Subject: [Pearg] GNUnet as peer-to-peer framework with very strong privacy focus

From: Hernâni Marques (p≡p project) <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2018 23:15:37 +0200

Dear PEARG group

Thanks for the interesting meeting yesterday, where I was the first time.

Immediately after the meeting I approached Sara & Shivan to tell them
that I think GNUnet could be a project to have a close look at, as not
just requirements are defined, but you also find lots of running code (>
400k LOC).

It's a peer-to-peer framework to "replace the old insecure Internet
stack" (in own words, cf. gnunet.org); the GNUnet project has a strong
emphasis on protecting privacy at all levels (including link level) and
also explores ways to achieve trust without relying on X.509 PKIs.

The most comprehensive document about GNUnet and its principles is this
habil work:

https://grothoff.org/christian/habil.pdf

As also DNS / name resolution privacy was a topic yesterday, it's
noteworthy to say that Christian (main dev and Prof. at BFH) recently
could show us decentralized name resolution working with the GNU Name
System (GNS), resolving .FR domains (which were imported into the GNUnet
DHT) as this can easily be imported from official sources; this would
also apply for the .SE zone.

You find an interesting analysis of DNS's issues in terms of privacy,
comparing it to, e.g., namecoin and also GNS, here:

https://gnunet.org/sites/default/files/ns2018.pdf

PS:
As pEp Foundation, working on opportunistic encryption for email as of
now, we also collaborate with the GNUnet project and also help to
finance its developemnt - at some point we want to send messages through
this P2P framework deployed through MUAs instead, so that for email SMTP
could become a secondary choice as a transport. The corresponding
subsystem for that is called CADET - you can also find everything about
it in the above mentioned habil.

PPS:
GNUnet is heavily academically rootet since almost two decades already;
cf. here:

https://gnunet.org/bibliography

These days, emphasis in being put on having it easy installable and thus
deployable for different ends ranging from file sharing, messaging, name
resolution or also voice.

PPPS:
Christian and other people of the project might subscribe to this list,
too. I put Christian CC for now.