected. Unfortunately, Opportunistic IPSec failed miserably at widespread adoption. The same fate is almost certainly waiting for any similar all-encompassing approach. Wireguard doesn't really help as the vast majority of the complexity and pain exists above the level of the basic stream encryption. (Supporting schemes like Opportunistic IPSec is one reason why IPSec permits direct IP-to-IP encryption without tunneling or layering. One of Wireguard's simplifying assumptions was that it would be used to create VPNs and tunnels; TLS had won the day as a solution for direct, end-to-end encryption.)

VikingCoder 5y ago
Thanks for your comment. I kind of feel like you and I are talking past each other a bit. (And the fact that I don't know any of the technical terminology doesn't help me at all, here.) I want this Host program she's talking about to be trivial to install for some random end user. And then that user can pick my App from some App Store interface, similar to the Demo in sandstorm.io, and then add Contacts, and then give my App permission to talk to some of their Contacts. So, the Host program is super sandboxed, and capability-model based... And I'm also asking for the Contact Management DNS Connectivity system, which I imagine feels roughly like setting up a public/private key pair with PGP, and then feels roughly like setting up a Dynamic DNS. I don't actually care about specific ports, and how they're actually encrypted, etc. It could connect over WebRTC for all I care. Yes, TLS might work. I hear NAT traversal is a problem to connect peer-to-peer, and I barely know what I'm talking about. I want the Host / DNS / some minimal central servers to take care of that for me. I feel like the DB interfaces are slightly higher level than the stream level access she was talking about, and would make it slightly easier to do some of the cool stuff I envision. But I feel like providing DB Capabilities is a pretty low bar - it should be relatively easy to do, right?

by wahern 5y ago

VikingCoder 5y ago

Thanks for your comment. I kind of feel like you and I are talking past each other a bit. (And the fact that I don't know any of the technical terminology doesn't help me at all, here.) I want this Host program she's talking about to be trivial to install for some random end user. And then that user can pick my App from some App Store interface, similar to the Demo in sandstorm.io, and then add Contacts, and then give my App permission to talk to some of their Contacts. So, the Host program is super sandboxed, and capability-model based... And I'm also asking for the Contact Management DNS Connectivity system, which I imagine feels roughly like setting up a public/private key pair with PGP, and then feels roughly like setting up a Dynamic DNS. I don't actually care about specific ports, and how they're actually encrypted, etc. It could connect over WebRTC for all I care. Yes, TLS might work. I hear NAT traversal is a problem to connect peer-to-peer, and I barely know what I'm talking about. I want the Host / DNS / some minimal central servers to take care of that for me. I feel like the DB interfaces are slightly higher level than the stream level access she was talking about, and would make it slightly easier to do some of the cool stuff I envision. But I feel like providing DB Capabilities is a pretty low bar - it should be relatively easy to do, right?