path: root/doc/chapters/philosophy.texi

@node Philosophy
@chapter Philosophy

The foremost goal of the GNUnet project is to become a widely used,
reliable, open, non-discriminating, egalitarian, unfettered and
censorship-resistant system of free information exchange.
We value free speech above state secrets, law-enforcement or
intellectual property. GNUnet is supposed to be an anarchistic network,
where the only limitation for peers is that they must contribute enough
back to the network such that their resource consumption does not have
a significant impact on other users. GNUnet should be more than just
another file-sharing network. The plan is to offer many other services
and in particular to serve as a development platform for the next
generation of decentralized Internet protocols.

@menu
* Design Goals::
* Security & Privacy::
* Versatility::
* Practicality::
* Key Concepts::
@end menu


@cindex Design Goals
@node Design Goals
@section Design Goals

These are the core GNUnet design goals, in order of relative importance:

@itemize
@item GNUnet must be implemented as free software.
@item GNUnet must only disclose the minimal amount of information
necessary.
@item GNUnet must be decentralised and survive Byzantine failures in any
position in the network.
@item GNUnet must make it explicit to the user which entities must be
trustworthy when establishing secured communications.
@item GNUnet must use compartmentalization to protect sensitive
information.
@item GNUnet must be open and permit new peers to join.
@item GNUnet must be self-organizing and not depend on administrators.
@item GNUnet must support a diverse range of applications and devices.
@item The GNUnet architecture must be cost effective.
@item GNUnet must provide incentives for peers to contribute more
resources than they consume.
@end itemize


@cindex Security and Privacy
@node Security & Privacy
@section Security & Privacy

GNUnet's primary design goals are to protect the privacy of its users and
to guard itself against attacks or abuse.
GNUnet does not have any mechanisms to control, track or censor users.
Instead, the GNUnet protocols aim to make it as hard as possible to
find out what is happening on the network or to disrupt operations. 

@cindex Versatility
@node Versatility
@section Versatility

We call GNUnet a peer-to-peer framework because we want to support many
different forms of peer-to-peer applications. GNUnet uses a plugin
architecture to make the system extensible and to encourage code reuse.
While the first versions of the system only supported anonymous
file-sharing, other applications are being worked on and more will
hopefully follow in the future.
A powerful synergy regarding anonymity services is created by a large
community utilizing many diverse applications over the same software
infrastructure. The reason is that link encryption hides the specifics
of the traffic for non-participating observers. This way, anonymity can
get stronger with additional (GNUnet) traffic, even if the additional
traffic is not related to anonymous communication. Increasing anonymity is
the primary reason why GNUnet is developed to become a peer-to-peer
framework where many applications share the lower layers of an
increasingly complex protocol stack.
If merging traffic to hinder traffic analysis was not important,
we could have just developed a dozen stand-alone applications
and a few shared libraries. 

@cindex Practicality
@node Practicality
@section Practicality

GNUnet allows participants to trade various amounts of security in
exchange for increased efficiency. However, it is not possible for any
user's security and efficiency requirements to compromise the security
and efficiency of any other user.

For GNUnet, efficiency is not paramount. If there is a more secure and
still practical approach, we would choose to take the more secure
alternative. @command{telnet} is more efficient than @command{ssh}, yet
it is obsolete.
Hardware gets faster, and code can be optimized. Fixing security issues as
an afterthought is much harder. 

While security is paramount, practicability is still a requirement.
The most secure system is always the one that nobody can use.
Similarly, any anonymous system that is extremely inefficient will only
find few users.
However, good anonymity requires a large and diverse user base. Since
individual security requirements may vary, the only good solution here is
to allow individuals to trade-off security and efficiency.
The primary challenge in allowing this is to ensure that the economic
incentives work properly.
In particular, this means that it must be impossible for a user to gain
security at the expense of other users. Many designs (e.g. anonymity via
broadcast) fail to give users an incentive to choose a less secure but
more efficient mode of operation.
GNUnet should avoid where ever possible to rely on protocols that will
only work if the participants are benevolent.
While some designs have had widespread success while relying on parties
to observe a protocol that may be sub-optimal for the individuals (e.g.
TCP Nagle), a protocol that ensures that individual goals never conflict
with the goals of the group is always preferable.

@cindex Key Concepts
@node Key Concepts
@section Key Concepts

In this section, the fundamental concepts of GNUnet are explained.
Most of them are also described in our research papers.
First, some of the concepts used in the GNUnet framework are detailed.
The second part describes concepts specific to anonymous file-sharing.

@menu
* Authentication::
* Accounting to Encourage Resource Sharing::
* Confidentiality::
* Anonymity::
* Deniability::                       
* Peer Identities::
* Zones in the GNU Name System (GNS Zones)::
* Egos::
@end menu

@cindex Authentication
@node Authentication
@subsection Authentication

Almost all peer-to-peer communications in GNUnet are between mutually
authenticated peers. The authentication works by using ECDHE, that is a
DH key exchange using ephemeral eliptic curve cryptography. The ephemeral
ECC keys are signed using ECDSA. The shared secret from ECDHE is used to
create a pair of session keys (using HKDF) which are then used to encrypt
the communication between the two peers using both 256-bit AES and 256-bit
Twofish (with independently derived secret keys). As only the two
participating hosts know the shared secret, this authenticates each packet
without requiring signatures each time. GNUnet uses SHA-512 hash codes to
verify the integrity of messages. 

In GNUnet, the identity of a host is its public key. For that reason,
man-in-the-middle attacks will not break the authentication or accounting
goals. Essentially, for GNUnet, the IP of the host has nothing to do with
the identity of the host. As the public key is the only thing that truly
matters, faking an IP, a port or any other property of the underlying
transport protocol is irrelevant. In fact, GNUnet peers can use
multiple IPs (IPv4 and IPv6) on multiple ports --- or even not use the
IP protocol at all (by running directly on layer 2). 

GNUnet uses a special type of message to communicate a binding between
public (ECC) keys to their current network address. These messages are
commonly called HELLOs or peer advertisements. They contain the public key
of the peer and its current network addresses for various transport
services.
A transport service is a special kind of shared library that
provides (possibly unreliable, out-of-order) message delivery between
peers.
For the UDP and TCP transport services, a network address is an IP and a
port.
GNUnet can also use other transports (HTTP, HTTPS, WLAN, etc.) which use
various other forms of addresses. Note that any node can have many
different
active transport services at the same time, and each of these can have a
different addresses. Binding messages expire after at most a week (the
timeout can be shorter if the user configures the node appropriately).
This expiration ensures that the network will eventually get rid of
outdated advertisements.@footnote{More details can be found in
@uref{https://gnunet.org/transports, A Transport Layer Abstraction for
Peer-to-Peer Networks}}

@cindex Resource Sharing
@node Accounting to Encourage Resource Sharing
@subsection Accounting to Encourage Resource Sharing

Most distributed P2P networks suffer from a lack of defenses or
precautions against attacks in the form of freeloading.
While the intentions of an attacker and a freeloader are different, their
effect on the network is the same; they both render it useless.
Most simple attacks on networks such as Gnutella involve flooding the
network with traffic, particularly with queries that are, in the worst
case, multiplied by the network. 

In order to ensure that freeloaders or attackers have a minimal impact on
the network, GNUnet's file-sharing implementation tries to distinguish
good (contributing) nodes from malicious (freeloading) nodes. In GNUnet,
every file-sharing node keeps track of the behavior of every other node it
has been in contact with. Many requests (depending on the application) are
transmitted with a priority (or importance) level. That priority is used
to establish how important the sender believes this request is. If a peer
responds to an important request, the recipient will increase its trust in
the responder: the responder contributed resources. If a peer is too busy
to answer all requests, it needs to prioritize. For that, peers to not
take the priorities of the requests received at face value.
First, they check how much they trust the sender, and depending on that
amount of trust they assign the request a (possibly lower) effective
priority. Then, they drop the requests with the lowest effective priority
to satisfy their resource constraints. This way, GNUnet's economic model
ensures that nodes that are not currently considered to have a surplus in
contributions will not be served if the network load is high.@footnote{Mor
e details can be found in @uref{https://gnunet.org/ebe, this paper}}

@cindex Confidentiality
@node Confidentiality
@subsection Confidentiality

Adversaries outside of GNUnet are not supposed to know what kind of
actions a peer is involved in. Only the specific neighbor of a peer that
is the corresponding sender or recipient of a message may know its
contents, and even then application protocols may place further
restrictions on that knowledge.
In order to ensure confidentiality, GNUnet uses link encryption, that is
each message exchanged between two peers is encrypted using a pair of
keys only known to these two peers.
Encrypting traffic like this makes any kind of traffic analysis much
harder. Naturally, for some applications, it may still be desirable if
even neighbors cannot determine the concrete contents of a message.
In GNUnet, this problem is addressed by the specific application-level
protocols (see for example, deniability and anonymity in anonymous file
sharing).

@cindex Anonymity
@node Anonymity
@subsection Anonymity

@menu
* How file-sharing achieves Anonymity::
@end menu

Providing anonymity for users is the central goal for the anonymous
file-sharing application. Many other design decisions follow in the
footsteps of this requirement.
Anonymity is never absolute. While there are various
@uref{https://gnunet.org/anonymity_metric, scientific metrics} that can
help quantify the level of anonymity that a given mechanism provides,
there is no such thing as complete anonymity.
GNUnet's file-sharing implementation allows users to select for each
operation (publish, search, download) the desired level of anonymity.
The metric used is the amount of cover traffic available to hide the
request.
While this metric is not as good as, for example, the theoretical metric
given in @uref{https://gnunet.org/anonymity_metric, scientific metrics},
it is probably the best metric available to a peer with a purely local
view of the world that does not rely on unreliable external information.
The default anonymity level is 1, which uses anonymous routing but
imposes no minimal requirements on cover traffic. It is possible
to forego anonymity when this is not required. The anonymity level of 0
allows GNUnet to use more efficient, non-anonymous routing.

@node How file-sharing achieves Anonymity
@subsubsection How file-sharing achieves Anonymity

Contrary to other designs, we do not believe that users achieve strong
anonymity just because their requests are obfuscated by a couple of
indirections. This is not sufficient if the adversary uses traffic
analysis.
The threat model used for anonymous file sharing in GNUnet assumes that
the adversary is quite powerful.
In particular, we assume that the adversary can see all the traffic on
the Internet. And while we assume that the adversary
can not break our encryption, we assume that the adversary has many
participating nodes in the network and that it can thus see many of the
node-to-node interactions since it controls some of the nodes. 

The system tries to achieve anonymity based on the idea that users can be
anonymous if they can hide their actions in the traffic created by other
users.
Hiding actions in the traffic of other users requires participating in the
traffic, bringing back the traditional technique of using indirection and
source rewriting. Source rewriting is required to gain anonymity since
otherwise an adversary could tell if a message originated from a host by
looking at the source address. If all packets look like they originate
from a node, the adversary can not tell which ones originate from that
node and which ones were routed.
Note that in this mindset, any node can decide to break the
source-rewriting paradigm without violating the protocol, as this
only reduces the amount of traffic that a node can hide its own traffic
in. 

If we want to hide our actions in the traffic of other nodes, we must make
our traffic indistinguishable from the traffic that we route for others.
As our queries must have us as the receiver of the reply
(otherwise they would be useless), we must put ourselves as the receiver
of replies that actually go to other hosts; in other words, we must
indirect replies.
Unlike other systems, in anonymous file-sharing as implemented on top of
GNUnet we do not have to indirect the replies if we don't think we need
more traffic to hide our own actions.

This increases the efficiency of the network as we can indirect less under
higher load.@footnote{More details can be found in @uref{https://gnunet.
org/gap, this paper}}

@cindex Deniability
@node Deniability
@subsection Deniability

Even if the user that downloads data and the server that provides data are
anonymous, the intermediaries may still be targets. In particular, if the
intermediaries can find out which queries or which content they are
processing, a strong adversary could try to force them to censor
certain materials. 

With the file-encoding used by GNUnet's anonymous file-sharing, this
problem does not arise.
The reason is that queries and replies are transmitted in
an encrypted format such that intermediaries cannot tell what the query
is for or what the content is about.  Mind that this is not the same
encryption as the link-encryption between the nodes.  GNUnet has
encryption on the network layer (link encryption, confidentiality,
authentication) and again on the application layer (provided
by @command{gnunet-publish}, @command{gnunet-download},
@command{gnunet-search} and @command{gnunet-gtk}).@footnote{More details
can be found @uref{https://gnunet.org/encoding, here}}

@cindex Peer Identities
@node Peer Identities
@subsection Peer Identities

Peer identities are used to identify peers in the network and are unique
for each peer.  The identity for a peer is simply its public key, which is
generated along with a private key the peer is started for the first time.
While the identity is binary data, it is often expressed as ASCII string.
For example, the following is a peer identity as you might see it in
various places:
@code{ UAT1S6PMPITLBKSJ2DGV341JI6KF7B66AC4JVCN9811NNEGQLUN0}

You can find your peer identity by running @command{gnunet-peerinfo -s}.

@cindex GNS Zones
@node Zones in the GNU Name System (GNS Zones)
@subsection Zones in the GNU Name System (GNS Zones)

GNS zones are similar to those of DNS zones, but instead of a hierarchy of
authorities to governing their use, GNS zones are controlled by a private
key.
When you create a record in a DNS zone, that information stored in your
nameserver.  Anyone trying to resolve your domain then gets pointed
(hopefully) by the centralised authority to your nameserver.
Whereas GNS, being decentralised by design, stores that information in
DHT.  The validity of the records is assured cryptographically, by
signing them with the private key of the respective zone.

Anyone trying to resolve records in a zone your domain can then verify the
signature on the records they get from the DHT and be assured that they
are indeed from the respective zone.  To make this work, there is a 1:1
correspondence between zones and their public-private key pairs.
So when we talk about the owner of a GNS zone, that's really the owner of
the private key.
And a user accessing a zone needs to somehow specify the corresponding
public key first.

@cindex Egos
@node Egos
@subsection Egos

Egos are your "identities" in GNUnet.  Any user can assume multiple
identities, for example to separate his activities online.  Egos can
correspond to pseudonyms or real-world identities.  Technically, an
ego is first of all a public-private key pair.