7 ms·

Avatar: A browser OS with built-in privacy and anonymity

117 points by staltz 13y ago

keyo 13y ago
Looks promising
hmhrex 13y ago
Are there any other OS' similar?
- samweinberg 13y ago
  It reminds me of Joli OS http://www.jolicloud.com/jolios http://www.jolicloud.com/jolios
  - hmhrex 13y ago
    Almost forgot about Joli. Great little OS.
hotloo 13y ago
Looks interesting. Any action videos or demo available?
- uzero 13y ago
  Not yet but hopefully soon.
Karunamon 13y ago
This looks to be very similar to Freenet[1] - basically a specialized, distributed network that runs on top of the internet but has its own server/client infrastructure. Does Avatar serve pages over plain HTTP(S) like Freenet, or is there some other magic here? [1] https://freenetproject.org/‎ https://freenetproject.org/‎
- uzero 13y ago
  Everything is encrypted by default. Even Freenet and Avatar are similar at very high-level, there's many differences under the surface. I wrote more about how Avatar compares to X here: https://discussions.avatar.ai/topic/13/comparison-to-tor-freenet-retroshare-etc https://discussions.avatar.ai/topic/13/comparison-to-tor-fre...
  - hnisnotreddit 13y ago
    your comparison to Tor completely glosses over Hidden Services, which are less complimentary to Avatar.
uzero 13y ago
We are looking for security experts to double check/triple check/audit our protocol designs. So if you know your crypto and you are intimately familiar with Alice and Bob, please lend us a hand and take a look at the protocols. Our discussion forum has a special section for security and protocols where you can post your comments. Thank you!
- jhdkjqhkjqhwk 13y ago
  > that runs on modern web browsers. Never mind your protocols, I'm pretty sure nothing can go wrong here!
seanmcelroy 13y ago
I think this would be a much more interesting project if it was to put a great interface on top of the Freenet protocol. Encryption and anonymization on P2P is very hard, and building on Freenet as a basis for the plumbing would speed the time to a deliverable and build on existing technologies rather than reinvent the wheel.
4ad 13y ago
I wish people would not misuse the term "operating system" so much.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  I'm posting this comment from a Chromebook. I'm imagining this could (I haven't gotten through all the marketing yet) be something very similar, which very much is an operating system.
  - 4ad 13y ago
    No, it's a javascript app plus another app that runs outside the browser. It's similar to freenet.
- zhemao 13y ago
  From the diagram, it seems they intend to put something resembling a microkernel stack in the browser app, which is a rather odd architectural choice. What exactly do you gain by piecing together low-level components inside the very high-level runtime that is a web browser?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- haberman 13y ago
  I don't think "operating system" is a particularly technical or well-defined term. It can mean anything from "kernel" to "kernel, userspace libraries, UI, package management / update infrastructure, etc." Its meaning is only slightly different from "platform", which basically means "any API to which you can program applications."
  - dsl 13y ago
    "Operating system" is a pretty technical and well defined term, you just might not be old enough to know it. :) An operating system is the core that is responsible for operating the underlying hardware of a computing device, upon which everything else is built. If you aren't concerning yourself with device drivers and task scheduling, you aren't building an operating system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system
spaceheeder 13y ago
Can you link to your source code? Have you given any thought to using the GNU Naming System to smooth over some of the usability problems with public keys? Are you familiar with unhosted.org, and their use of Oasis.js to partially solve the problem of running untrusted js in the browser?
- staltz 13y ago
  We haven't released any source code yet because we first want to make sure our protocol designs are correct. Unhosted is a familiar project and we are currently evaluating multiple options to run unsecure code.
  - spaceheeder 13y ago
    Going on a slight tangent off of jude-'s question, will there be any social or economic incentive for making one's bridge persistent, or capable of holding more data? Or will this rely on volunteer participation, like tor/freenet/etc?
    - staltz 13y ago
      At first it's volunteer but we do realize that incentives are needed and we're working on different models. The long-term goal, which depends on WebRTC maturity, is to have no need for Bridges, because that code would be in the browser OS.
      - spaceheeder 13y ago
        If the storage _wasn't_ separate from the client, wouldn't access time performance top out around the same levels as, e.g., Freenet?
jude- 13y ago
I worry about storage performance. Why use a DHT? Could you get away with using cloud storage to host the signed and encrypted data? Also, are you worried about Sybil attacks on the DHT?
- spaceheeder 13y ago
  Based on my read through, I think the files themselves live in the bridges and the DHT is how they are found. So you could set up an Avatar bridge in the cloud and use that as your bridge (or put the bridge on your local device and tell _it_ to store/retrieve everything from a network folder).
  - jude- 13y ago
    So, performance will depend on where these bridges live, and how generously provisioned they are. Using the DHT for routing doesn't address this problem, though--requests for hot content will be routed to the same node, regardless of how well-positioned it is to serve requests. Also, what happens to the content when that node goes offline? I skimmed the R5N DHT whitepaper, and while it replicates keys, it's not clear that the bridges replicate chunks. Do the authors have a plan to address data loss? Do they have a plan for caching/replicating data to alleviate hot spots? Will their replication strategies on read/write objects include a well-defined consistency model?
    - spaceheeder 13y ago
      Their current line is that, with increased WebRTC adoption, bridges will somehow become unnecessary? I'm not convinced, and agree with you that there may be some problems here that will lead to poor performance (which is critical). According to someone (a developer?) further down this thread, they realize that incentives will be needed for things like this. It sounds sort of like the same problem that the bitcloud people are trying to solve, but to my knowledge nobody has any solid solutions. Why pay more for a blind CDN when 99.9% of your customers use infrastructure that only require you to use unsecured ones? That shouldn't be a rhetorical question--this is an important issue that needs to be addressed if we want to make the Internet a better, freer, and more secure place to communicate. We'll see if these guys come forward with something that sounds like it can work, I guess.
mQu 13y ago
Do I understand correctly that browsers obtain source code through bridge (local HTTP server?) from Avatar network or is it downloaded traditionally? EDIT (from here to end): to clarify - my question is to assess security of the 'runtime' - if it's downloaded from the server what is there to stop malicious party from compromising the server and sending modified verification code? Would it be downloaded through the bridge then (and only then) verification with block chain could be done on received updates (providing first d/l wasn't compromised). User browser would then access files exposed by the bridge. At least this is how I imagine it but the OP overview is light on details.
TacticalCoder 13y ago
It's interesting that they're using secp256k1 (as Bitcoin does) for performance reasons (regarding Bitcoin, Satoshi mentioned in early messages that he did choose EC because it would help keep the size of the blockchain not too big). I wonder if Bitcoin's use of EC is "giving a boost" to EC... Anyway... TFA states this: "We are aware of theoretical weaknesses in secp256k1" What are the theoretical weaknesses in EC secp256k1?
- hendzen 13y ago
  See http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ for an explanation.
computer 13y ago
Technically I love new plans in this space. However, it seems that this requires a lot of people using it to be useful (network effect)? Is there a plan for getting this used by people?
jokoon 13y ago
I like the initiative to tackle against what the NSA is doing, but I'm seeing many projects that just seem to overdo it. You will have better results by going out and educating people about how technology works than inventing a internet-obscurity-security sort of thing. On top of it, if the NSA can detect who encrypts its traffic the most, who use what OS, what browser, if that person has used PGP, etc, it just needs to monitor this person a little bit more. I don't want to sound cynical, but I wish I could see programmers work on solving real problems, like economical ones: you'll be surprised how miscommunication and lack of information spreading can worsen situations. Many people seems to criticize facebook, why am I not seeing anyone reinventing the social network ? I'm not talking a website like diaspora or google+, but anything which is designed for making the economy work better. Like a craiglist for masses, but more efficient and relevant.
- woah 13y ago
  It sounds like you are basically suggesting the most generic of web startups.
  - jokoon 13y ago
    Yeah well I see countless posts of people failing their startup...
blueskin_ 13y ago
Wait, so this is a browser-in-a-browser? How the fsck is that in any way an OS? >"We believe it's not your job to keep track of what social networks your contacts use. With Avatar you simply just write a message and the system takes care of delivering the message to your friend. You can use your Avatar to communicate "cross-border" with other social networks like Facebook or Twitter." I saw someone mention this yesterday on HN for another service, but I'll say it here. This seems like a huge WTF, as people separate services for a reason. If I want to talk to someone on facebook, I might not via email, or via a different email address to the default. See: Google recently outing a trans person who used different services for different identities.
kitd 13y ago
The guiding goal has been to create a portable, easy-to-use layer on top of a browser I can't help thinking they're looking at this the wrong way round.
fiatjaf 13y ago
Why didn't they write everything in Javascript and run from the browser? A pure-browser Freenet is possible, isn't it?
uzero 13y ago
I wrote a clarification about how Avatar is an operating system and about how it runs on a browser at https://discussions.avatar.ai/topic/18/what-makes-avatar-an-operating-system https://discussions.avatar.ai/topic/18/what-makes-avatar-an-... - I hope this clarifies a bit what we are trying to accomplish with Avatar.

117 points by staltz 13y ago

keyo 13y ago

Looks promising

hmhrex 13y ago

Are there any other OS' similar?

samweinberg 13y ago
It reminds me of Joli OS http://www.jolicloud.com/jolios http://www.jolicloud.com/jolios
- hmhrex 13y ago
  Almost forgot about Joli. Great little OS.

hotloo 13y ago

Looks interesting. Any action videos or demo available?

uzero 13y ago
Not yet but hopefully soon.

Karunamon 13y ago

This looks to be very similar to Freenet[1] - basically a specialized, distributed network that runs on top of the internet but has its own server/client infrastructure. Does Avatar serve pages over plain HTTP(S) like Freenet, or is there some other magic here? [1] https://freenetproject.org/‎ https://freenetproject.org/‎

uzero 13y ago
Everything is encrypted by default. Even Freenet and Avatar are similar at very high-level, there's many differences under the surface. I wrote more about how Avatar compares to X here: https://discussions.avatar.ai/topic/13/comparison-to-tor-freenet-retroshare-etc https://discussions.avatar.ai/topic/13/comparison-to-tor-fre...
- hnisnotreddit 13y ago
  your comparison to Tor completely glosses over Hidden Services, which are less complimentary to Avatar.

uzero 13y ago

We are looking for security experts to double check/triple check/audit our protocol designs. So if you know your crypto and you are intimately familiar with Alice and Bob, please lend us a hand and take a look at the protocols. Our discussion forum has a special section for security and protocols where you can post your comments. Thank you!

jhdkjqhkjqhwk 13y ago
> that runs on modern web browsers. Never mind your protocols, I'm pretty sure nothing can go wrong here!

seanmcelroy 13y ago

I think this would be a much more interesting project if it was to put a great interface on top of the Freenet protocol. Encryption and anonymization on P2P is very hard, and building on Freenet as a basis for the plumbing would speed the time to a deliverable and build on existing technologies rather than reinvent the wheel.

4ad 13y ago

I wish people would not misuse the term "operating system" so much.

steveklabnik 13y ago
I'm posting this comment from a Chromebook. I'm imagining this could (I haven't gotten through all the marketing yet) be something very similar, which very much is an operating system.
- 4ad 13y ago
  No, it's a javascript app plus another app that runs outside the browser. It's similar to freenet.
zhemao 13y ago
From the diagram, it seems they intend to put something resembling a microkernel stack in the browser app, which is a rather odd architectural choice. What exactly do you gain by piecing together low-level components inside the very high-level runtime that is a web browser?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
haberman 13y ago
I don't think "operating system" is a particularly technical or well-defined term. It can mean anything from "kernel" to "kernel, userspace libraries, UI, package management / update infrastructure, etc." Its meaning is only slightly different from "platform", which basically means "any API to which you can program applications."
- dsl 13y ago
  "Operating system" is a pretty technical and well defined term, you just might not be old enough to know it. :) An operating system is the core that is responsible for operating the underlying hardware of a computing device, upon which everything else is built. If you aren't concerning yourself with device drivers and task scheduling, you aren't building an operating system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system

spaceheeder 13y ago

Can you link to your source code? Have you given any thought to using the GNU Naming System to smooth over some of the usability problems with public keys? Are you familiar with unhosted.org, and their use of Oasis.js to partially solve the problem of running untrusted js in the browser?

staltz 13y ago
We haven't released any source code yet because we first want to make sure our protocol designs are correct. Unhosted is a familiar project and we are currently evaluating multiple options to run unsecure code.
- spaceheeder 13y ago
  Going on a slight tangent off of jude-'s question, will there be any social or economic incentive for making one's bridge persistent, or capable of holding more data? Or will this rely on volunteer participation, like tor/freenet/etc?
  - staltz 13y ago
    At first it's volunteer but we do realize that incentives are needed and we're working on different models. The long-term goal, which depends on WebRTC maturity, is to have no need for Bridges, because that code would be in the browser OS.
    - spaceheeder 13y ago
      If the storage _wasn't_ separate from the client, wouldn't access time performance top out around the same levels as, e.g., Freenet?

jude- 13y ago

I worry about storage performance. Why use a DHT? Could you get away with using cloud storage to host the signed and encrypted data? Also, are you worried about Sybil attacks on the DHT?

spaceheeder 13y ago
Based on my read through, I think the files themselves live in the bridges and the DHT is how they are found. So you could set up an Avatar bridge in the cloud and use that as your bridge (or put the bridge on your local device and tell _it_ to store/retrieve everything from a network folder).
- jude- 13y ago
  So, performance will depend on where these bridges live, and how generously provisioned they are. Using the DHT for routing doesn't address this problem, though--requests for hot content will be routed to the same node, regardless of how well-positioned it is to serve requests. Also, what happens to the content when that node goes offline? I skimmed the R5N DHT whitepaper, and while it replicates keys, it's not clear that the bridges replicate chunks. Do the authors have a plan to address data loss? Do they have a plan for caching/replicating data to alleviate hot spots? Will their replication strategies on read/write objects include a well-defined consistency model?
  - spaceheeder 13y ago
    Their current line is that, with increased WebRTC adoption, bridges will somehow become unnecessary? I'm not convinced, and agree with you that there may be some problems here that will lead to poor performance (which is critical). According to someone (a developer?) further down this thread, they realize that incentives will be needed for things like this. It sounds sort of like the same problem that the bitcloud people are trying to solve, but to my knowledge nobody has any solid solutions. Why pay more for a blind CDN when 99.9% of your customers use infrastructure that only require you to use unsecured ones? That shouldn't be a rhetorical question--this is an important issue that needs to be addressed if we want to make the Internet a better, freer, and more secure place to communicate. We'll see if these guys come forward with something that sounds like it can work, I guess.

mQu 13y ago

Do I understand correctly that browsers obtain source code through bridge (local HTTP server?) from Avatar network or is it downloaded traditionally? EDIT (from here to end): to clarify - my question is to assess security of the 'runtime' - if it's downloaded from the server what is there to stop malicious party from compromising the server and sending modified verification code? Would it be downloaded through the bridge then (and only then) verification with block chain could be done on received updates (providing first d/l wasn't compromised). User browser would then access files exposed by the bridge. At least this is how I imagine it but the OP overview is light on details.

TacticalCoder 13y ago

It's interesting that they're using secp256k1 (as Bitcoin does) for performance reasons (regarding Bitcoin, Satoshi mentioned in early messages that he did choose EC because it would help keep the size of the blockchain not too big). I wonder if Bitcoin's use of EC is "giving a boost" to EC... Anyway... TFA states this: "We are aware of theoretical weaknesses in secp256k1" What are the theoretical weaknesses in EC secp256k1?

hendzen 13y ago
See http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ for an explanation.

computer 13y ago

Technically I love new plans in this space. However, it seems that this requires a lot of people using it to be useful (network effect)? Is there a plan for getting this used by people?

jokoon 13y ago

I like the initiative to tackle against what the NSA is doing, but I'm seeing many projects that just seem to overdo it. You will have better results by going out and educating people about how technology works than inventing a internet-obscurity-security sort of thing. On top of it, if the NSA can detect who encrypts its traffic the most, who use what OS, what browser, if that person has used PGP, etc, it just needs to monitor this person a little bit more. I don't want to sound cynical, but I wish I could see programmers work on solving real problems, like economical ones: you'll be surprised how miscommunication and lack of information spreading can worsen situations. Many people seems to criticize facebook, why am I not seeing anyone reinventing the social network ? I'm not talking a website like diaspora or google+, but anything which is designed for making the economy work better. Like a craiglist for masses, but more efficient and relevant.

woah 13y ago
It sounds like you are basically suggesting the most generic of web startups.
- jokoon 13y ago
  Yeah well I see countless posts of people failing their startup...

blueskin_ 13y ago

Wait, so this is a browser-in-a-browser? How the fsck is that in any way an OS? >"We believe it's not your job to keep track of what social networks your contacts use. With Avatar you simply just write a message and the system takes care of delivering the message to your friend. You can use your Avatar to communicate "cross-border" with other social networks like Facebook or Twitter." I saw someone mention this yesterday on HN for another service, but I'll say it here. This seems like a huge WTF, as people separate services for a reason. If I want to talk to someone on facebook, I might not via email, or via a different email address to the default. See: Google recently outing a trans person who used different services for different identities.

kitd 13y ago

The guiding goal has been to create a portable, easy-to-use layer on top of a browser I can't help thinking they're looking at this the wrong way round.

fiatjaf 13y ago

Why didn't they write everything in Javascript and run from the browser? A pure-browser Freenet is possible, isn't it?

uzero 13y ago

I wrote a clarification about how Avatar is an operating system and about how it runs on a browser at https://discussions.avatar.ai/topic/18/what-makes-avatar-an-operating-system https://discussions.avatar.ai/topic/18/what-makes-avatar-an-... - I hope this clarifies a bit what we are trying to accomplish with Avatar.