Rendered at 20:30:11 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
andrewflnr 41 minutes ago [-]
> Dial keys
Maybe it's in the video I didn't watch, but I really think paragraph one should make clear what kind of keys and why. Cryptographic? Asymmetric? How do they do the job, at even the most basic level? It never explains, just dives into abstract claims of superiority and usage stats. I gather relays are involved; this would be a good thing to mention right away instead of making me sift it from the HN discussion.
morphism 11 minutes ago [-]
While the frontpage doesn't go in depth, the docs quickly do:
First with https://docs.iroh.computer/what-is-iroh and then following up with the how it works section. The docs are actually good from what I can see so far. From what questions you brought up so for it seems to answer them pretty quickly.
sva_ 7 minutes ago [-]
The doc still doesn't show what such a 'key' looks like? Why can't there be a simple infographic that goes like
127.0.0.1 -> 'key'
3 minutes ago [-]
isodev 9 minutes ago [-]
I saw the video and still have no idea what they are. Also, “never locked in” but then “pricing” and why is one paying for “apps” but self hosting relays?
taf2 15 minutes ago [-]
when i read "keys" i figured "names" like in my .ssh/config a named host that i access with a key... but listening more it sounds like a new way to do networking over QUIC...
rklaehn 5 hours ago [-]
I am one of the iroh developers.
A question that frequently comes up: when will iroh support webrtc, or BLE, or LoRa, or ...
Iroh as of now supports only IPv4, IPv6 and relay transports out of the box. There is such a large variety of potentially interesting transports out there that we can't support all of them without turning the codebase into an unmaintainable maze of feature flags.
But we have added the ability to implement custom transports. That way your transport implementation can live in a completely separate crate.
Hi! As someone who has historically built on libp2p, I'd love to see an updated comparison focused on app developers!
Last year, I was trying to choose between the two and went with that I know... but it feels like there's real momentum on Iroh's side.
Folcon 2 hours ago [-]
Hey, just reading through the docs, this looks like a pretty cool project and I found your p2p chat example[0]
I'm trying to understand it's limitations, if I used this to build a p2p client / server setup or even two peer machines, what else do I need to setup to be able to have connections between the two applications?
For example, could I create an application that runs on my phone and another that runs on my laptop and finally get a direct secured working connection between the two of them? Or is this solving a different problem? =)
You'll get a direct connection in most cases, but sometimes it will need to fall back to relays. n0 provides free relays, but ultimately that can get rather expensive. You can also run your own relays for your app.
rklaehn 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, you will get secure direct connections. This matters for privacy in case of an encrypted chat, but also has a lot of benefits for more demanding use cases such as video streaming.
If you use the default setup you are still depending on a tiny bit of cloud infrastructure such as our public relays to faciliate the hole punching. However, we also have optional local discovery using e.g. mDNS.
Bender 5 hours ago [-]
What are the risks if any of running public relays? Is this similar in concept to running Tor Guard Nodes / Relays?
rklaehn 4 hours ago [-]
If you run a public unauthenticated relay you act as a home relay for whoever has your relay configured in their relay map and is close in terms of latency.
So you might get a lot of traffic. You can configure rate limiting, as we do on our public relays.
The traffic is fully encrypted and can not be decrypted by the relay. The only information the relay has is what is necessary for it to function - the endpoint id and ip addresses of the endpoints that are connected to it at any given time, as well as endpoint pairings.
You relay encrypted traffic with no egress to the open internet. So if you want to compare it with Tor, it would be like a tor guard/middle relay, not an exit node.
Bender 4 hours ago [-]
So if you want to compare it with Tor, it would be like a tor guard/middle relay, not an exit node.
Nice. I already do rate limiting, traffic balancing using sch cake. This looks like an interesting project. I could envision open source NVR's implementing this. I also like the name of the project.
Arqu 4 hours ago [-]
All the data is e2e encrypted and nothing is stored. The usual self hosting public things rules apply.
Yes, I wrote the current tor transport as a quick demo/testground for custom transports.
Arguably directly embedding the rust tor implementation would be more useful for the typical iroh user that wants an embeddable library. I just did not get to it yet.
Can the relay servers, when used as fallback, read the data between two parties by providing its own public key to both of the peers?
rklaehn 1 hours ago [-]
No. The data in each direction is encrypted by TLS, using ephemeral keys.
Only the owner of the corresponding private key can initiate a connection from their public key, or receive a connection attempt to their public key.
Let's say you have alice and bob talking via a relay. Even if you have the private key of alice, you can impersonate alice to bob, but not vice versa. So you can't initiate a connection between the two.
To really intercept data you would need the private keys of both participants.
refulgentis 4 hours ago [-]
FWIW I think for “new user” audiences you’re better off describing why we’d use this instead of IP, than why you haven’t gotten it everywhere yet: there’s a certain sort of “complaint I see the most from current users” myopia that sets in, at least for me, over the years. :)
I am not aware of a LoRa custom transport yet, but that is not unexpected given that the custom transport API is relatively new, and our main focus has been on getting iroh 1.0 out of the door.
larodi 3 hours ago [-]
Definitely interesting in having lots of things running lora AND meshes. Thanks.
ascii0eks84 4 hours ago [-]
If you don't mind, what are other low-effort but high signal forums other than HN, Perplexity and X for accurate news that skip the annoying part?
coldblues 1 hours ago [-]
The future of networking is decentralization. I'm a huge fan of Yggdrasil and I2P. We should just be able to buy a mini PC to run 24/7 and host whatever it is that we need on it and seamlessly connect to others. A lot of techies already have older spare machines laying around collecting dust that can become servers. It is far cheaper in the long run and easier to maintain than having to deal with domains and server hosting. I truly appreciate the work that the Iroh team puts out.
tootie 29 minutes ago [-]
It's been the future for at least 20 years now.
coldblues 4 minutes ago [-]
This post may be sarcastic, but some of us really have been living in the future so to speak, more than others. It's the nature of novel, groundbreaking tech. Adoption is not immediate.
Thaxll 4 hours ago [-]
I don't understand the problem its trying to solve in the first place, IP works just fine, such as DNS.
There is already IPv6 and quic, you need vendor and major software to have any traction in that field.
rklaehn 4 hours ago [-]
Iroh is QUIC. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel here, just combining existing IETF RFCs in a creative way.
Here is a concrete problem we solve. You have one device in your home WLAN behind a NAT. Your other device is in a 4g network, or behind another NAT at work.
In most cases we can give you a direct connection between the two devices very quickly via hole punching, so you get the highest possible bandwidth and the lowest possible latency.
This was not a solved problem until now.
kkapelon 4 hours ago [-]
isn't this exactly what tailscale (and also zerotier, netmaker) do?
That only works for the infrastructure of one entity. It doesn't establish direct connection to my friend's device by a key pair if he is outside of the particular organisation tailscale VPN.
p2p apps need direct connections.
moritzruth 4 hours ago [-]
Those are intended to solve the problem at the OS layer, while Iroh (being a library) does it at the application layer.
From reading that, it lets you establish connections within your tailscale vpn. Iroh let's you establish connections between devices regardless of their network.
9dev 2 hours ago [-]
There might be a misunderstanding of what Tailscale offers here. There is no "VPN" in the classic "virtual network" way. With Tailscale, you can - as with Iroh, IIUC - connect arbitrary nodes to each other, where a node can be a device or an application (via tsnet). All nodes get CGNAT IPs and an addressable hostname, so there is one giant "network" of all your nodes with automatic DNS resolution baked in.
kbenson 1 hours ago [-]
Doesn't tailscale require those all be administered and approved by one account?
> there is one giant "network" of all your nodes
From what I understand they're saying, the point is that you get easy connections to things that aren't "your" nodes, sort of like allowing me to connect one of my tailscale nodes ad-hoc to one of your tailscale nodes, when our accounts are not related in any way prior to us doing that, and without me having to allow your node onto my network or you allow one of mine onto your network and have to deal with the specialized ACLs for that, since it's just a direct connection between two nodes.
9dev 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
__float 2 hours ago [-]
I think everyone in this thread agrees on that part already.
The similarities are in an application lib to connect, and that tail net IPs correspond to device keys like in Iroh. The service using the Go library has its own Tailscale identity.
opem 2 hours ago [-]
So iroh is basically WebRTC, except it works in and outside of a browser. Relays seems quite similar to TURN/STUN servers except they also handle fallback traffic much like TOR guard/relay nodes
Sean-Der 2 hours ago [-]
Does WebRTC not work inside/outside of the browser anywhere?
nunobrito 1 hours ago [-]
It works outside the browser too, I've been using it that way.
opem 31 minutes ago [-]
Yes it does! I was trying to draw an analogy there, I think it would be better to state as - iroh is similar to WebRTC + PeerJS[1] which only works on browsers, generally[2].
[1]: PeerJS(https://peerjs.com/) is a library to use WebRTC w/o any boilerplate code.
[2]: WebRTC functionality can be enabled in non-browser envs like Node.js by using third-party native addons (like node-webrtc) that provide bindings to the underlying C++ WebRTC library.
handoflixue 4 hours ago [-]
Excuse my ignorance on the subject, but what does this solve that VPNs didn't already address?
gslepak 4 hours ago [-]
VPNs do not allow you to connect two devices directly, they have to go through the VPN. They also do not allow you to connect devices that are not on the VPN. Iroh does P2P connections and punches holes through NATs when needed, so you can connect directly to devices on different networks that are behind firewalls.
pkulak 4 hours ago [-]
From my VERY brief understanding: this is like if you want the hole-punching of a VPN, but your stuff is public, so not only do you not want all the security of a VPN, but it works against you. But I'm happy to be corrected!
Arqu 2 hours ago [-]
You don't have to have it public. You can have your app gate against any auth method you like to implement on top. And you can have private relays to segregate your traffic and discovery depending on setup.
milkshakes 4 hours ago [-]
vpns typically add at least one hop. this has the possibility of connecting directly via hole punching
tux3 4 hours ago [-]
Modern VPNs based on wireguard can do direct connections with hole punching. It's just a lot more work to setup on your own, or you have to sign-up to a SaaS like tailscale and use their relays, and they'll do the hole punching for you.
Here this is a decentralized network with a lot of existing public relays. But in principle a VPN can solve a lot of the same problems. It's just that commercial VPNs are not decentralized, and doing your own wireguard setup is a pain.
kkapelon 4 hours ago [-]
Already possible with taiscale, netmaker, zerotier etc.
This allows you to provide information to an arbitrary person (a friend/coworker/etc) to let them access the thing without them having to jump through all the extra hoops of joining your tailnet/them joining yours/adding a VPN/etc.
9dev 2 hours ago [-]
With Tailscale at least, you can pretty easily share a node with someone else. If your target audience are solo developers or hobbyists, making it even easier to share access is surely nice; from the perspective of someone in charge of making sure our company IT is balancing security and ease of networking, the literal last thing I want is making it easier to grant someone access.
There are policies defining who can talk to what; they are deployed from a GitHub repository with defined rules on who can modify them and who has to review them; there are zero scenarios where I want an alternative way of granting access to any device or service under our control.
kkapelon 3 hours ago [-]
but what exactly is the use case? I was responding to the nat traversal topic..
If I wanted to share something internal with a friend I would use ngrok or any of the million alternatives.
Anyway, this is exactly why my top-level comment says that this project needs a "versus" page in the docs.
UltraSane 3 hours ago [-]
Cisco Dynamic Multipoint VPN will start by connecting to a central VPN server and then learn the public IPs of endpoints and automatically create VPN tunnels to them. It can scale to thousands of endpoints.
aliasxneo 4 hours ago [-]
Is that not what libp2p already offers? Not sure if it has QUIC out of the box, but hole-punching to UDP connectivity and then running QUIC over it isn't that hard.
karissa 4 hours ago [-]
The folks who made iroh worked on libp2p first, but found many limitations in libp2p's design. iroh is a better more flexible and powerful version of libp2p
orthecreedence 4 hours ago [-]
Libp2p does have quic, at least the rust implementation.
rklaehn 3 hours ago [-]
libp2p does have QUIC, but it is one of many possible transports.
So libp2p builds many things on top of the underlying transport where we use QUIC directly and use existing mechanisms such as TLS ALPNs for protocol negotiation.
We also use the stream multiplexing that is built into QUIC instead of putting a stream multiplexer on top of QUIC.
You can think about it like this: libp2p abstracts transports as streams, and then puts many required features on top (protocol negotiation, stream multiplexing)
Iroh uses QUIC and abstracts transports below QUIC. We can work with any unreliable datagram transport that has (or can be hacked to have) a minimum MTU of 1200 bytes (needed to be QUIC compliant).
ianopolous 2 hours ago [-]
Minor clarifications, but libp2p also uses TLS ALPN for protocol negotiation, and also uses native quic streams - there is no additional muxer layer when using quic.
Iroh is still awesome.
dignifiedquire 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, but libp2p was mainly designed around the limitations of tcp, as quic simply wasn't there yet when the design started. Iroh gets the benefit of having been designed and built from the ground up, based on quic.
dannyobrien 2 hours ago [-]
would it possible to have iroh as a libp2p pluggable transport? So you could dial a iroh node with /iroh/proxy/ed25519key?
It doesn't seem to do anything when you click Run Live, besides updating the status to "Connecting to DERP relay, exchanging endpoint info..."
kfarr 2 hours ago [-]
Classic... want to cast to the chromecast but I'm on the wifi
system2 4 hours ago [-]
Is bypassing the router a good idea?
Arqu 3 hours ago [-]
Yes if you want to. Routers are a necessary abstraction from the IPv4 days and seems it will stick around for a long time, and we need solutions sometimes around those topologies.
rpcope1 3 hours ago [-]
Are you conflating a router with SNAT? Routers as in L3 routing are not an "IPv4 only abstraction."
Arqu 2 hours ago [-]
Yes I used it in place of NAT for most casual users at home, which is presumably what the user above originally meant.
Kevcmk 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not affiliated with Iroh or even using it, but... "IP works just fine". What!? This is _not_ a solved problem
PantaloonFlames 4 hours ago [-]
I think that was the question: What is the problem it is solving ?
You’ve asserted “THIS is not a solved problem,” which suggests everyone is clear on what THIS means. I think that is not a good assumption.
shevy-java 3 hours ago [-]
But what is the actual problem?
duped 2 hours ago [-]
Establishing fast/secure P2P connections between computers.
Arqu 4 hours ago [-]
Establishing direct connections on the other hand is a much harder problem with the current internet infrastructure.
octoberfranklin 2 hours ago [-]
DNS is highly centralized. Iroh isn't.
UltraSane 3 hours ago [-]
From what I can tell Iroh seems to be trying to create the missing Session layer from the OSI model. Another example of trying to do this is Cisco's Location-Identity Separation Protocol.
Lack of a true session layer in TCP/IP is why vmotion is normally only possible in a single broadcast domain because in this situation you only really use mac addresses for addressing and can thus use the IP as a stable identifier when the MAC address changes after a vmotion. And the switch mac address table handles the mapping.
CommanderData 3 hours ago [-]
DNS isn't decentralised it's more federated. I believe Iroh has the option to use DHT here, last I looked at least.
rklaehn 3 hours ago [-]
Exactly. We use DNS TXT records for our default address lookup system. But we also support fully p2p address lookup via the mainline DHT.
And if you have another suitable system, you can also plug it in. E.g. you might want to use another DHT that allows mapping from a key to some address data.
huflungdung 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
miki123211 1 hours ago [-]
I like the idea. A couple of questions:
1. How does Iroh handle key rotation / leakage? Could you build some kind of hot/cold system on top of it, where you'd have a cold "identity key" in airgapped, secure storage, used only to issue certificates for your hot "traffic acceptance" key?
2. Is there any kind of peer discovery / DHT, either built-in directly or through some semi-official higher-level protocol, like DNS for IP?
3. What about human-friendly peer names? Those are almost required for end-user friendly applications. Most solutions of that problem either assume that every single user is willing to dedicate their life to configuring DNS, rely on a trusted third party, or delegate the responsibility to a blockchain.
4. What are the channel reliability properties, and are they configurable? Can you decide how to handle out-of-order or lost packets, or does the protocol enforce a decision? If you're willing to tolerate loss, duplication and reordering, can you avoid head-of-line blocking?
5. Is peer anonymity a goal?
6. What about two mostly-offline peers who wish to communicate (think smartphone apps that can't be connected 24/7 due to battery concerns)?
Overall, cool project.
rklaehn 49 minutes ago [-]
1. Currently we are using Ed25519 keys. You could use our existing discovery services to add a level of indirection from a root key to the currently active key. It wouldn't be that much code, since the discovery services are pretty generic. But we haven't done so yet.
2. We have a centralized DNS based discovery mechanism enabled by default, and an optional bittorrent mainline DHT based discovery mechanism. We also have mDNS for local networks, and you can plug in your own.
3. Our current keys are non scarce but also not human readable. You can use another level of indirection via DNS or some blockchain based naming system like ENS to assign a human readable alias, but that is not built in.
4. Iroh streams are just QUIC streams, and reliable and ordered by default. There are APIs to receive data as it arrives, but this for really advanced users. Most users are best served by just using the streams as-is.
There is also an escape hatch if you don't want streams at all, e.g. if you have a consumer like a video codec that can deal with data loss themselves. We support QUIC unreliable datagrams ( https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9221 ).
5. Peer anonymity as in hiding the ip addr of a endpoint id can be achieved, but not with the default config. The default config is tuned for performance. You can hide your ip address by using one of the mixnet custom transports and disabling the ip transport.
6. Iroh is just connections. If a and b are never online at the same time they won't be able to communicate. You would have to write an iroh protocol that talks to some always online node. We do have some protocols that can be used to implement this, such as iroh docs, but that is not the main product.
logankeenan 5 hours ago [-]
Iroh has been amazing to work with and the engineers are so nice in the discord channel. The pragmatic approach to making p2p just work has been easy to understand. Their YouTube channel has great content too. Congrats on v1!
Doesn't it seem odd to have "Pricing" for a protocol that's meant to serve a similar function to IP addresses? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.
dignifiedquire 5 hours ago [-]
As others have already mentioned, iroh the core library and protocol is fully open source. But to finance the development of it, we offer additional services to make it easier to deploy and run it, especially for larger or more specialized use caes.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago [-]
Congrats for the launch, seems to have matured a bunch and Iroh gotten a bunch of neat additions since I last looked! You even managed to get 1.0 out the door before go-ipfs / Kubo ;)
> But to finance the development of it, we offer additional services to make it easier to deploy and run it, especially for larger or more specialized use caes.
Interesting (and somewhat proven) idea to finance it, smart :)
Did you guys started doing this already on a case-by-case basis and have some experience of it already, and if so what are the common things you typically help out with exactly? I'm just curious what sort of things a company who'd use a protocol like that might need help with, that they wouldn't have experience with in-house, since they're going down a P2P road already (assuming that, maybe maybe need help with greenfield projects)?
I think it would be clearer if you put the "Pricing" navbar link under "Services."
noworriesnate 4 hours ago [-]
I don't mind paying for a subscription, as long as I'm not also paying for the privilege of being locked in to a specific vendor. If I pay for a subscription and then your prices quadruple or something, what are my options? Can I self-host a relay? Do I lose features if I do so?
moritzruth 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not affiliated. From what I understand, they provide an open-source implementation of the relay server: https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh/tree/main/iroh-relay (which may or may not be what they actually run as part of their hosted offering).
If you use their offering, you probably get some kind of web interface for metrics that isn't open-source.
karissa 3 hours ago [-]
Correct
karissa 3 hours ago [-]
Yes you can self-host your relays. Forever! Please check out the docs & hosting pages more information:
"we want to be infrastructure for people, and a business towards professionals."
stuck between "we need cash to operate" and "we want to be a public good infrastructural system." , with the negative parts of a for-profit whisked away with "Well it's open source."
it's a business concept i'm okayish with as long as the "Well it's open source." caveat doesn't come with a total bespoke and unusable code base to figure out.
rklaehn 4 hours ago [-]
Take a look yourself.
Our code is as good as we can make it, and everything is modular and well documented. For example our QUIC implementation noq which underlies every iroh connection can also be used as a standalone QUIC impl that implements QUIC multipath.
If we wanted to have "total bespoke and unusable code" we would have inlined all of this into the iroh repo to make it unusable.
colinmarc 4 hours ago [-]
Not affiliated, but I am a very happy user of Tailscale and a very happy user of Iroh; we use the latter in production at work.
Tailscale is a great service that happens to be open source, but Iroh is clearly structured as a library that you can build into whatever you want.
PLG88 3 hours ago [-]
fwiw, Tailscale happens to be mostly open source, not completely. Yes, I know Headscale exists, it does not implement all the Tailscale functions (not non-functional production type capabilities)
w4der 3 hours ago [-]
RustDesk has a similar business model and works fine for what it is, is there something particular about TailScale and Iroh that makes you think it will not work?
Kinrany 5 hours ago [-]
From the same pricing page, it's all additional services: observability, relay hosting, support engineers.
TheDong 4 hours ago [-]
The equivalent for IP addresses to what they offer would be closer to running a BGP router or ISP, or generally contracting with network engineers for your data-center's networking.
If you want to run an ISP or AS, believe me it will cost you a decent chunk of money.
icedchai 2 hours ago [-]
I've been running my own AS for years. You can get an ASN and IPv6 from a RIPE LIR for $200/year or less. Then you need a couple of VPSes that are BGP capable. You can get those for $20 month. Then you can tunnel traffic back to your location with a Wireguard tunnel or whatever you prefer. It's relatively cheap! I also have a legacy IPv4 block I'm routing, which doesn't cost me anything.
adammarples 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe. It's offering "Customized hosting and monitoring for Iroh apps".
colinmarc 4 hours ago [-]
We use Iroh in production at work, and I'm absolutely in love with it. I'd describe it primarily as "Tailscale-style hole punching as a rust crate", but of course you can sprinkle a lot of cool p2p stuff on top of the basic QUIC connections.
3 hours ago [-]
dignifiedquire 3 hours ago [-]
thank you!
arilotter 3 hours ago [-]
My company was using Iroh for a production distributed ML training system & we LOVED it. The team was incredibly responsive even before we hooked up with an enterprise support contract, they're incredibly knowledgeable and the library itself worked amazingly. ++ to this lib. would use again over libp2p anytime.
rklaehn 3 hours ago [-]
thank you!
virtualbluesky 28 minutes ago [-]
This might sound pointed, but it truly isn't - why is this approach not already commonplace? As a concept, looking up a verifiable identity makes sense, but often ideas that made sense were looked into and discarded for valid reasons. Would be good to understand those to better understand when/when not to use the project?
10 minutes ago [-]
akavel 33 minutes ago [-]
Huge congrats on the release!
I'm slowly trying to build an app on Iroh; it's progressing tiny bit by tiny bit, but I must admit I'm struggling a lot all the time, both with various low-level details, as well as with understanding many high-level aspects, concepts, and approaches. Oftentimes I have to resort to some LLM-generated "wiki" websites to help me progress. I really hope you'll manage one day to allocate some more resources to improve the docs. That said, when I manage to muster enough strength, I do manage to grind some progress, and also it's good to know the underlying tech seems robust, given how many real-world solutions you've built on it!
At this moment, if I can try to ask one question: AFAIU Iroh emerged from an attempt at fixing IPFS. I also understand you've since focused more on providing the lower-level building blocks that would allow this and other solutions. Understanding some basics, but still having hard time to get a really solid grasp of the whole of Iroh, I wonder: between Iroh, p2panda, and Willow, what's available and what's missing / needs to be added if one wanted to try and build an "IPFS-like" with those technologies? I'm especially interested in an idea of a "new web" that would defuse DDoS of static websites in a Torrent-like way, forcing the downloading peers to also share their upstream bandwidth while doing this. I'm also thinking of e.g. a "globally-distributed Internet Archive", where I can easily download part of the Archive to my computer, and this automatically improves its availability on such "new web" for subsequent downloaders and browsers. Would you care to give a newbie something of a high-level overview of how one could try to do it over maybe some appropriate combination of Iroh+p2panda+Willow+DHT?
rklaehn 19 minutes ago [-]
We started as an IPFS implementation, but since then the scope of iroh has been reduced. Iroh is not IPFS, but more like libp2p.
If you want something like a globally distributed internet archive you would have to use protocols on top of iroh. For example iroh-blobs provides verified streaming of content-addressed data using the BLAKE3 tree hash function. It is very close to itself being 1.0 (probably Q3), but for now it requires you to know from where to stream the data.
What is missing to fully replace IPFS is a global distributed content discovery system. This is a really hard problem that IPFS itself never solved reliably in my opinion.
I also still want this to happen eventually, but the first step is to get the connection layer super reliable and fast, which we have done.
I wish you could also delegate this problem to the mainline DHT, but alas that is not possible because of some mainline limitiations. So I am working on the side on a new DHT, see https://www.iroh.computer/blog/lets-write-a-dht-1
yapancha 8 minutes ago [-]
Maybe it's just me but it's not clear immediately what this is about. I did get a sense after spending enough time. Just feedback.
kkapelon 4 hours ago [-]
Congrats on shipping
You need urgently a "versus" page that talks about tailscale/netbird/netmaker/zerotier/twingate/openziti
Looking at the use cases, right now I don't see anything that cannot be done with Tailscale...
kamranjon 4 hours ago [-]
To me this sounds like tailscale - does anyone have any insight into how what this is doing is similar or different?
forsalebypwner 4 hours ago [-]
Their use of addressing by keys instead of by IPs seems to be the main differentiator. Also the support for custom transports (BLE, LoRa, Tor) which appears to be in progress and not yet fully implemented.
I love Tailscale, it's deployed on all my devices. But I might check this out for the transports part in particular.
RationPhantoms 4 hours ago [-]
Tailscale uses MagicDNS which allows one to auto-generate a semi-memorable private hostname as well. I'm in the networking industry so I'm not seeing anything truly groundbreaking or that isn't offered elsewhere.
danudey 3 hours ago [-]
The pitch here appears to be that this can allow communication between services without having to add them to a tailnet or such; e.g. if you wanted to let a friend or coworker access some service on your local network without making them join a tailnet, add a public external endpoint to forward traffic, set up a VPN, etc.
IIUC you just send someone 'here is the connection information' and it just works automatically.
forsalebypwner 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah and my understanding of Iroh wasn't quite right either, it sounds like it's positioned to be more of a library to use in code, rather than a VPN solution like Tailscale.
I love MagicDNS - A long time ago I wrote a stupid Python script to have it continually generate MagicDNS names until one of them contained a word I was looking for.
hazkoulia 4 hours ago [-]
My 5 second summary: Tailscale connects devices and Iroh connects applications.
dignifiedquire 4 hours ago [-]
Tailscale is built to be global to your device, while iroh is built to be embedded into each application. This allows application developers and users a much more fine grained and bespoke setup, than having a single global bridge.
This isn't the same functionality - if I'm shipping a video conferencing application, tsnet would require all my customers be in my tailnet.
kkapelon 3 hours ago [-]
but if I am shipping a video conferencing application (where I control both the client and the server) I don't need nat traversal anymore. My clients will have outgoing connections to whichever co-ordination server I choose.
Tailscale is great for bringing devices/apps into a secure network when I cannot modify them in any way. If I have full access to the source code for everything, the story changes completely.
ranguna 3 hours ago [-]
What if you build a p2p video conferencing app with user controlled co-ordinator "server". Server in quotes, because maybe iroh works through the browser?
ramoz 3 hours ago [-]
Ive been prototyping with Iroh for awhile.
I think this tech (modern p2p) represents what agent-to-agent (a2a) should be built on.
Every agent should be reachable to each other without hosting itself as an http server.
I've been using iroh for a while now for personal projects. I wrote an utility for sharing locally running services with others: https://github.com/Kazik24/server_share
Glad I can finally update to 1.0. It's a great library.
jhbruhn 4 hours ago [-]
That to me looks like Reticulums [1] adressing ("Destinations") with transport done via QUIC. Does it add anything what Reticulum didn't already solve, other than using slightly different protocols - do they have an advantage?
What about censorship circumvention? Is there specialized DERP to DERP communication, that bridge over internet edge nodes doing DPI on QUIC?
rklaehn 39 minutes ago [-]
We do not use DERP. But yes, relay to relay communication is something we want to look into in the future for some use cases.
As of now relays are completely self contained and pretty dumb. The protocol does not require relay to relay communication, which means that the relay code can be relatively simple.
AgharaShyam 4 hours ago [-]
LM studio recently released a mobile app powered by Tailscale -- https://lmstudio.ai/link . Iroh seems like a perfect OSS alternative for implementing similar p2p features.
forsalebypwner 4 hours ago [-]
Tailscale is OSS AFAIK. Not their backend of course, but if you use Headscale then I believe every part is OSS.
dignifiedquire 3 hours ago [-]
tailscale also is written in go, making the integration on mobile especially, often times a lot harder and more expensive
basro 3 hours ago [-]
I wish it had support for a system similar to webrtc's offer and answer SDP messages.
From what I see, relay servers are doing a job that is equivalent to Stun + Turn + SignalingServer in WebRTC.
This is great for simplicity, but having Stun Turn and Signaling live in the same server would make it harder to secure.
For example, since in webrtc signaling is up to the user, it is most common to have signaling implemented as a web server, this allows you to have it behind cloudflare with the signaling server ip never exposed to the internet. If you are not interested in supporting turn, there is plenty of public Stun servers that can be used and Stun itself is a really cheap server to run.
For iroh, it seems if I wanted to self host relay servers I'd be forced to expose their IP to the web which would make them really expensive to run if one wanted to make them DDoS proof.
20 minutes ago [-]
edbaskerville 1 hours ago [-]
Hoping to use this to reboot an ancient abandoned project. At the time there wasn't a mature P2P connection layer that took care of all the realities of the modern Internet out of the box. Now there is, and it's great to see.
This isn't Tailscale because it does secure P2P connections between any pair of devices, whether or not they have Tailscale. This enables real end-user P2P for, e.g., local-first apps with no server infrastructure except relays for resilience. And even if you lose the relay servers, things keep on working the same for any hosts that don't need them.
Not an expert but this is how I understand it. Yggdrasil is a P2P mesh network. You configure peers to join the network and your computer becomes a relay node for everyone else to use. It doesn't work behind a NAT without port forwarding.
Iroh is kinda just a connection protocol. If you get given a public key for another computer, you can establish a connection. Like you would an IP address. The magic is in being able to establish that connection regardless of where either device is, and keeping that connection alive through changing network conditions.
astonex 5 hours ago [-]
Not sure what the difference is between this and any regular P2P network?
rklaehn 4 hours ago [-]
A difference between iroh and many p2p networks is that we try to use existing IETF standards (QUIC, TLS) as much as possible instead of reinventing the wheel. An iroh connection is just a QUIC connection, using TLS and TLS ALPNs for protocol negotiation.
If you look at an iroh connection using wireshark, it is just a QUIC connection. You can use all the existing tools, and a lot of things you learn when using iroh transfers to traditional QUIC connections and vice versa.
Most iroh contributors come out of the p2p world, and you could say that we had a bit of abstraction fatigue after working on regular P2P networks for some years.
We have also so far resisted the temptation to write a DHT, opting instead to use the biggest existing DHT, bittorrent mainline, for our p2p address lookup needs. Many traditional P2P networks come with their own implementation of a DHT for discovery.
Forgive me if this is an ignorant question, but does your use of the Mainline DHT mean that Bittorrent clients will be responding to P2P address lookups from Iroh?
rklaehn 4 hours ago [-]
First of all: the p2p address lookup is an optional feature. You have to explicitly enable it.
Mainline is incredibly frugal in terms of resource use, but we want it disabled by default so mobile apps don't look like bittorrent clients and get flagged by the OS.
When we do a p2p address lookup, every mainline server node could possibly be responding. Any bep_0044 record gets stored on 20 random mainline server nodes.
So a bittorrent client that participates in the DHT as a server and is long running enough to be included into the DHT routing tables will respond, yes.
octoberfranklin 2 hours ago [-]
> We have also so far resisted the temptation to write a DHT, opting instead to use the biggest existing DHT, bittorrent mainline, for our p2p address lookup needs. Many traditional P2P networks come with their own implementation of a DHT for discovery.
Bravo, because they always get it wrong.
DHTs used for decentralized DNS-like naming purposes have truly unique scaling requirements; you have to use a connectionless protocol (like bittorrent does) but everybody seems to be fixated on connection-oriented protocols like TCP, HTTP, and QUIC. The latter just don't work for this extreme use case.
No other use case on the entire internet requires such an extremely large out-degree for end-user nodes in the node connection graph. Allocating connection-state, even a very small amount, opens up the least-powerful nodes to easy DoS attacks. And from there it's easy for a motivated attacker to push the network away from decentralization and force it in to a highly-centralized state.
rklaehn 36 minutes ago [-]
I might be crazy, but I got a side project to write a DHT using iroh. The key is to use QUIC 0-rtt connections to keep the connection overhead minimal.
But at this point it is just a toy project to push the limits of what is possible with iroh and 0-rtt. It is not used in prod and won't be any time soon :-)
Hmm, this really looks more of a relay network for sale, kinda like steam p2p. The only real use-case I see for this is for exactly that, connecting two or more players where one of the players is the host.
Seems like it'll be a hard sell since steam is already so dominant and enterprise is dominated by tailscale... I see the proposal for being able to work with many different networks from different companies at the same time, but it's a pretty rare usecase and nothing some iptables can't solve.
I can see the argument for chat in heavily censored regions of the world, but not sure if there's any advantages that iroh can offer over other solutions.
Market fit will be hard to find, but best of luck.
int0x29 2 hours ago [-]
Steam sockets and CloudFlare's UDP forwarding really are different though. They provide ddos protection as well as route optimization due to lots of points of presence.
Here there seems to be no mention of ddos mitigation or shorter routes due to infrastructure. Yes you need a key to connect but your iroh relay server can still be attacked. I suppose you could roll your own distributed anycast system for this.
himata4113 1 hours ago [-]
I assume that the 'enterprise' relays have ddos protection. DDoS protection also comes standard these days, but we've seen attacks go from 20gbps to 20tbps so if uptime is required then tough luck.
mcdermott 33 minutes ago [-]
"If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea." --Zen of Python
born-jre 35 minutes ago [-]
As a person which tried to love libp2p so much this look. Great will definitely take deeper look
Kinrany 5 hours ago [-]
I wonder if Iroh and Zenoh could/should be used together.
The fundamental component of Iroh is p2p routing by key, and the main utility provided by Zenoh is message semantics. The two seem complementary.
Imustaskforhelp 5 hours ago [-]
Zenoh seems interesting but can you please give me some use case where both Iroh + zenoh can be combined to achieve something more trivially (ie. without hassle) or the use-cases of this combination. I'd be curious to know more about their combined use-cases!
Kinrany 4 hours ago [-]
...that's what I'm asking :)
jmward01 2 hours ago [-]
I think I see the value prop here. Beyond its intended use, what about creating a full VPN out of it? This takes care of the hard part for a lot of home users, opening your vpn up in a safe way. I know this is solved by many other tools so this isn't a new thing but it may increase adoption. Is there already something like that? I imagine you have considered this and if it doesn't already exist have a good reason for not including it. If so, what is that reason?
Which I just finished updating to 1.0. But it is currently lacking in breadth of API, so if you start using it let us know what you are missing. In the meantime https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-ffi has the other language bindings with a more comprehensive API
dangoodmanUT 3 hours ago [-]
iroh is consistently one of the most delightful projects i've ever worked with. The people reflect that too.
Congrats iroh team!
overgard 2 hours ago [-]
This sounds useful, but isn't this the problem that ipv6 is supposed to solve with 128bit addresses? (I'm not really familiar with why IPv6 never really seemed to take off -- does NAT block incoming IPv6 traffic? (I guess that's the other thing -- even though my devices all seem to have IPv6 addresses I can't recall ever using them))
rklaehn 2 hours ago [-]
IPV6 addresses are still addresses. They get assigned to your device, and change as you change networks.
Iroh addresses are (currently Ed25519) keys. They are not scarce, so you can create them on demand and keep them as you move from one network to another.
If IPv6 was everywhere I guess the hole punching feature of iroh would become less important, but the dial by key feature would remain just as important.
tancop 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
59 minutes ago [-]
w10-1 2 hours ago [-]
I definitely see the value! But I'm not confident I can tell whether there are e.g., security implications, and I couldn't find anything on point in the docs or on github (other than one discussion on authentication that mentions the information disclosed). Would love a whitepaper on that and any other issues adopters should consider.
rklaehn 2 hours ago [-]
We should definitely do a better job explaining this.
Regarding security, one thing to be aware of is that iroh connections are just standard QUIC connections secured using standard TLS with the (also standard) raw public keys in TLS extension.
We don't roll our own crypto. What little non-standard crypto we had previously was removed on the path to iroh 1.0.
So iroh connections are just as secure as the QUIC/TLS connections your browser makes to your banking app. Whenever there are some new concerns like for example post quantum security, we can benefit from industry standards.
E.g. we do already support optional post quantum key exchange to secure connections.
hey, I helped make this :) will try to answer questions where I can
piskov 5 hours ago [-]
Does this solve the problem of internet segmentation due to politcs?
For example: dns control, tls certification bans (just this month both let’s encrypt and globalsign started revoking Russian certificates), once google starts really complaining about https it gets ugly.
Russia aside, anyone else is closely watching (europe, brics, what have you)
rklaehn 4 hours ago [-]
I would say it is an excellent building block for application developers to route around the segmentation. There are several projects that work well in restricted enviroments that use iroh for some features. E.g. https://delta.chat/en/
E.g. you could write an excellent encrypted chat app using iroh, the Tor or Nym custom transport, and BLE or direct wifi for local connections.
You have to be careful though to make sure you configure the transports correctly in order not to expose data you don't want exposed. Iroh can be used in highly restricted environments, but the defaults favour performance over complete metadata privacy.
dignifiedquire 5 hours ago [-]
While it doesn't solve all the issues that come up through the current segmentation, it is very much possible today to assemble components that let you forget about segmentation while you use it.
And it is designed from the ground up, to use existing internet technologies, while avoiding the lock in and dependencies on browser vendors or other large players.
zelias 5 hours ago [-]
how can i make it give me zen-inspired life advice?
Hugsbox 5 hours ago [-]
I'd also like for it to prepare tea
projektfu 5 hours ago [-]
Jasmine tea and a game of Pai Sho.
dignifiedquire 4 hours ago [-]
the zen life advice will come if you use it long enough :)
eikenberry 2 hours ago [-]
Why a library and not a service/daemon? Or are you planning to write a server based on the library and just haven't got to that yet?
rklaehn 2 hours ago [-]
We think a library is more useful for widespread adoption. I can't get my mother to install a daemon, but I can get her to download an app that uses iroh under the hood.
Besides, as a lot of people have mentioned already, if you want a dedicated server there are a lot of existing options.
I've been working on a mesh network for private AI models running remotely, controlled by mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.). The mesh is constructed like a piconet, a few devices controlled by a single individual, layered on top of the internet.
How does it support semi-connected devices, intermittent connection failures, etc?
karissa 3 hours ago [-]
Hi, I also work on iroh.
Iroh is built for environments where connectivity is unreliable or intermittent, so it can be a good fit for use cases involving connection failures, offline periods, or semi-connected devices.
We provide a range of peer-to-peer protocols that don't require a central server, including key-value stores, blob transfer, collaborative documents, and streaming audio/video. These protocols are designed to synchronize devices back to a consistent state, even after long disconnections or network interruptions.
If you'd like to explore whether iroh could work for your use case, we're happy to chat. Feel free to email us at support@iroh.computer, and we can set up a call.
amatheus 5 hours ago [-]
This looks very interesting. I’m not sure I understand this, but it seems to me like it competes (or is in the same space as) both Tailscale and zeromq/nanomsg via the protocols? I think it would be nice to have a comparison page to make it easier to position it (I didn’t find one).
rklaehn 5 hours ago [-]
A key distinguishing factor is that iroh is meant to be used as a library that you can embed into your desktop, mobile or embedded apps.
Up to now our users are mostly teams that have a rust or C/C++ core, such as https://delta.chat/ . But now that we have bindings teams who use other languages should be able to use iroh.
So you can write e.g. an android and ios app that uses iroh direct connections under the hood, and the app user does not have to know or care about this at all.
matheus23 5 hours ago [-]
We keep thinking about ways to combine iroh + zeroMQ! I think these two could compose. (Not familiar with nanomsg myself)
About tailscale: It's similar, but iroh is not a VPN, so it doesn't add a TUN interface. Instead, you'd build iroh directly into your application. Using iroh you can build a VPN, and there are projects that do so (iroh-lan/iroh-vpn are some hobbyist projects). The upside of building it into your application is that it doesn't need special permissions and is easy to ship to the user.
wiremine 2 hours ago [-]
This looks really interesting... I think I grok the basic value prop.
However, I'm confused on the open source vs. commercial offerings. How do they differ? How do they work together?
rklaehn 30 minutes ago [-]
The core is open source and always will be. Crates are licensed the usual for rust: Apache2 and MIT. This also includes the relay servers.
In addition we provide services that any commercial deployment using iroh will probably find essential: observability and a custom non rate limited relay network, as well as priority access to the engineering team.
flub 32 minutes ago [-]
iroh is an open source library. The relay servers are open source too but number0 runs public, rate limited, relay servers that can be used by everyone. The commercial offerings are for dedicated relay servers and more insight into your network.
0x59 3 hours ago [-]
So this could be used as a streamlined way for client devices (mobile phones for example) to phone home to servers (google.com for example) with user data and bypass some local network controls? (DNS block lists, for example)
Is there an android SDK available?
peddling-brink 2 hours ago [-]
I’m thinking similarly. Seems delightful for malware development and exfil. But I haven’t confirmed how the actual connections are made.
Honestly I am happy that more remote access products are using QUIC, not WireGuard, for tunneling and realizing its technical benefits (e.g. AES hardware acceleration, dynamic endpoints, custom auth with JWT or mTLS, FIPS compliance, traffic masquerading as HTTP/3, etc.). I am a big fan of QUIC myself and I implemented it long ago in Octelium, which is a similar remote access product that's more centered around access control and zero trust rather than P2P connectivity. I believe QUIC should be the future of tunneling, especially when it comes to business and enterprise remote access use cases. Congrats on launching an I wish you the best of luck.
jbverschoor 3 hours ago [-]
Nice video production, but as you can see on this thread of nerds, the messaging is not clear.. Content first, presentation later.
rklaehn 2 hours ago [-]
We have plenty of very deep technical content on our blog, explaining features of QUIC such as 0-rtt, post-quantum key exchange, address validation tokens, embedded devices.
A great thing about iroh is that due to it being just QUIC, when you learn about iroh you also learn about details of QUIC that are useful and transferrable for traditional p2p QUIC connections.
MoonWalk 2 hours ago [-]
Not to mention that the title of the post doesn't even say what it is.
janandonly 2 hours ago [-]
This is big
> We built & continually check that iroh can compile to WASM & run in the browser
MostlyStable 4 hours ago [-]
I'm out of my technical depth here, but out of curiosity: is this meant to be a full replacement for the current IP address paradigm, or is this meant to be a specific tool on top of/alongside IP addresses that solves particular problems/frictions?
rklaehn 4 hours ago [-]
I would say it is not a replacement but an addition.
IP isn't going anywhere any time soon, but we add two capabilities on top. The ability to dial an endpoint by key, and the ability to get direct connections whenever possible.
That being said, if some other technology becomes popular that actually replaces the IP address paradigm, iroh is well positioned to make use of it. From the point of view of an iroh application developer nothing would change. You still dial by key, and iroh will just make sure under the hood to get you the best possible connection, IP or otherwise.
Arqu 4 hours ago [-]
A little bit of both. Natively it relies on QUIC and leverages existing IP infrastructure, however it also works with custom transports just as fine so you can interact via bluetooth for example.
Holepunch, formerly hypercore, formerly dat, is a great project. Their main language is js, which makes it difficult to embed into anything but js/ts applications.
Also, they are very principled when it comes to peer to peer purity, whereas iroh is a bit more pragmatic. We use dedicated relays to faciliate hole punching, whereas holepunch tries to use other peers as a temporary relay for hole punching messages.
Another difference is that holepunch have their own DHT, where we have a less decentralised address lookup service by default and use the mainline DHT as a fully p2p alternative.
So TLDR if you are doing js in the browser, holepunch.to might be a good fit. If you work on native mobile apps or embedded devices, iroh will be better since it is pretty frugal. If you work with node.js, both will work. Just evaluate them both and use what works better for you.
Thank you so much for the great reply! Answered all my questions - will definitely look closer!
Imustaskforhelp 5 hours ago [-]
Good for Iroh to have libraries within different languages.
I think that with Kotlin support, the creation of some android/multi-platform gui apps can be made easier if they want to use Iroh.
Arqu 5 hours ago [-]
Thanks, we agree! We used to have bindings for while but the maintenance burden at that point was too high. Now that 1.0 guarantees everyone some stability and we feel confident in the library, we have enough room to properly support it.
gnarlouse 3 hours ago [-]
Is the intent to replace the IP protocol ever?
rklaehn 2 hours ago [-]
No. IP isn't going anywhere. The intent is to provide additional capabilities on top of IP.
That being said, if IP ever gets replaced, your iroh based app will continue to work pretty much unchanged. Iroh will just get you the best possible connection (IP or whatever) under the hood.
28304283409234 4 hours ago [-]
I love it. I think. But I find it hard to parse tech videos with music in the background.
suwapat 4 hours ago [-]
Missing a native go version
rklaehn 3 hours ago [-]
Iroh is just a clever combination of existing standards such as QUIC with some draft RFCs and a tiny bit of clever custom logic added via TLS extensions.
So in theory a go implementation is possible using a go QUIC implementation that supports the multipath extension.
Our focus is the rust implementation, since it is very easy to use from compiled languages such as rust, C and C++ and to embed into languages such as js and python.
Edit: since iroh is just a library, it is also possible to link iroh into a go program. Linking a go program from other native languages is a bit of a pain, but linking a C or rust library into a go program is relatively straightforward and high performance.
karissa 3 hours ago [-]
Would you use it if there was a go version?
saberience 5 hours ago [-]
This page is basically useless in explaining what Iroh is or does and why I should care.
bel8 4 hours ago [-]
As I see, it tries to explain.
But as someone who's not a network specialist, I fail to see how this is not a glorified P2P DNS.
const ALPN: &[u8] = b"iroh-example/echo/0";
let endpoint = Endpoint::bind().await?;
// Open a connection to the accepting endpoint
let conn = endpoint.connect(addr, ALPN).await?;
// Open a bidirectional QUIC stream
let (mut send, mut recv) = conn.open_bi().await?;
// Send some data to be echoed
send.write_all(b"Hello, world!").await?;
send.finish()?;
// Receive the echo
let response = recv.read_to_end(1000).await?;
assert_eq!(&response, b"Hello, world!");
// As the side receiving the last application data - say goodbye
conn.close(0u32.into(), b"bye!");
// Close the endpoint and all its connections
endpoint.close().await;
dignifiedquire 4 hours ago [-]
I would love to see that P2P DNS you are talking about
bel8 1 hours ago [-]
Perhaps it doesn't exist because there's no real need.
embedding-shape 4 hours ago [-]
Such is life when you choose to be introduced to something by a version update blogpost, instead of clicking in the top-left corner and reading the landing page.
SubiculumCode 4 hours ago [-]
Did we choose, or was that the link we were given that introduced us to it.
embedding-shape 4 hours ago [-]
The whole experience is fully interactive and you get to chose your own adventure! If you get lost, top-left corner is a safe bet to go to the initial page. Welcome to the internet and enjoy :)
pseudalopex 4 hours ago [-]
This is true. But you could click the name in the top left. Or Docs.
IP addresses break, dial keys instead
Modular networking stack for direct, peer-to-peer connections between devices
iroh establishes direct connections whenever possible, falling back to relay servers if necessary. Get fast, efficient, reliable connections that are authenticated and encrypted end-to-end using QUIC.
nicebyte 3 hours ago [-]
I am confused why this is needed.
> IP addresses can break, without warning, and it's outside of your device's control.
We have DNS?
> Keys, however, are created & controlled by you. They stay the same as your device moves, and are yours to throw away, or not.
So are domain names? This page does not do a good job of helping me find what it is that I'm missing.
ben-schaaf 3 hours ago [-]
Your phone and laptop don't have stable IPs, let alone DNS entries pointing to them.
kkapelon 3 hours ago [-]
They do if you use tailscale and friends
ben-schaaf 2 hours ago [-]
Everyone I'd like to connect to isn't on my tailscale, nor do I want them to be.
guywithahat 59 minutes ago [-]
What you're missing is that they can't charge you for IP's, and someone else already charges you for DNS/domains. They would like to replace your IP's with keys they lookup. It's a cool idea and I would expect that they'll find a market, but I'm not sure this would be a breakthrough product for me
I have been playing around with building an Iroh Tunnel Sandstorm app that can connect two Sandstorm instances, and share some capabilities exposed from one Sandstorm instance to the other, as if the capabilities were local. Iroh has been very reliable throughout the process.
Netbird offers the same. Just based on wireguard and everything is open source.
MoonWalk 2 hours ago [-]
Is what?
shevy-java 3 hours ago [-]
> And because all data that comes from the connection is secured by that key, we can build up from that same key into identity, permissions, and attribution.
So basically they want to find out who is who. In other words: sniffing.
It's interesting how the discussion is currently shifting to meta-explain why sniffing is necessary. I noticed this at universities in the last years; people now either have a tablet or a smartphone or a yubico key. This will be extended in the future, there is no doubt about that. And they are selling it with fancy words, just as Iroh showed.
commandersaki 5 hours ago [-]
So what has the reception been like with IETF?
rklaehn 4 hours ago [-]
Iroh is a project that combines existing IETF standards in an interesting way. For example we use raw public keys in TLS for the key exchange https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7250 instead of coming up with our own key exchange scheme.
Our QUIC implementation noq is a standards compliant QUIC implementation that in addition to RFC9000 also implements the QUIC multipath draft RFC.
We try very hard not to invent new things unless absolutely necessary. In a few places we had to implement draft RFCs, QUIC multipath and QUIC NAT traversal. And there are some corners where we had to add our own extensions. But we try very hard to keep this to an absolute minimum.
Arqu 5 hours ago [-]
Were interacting with IETF on a number of projects and so far it's been going well :)
convolvatron 5 hours ago [-]
I should read the specs, but since it's such a foundational issue maybe someone who knows could respond briefly? the problem with a flat addressing space is that it requires every intermediate node to have state about every address, or perform a costly discovery mechanism for those it doesn't know about. is there a clever answer to this?
rklaehn 5 hours ago [-]
We have an answer, but it isn't really clever. We do have both built in and pluggable address lookup services.
Our default enabled address lookup service is using DNS in a creative way, but we also have a service that is fully peer to peer and is using the mainline DHT, specifically the bep_0044 extension that allows you to store a tiny bit of arbitrary data for an Ed keypair that you control.
The secret is that iroh still uses IPs under the hood :)
But with QUIC, your connections aren't bound to your four-tuple, your connection can migrate from e.g. WiFi to Cellular with only a small blip/hiccup.
And with QUIC multipath, you can have multiple four-tuples "active" at the same time. iroh uses e.g. a "real" IP path mainly, with a websocket-based HTTPS path via relay servers as the backup (e.g. in case UDP is blocked).
ssx-x1 4 hours ago [-]
reticullum is better, and faster
gamegod 4 hours ago [-]
Sounds good, but the first step in your quickstart is getting an API key, and I'm oh, so I guess your sales pitch was a lie and this is really just another Cloudflare-like play to build another intermediary in the internet. If that's not the case, then I shouldn't need an API key for hello world...
rklaehn 3 hours ago [-]
If you are a rust developer, you can just take a look at the examples in the iroh repo itself or in our iroh-examples repo.
Maybe it's in the video I didn't watch, but I really think paragraph one should make clear what kind of keys and why. Cryptographic? Asymmetric? How do they do the job, at even the most basic level? It never explains, just dives into abstract claims of superiority and usage stats. I gather relays are involved; this would be a good thing to mention right away instead of making me sift it from the HN discussion.
A question that frequently comes up: when will iroh support webrtc, or BLE, or LoRa, or ...
Iroh as of now supports only IPv4, IPv6 and relay transports out of the box. There is such a large variety of potentially interesting transports out there that we can't support all of them without turning the codebase into an unmaintainable maze of feature flags.
But we have added the ability to implement custom transports. That way your transport implementation can live in a completely separate crate.
Existing experimental custom transports include Tor, Nym and BLE. https://github.com/mcginty/iroh-ble-transport
Here is how custom transports work under the hood: https://www.iroh.computer/blog/iroh-0-97-0-custom-transports...
Last year, I was trying to choose between the two and went with that I know... but it feels like there's real momentum on Iroh's side.
I'm trying to understand it's limitations, if I used this to build a p2p client / server setup or even two peer machines, what else do I need to setup to be able to have connections between the two applications?
For example, could I create an application that runs on my phone and another that runs on my laptop and finally get a direct secured working connection between the two of them? Or is this solving a different problem? =)
-[0]: p2p chat, in rust, from scratch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogN_mBkWu7o
Here is a video of frando from our team demoing media over QUIC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3qqyu1mmGQ
If you use the default setup you are still depending on a tiny bit of cloud infrastructure such as our public relays to faciliate the hole punching. However, we also have optional local discovery using e.g. mDNS.
So you might get a lot of traffic. You can configure rate limiting, as we do on our public relays.
The traffic is fully encrypted and can not be decrypted by the relay. The only information the relay has is what is necessary for it to function - the endpoint id and ip addresses of the endpoints that are connected to it at any given time, as well as endpoint pairings.
You relay encrypted traffic with no egress to the open internet. So if you want to compare it with Tor, it would be like a tor guard/middle relay, not an exit node.
Nice. I already do rate limiting, traffic balancing using sch cake. This looks like an interesting project. I could envision open source NVR's implementing this. I also like the name of the project.
you are using a Tor daemon in it. tor has a rust implementation and when used with rust has stream objects etc.
an example of how it's used can be found in https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/oniux
Arguably directly embedding the rust tor implementation would be more useful for the typical iroh user that wants an embeddable library. I just did not get to it yet.
But thanks for the link.
Strategy patterns and code-centralised feature management ftw :)
How current is the PyPI package? https://pypi.org/project/iroh/
Only the owner of the corresponding private key can initiate a connection from their public key, or receive a connection attempt to their public key.
Let's say you have alice and bob talking via a relay. Even if you have the private key of alice, you can impersonate alice to bob, but not vice versa. So you can't initiate a connection between the two.
To really intercept data you would need the private keys of both participants.
I am not aware of a LoRa custom transport yet, but that is not unexpected given that the custom transport API is relatively new, and our main focus has been on getting iroh 1.0 out of the door.
There is already IPv6 and quic, you need vendor and major software to have any traction in that field.
Here is a concrete problem we solve. You have one device in your home WLAN behind a NAT. Your other device is in a 4g network, or behind another NAT at work.
In most cases we can give you a direct connection between the two devices very quickly via hole punching, so you get the highest possible bandwidth and the lowest possible latency.
This was not a solved problem until now.
https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works
p2p apps need direct connections.
> there is one giant "network" of all your nodes
From what I understand they're saying, the point is that you get easy connections to things that aren't "your" nodes, sort of like allowing me to connect one of my tailscale nodes ad-hoc to one of your tailscale nodes, when our accounts are not related in any way prior to us doing that, and without me having to allow your node onto my network or you allow one of mine onto your network and have to deal with the specialized ACLs for that, since it's just a direct connection between two nodes.
The similarities are in an application lib to connect, and that tail net IPs correspond to device keys like in Iroh. The service using the Go library has its own Tailscale identity.
[1]: PeerJS(https://peerjs.com/) is a library to use WebRTC w/o any boilerplate code. [2]: WebRTC functionality can be enabled in non-browser envs like Node.js by using third-party native addons (like node-webrtc) that provide bindings to the underlying C++ WebRTC library.
Here this is a decentralized network with a lot of existing public relays. But in principle a VPN can solve a lot of the same problems. It's just that commercial VPNs are not decentralized, and doing your own wireguard setup is a pain.
https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works
This allows you to provide information to an arbitrary person (a friend/coworker/etc) to let them access the thing without them having to jump through all the extra hoops of joining your tailnet/them joining yours/adding a VPN/etc.
There are policies defining who can talk to what; they are deployed from a GitHub repository with defined rules on who can modify them and who has to review them; there are zero scenarios where I want an alternative way of granting access to any device or service under our control.
If I wanted to share something internal with a friend I would use ngrok or any of the million alternatives.
Anyway, this is exactly why my top-level comment says that this project needs a "versus" page in the docs.
So libp2p builds many things on top of the underlying transport where we use QUIC directly and use existing mechanisms such as TLS ALPNs for protocol negotiation.
We also use the stream multiplexing that is built into QUIC instead of putting a stream multiplexer on top of QUIC.
You can think about it like this: libp2p abstracts transports as streams, and then puts many required features on top (protocol negotiation, stream multiplexing)
Iroh uses QUIC and abstracts transports below QUIC. We can work with any unreliable datagram transport that has (or can be hacked to have) a minimum MTU of 1200 bytes (needed to be QUIC compliant).
Iroh is still awesome.
You’ve asserted “THIS is not a solved problem,” which suggests everyone is clear on what THIS means. I think that is not a good assumption.
Lack of a true session layer in TCP/IP is why vmotion is normally only possible in a single broadcast domain because in this situation you only really use mac addresses for addressing and can thus use the IP as a stable identifier when the MAC address changes after a vmotion. And the switch mac address table handles the mapping.
And if you have another suitable system, you can also plug it in. E.g. you might want to use another DHT that allows mapping from a key to some address data.
1. How does Iroh handle key rotation / leakage? Could you build some kind of hot/cold system on top of it, where you'd have a cold "identity key" in airgapped, secure storage, used only to issue certificates for your hot "traffic acceptance" key?
2. Is there any kind of peer discovery / DHT, either built-in directly or through some semi-official higher-level protocol, like DNS for IP?
3. What about human-friendly peer names? Those are almost required for end-user friendly applications. Most solutions of that problem either assume that every single user is willing to dedicate their life to configuring DNS, rely on a trusted third party, or delegate the responsibility to a blockchain.
4. What are the channel reliability properties, and are they configurable? Can you decide how to handle out-of-order or lost packets, or does the protocol enforce a decision? If you're willing to tolerate loss, duplication and reordering, can you avoid head-of-line blocking?
5. Is peer anonymity a goal?
6. What about two mostly-offline peers who wish to communicate (think smartphone apps that can't be connected 24/7 due to battery concerns)?
Overall, cool project.
2. We have a centralized DNS based discovery mechanism enabled by default, and an optional bittorrent mainline DHT based discovery mechanism. We also have mDNS for local networks, and you can plug in your own.
3. Our current keys are non scarce but also not human readable. You can use another level of indirection via DNS or some blockchain based naming system like ENS to assign a human readable alias, but that is not built in.
4. Iroh streams are just QUIC streams, and reliable and ordered by default. There are APIs to receive data as it arrives, but this for really advanced users. Most users are best served by just using the streams as-is.
https://docs.rs/noq/latest/noq/struct.RecvStream.html#method...
There is also an escape hatch if you don't want streams at all, e.g. if you have a consumer like a video codec that can deal with data loss themselves. We support QUIC unreliable datagrams ( https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9221 ).
https://docs.rs/noq/latest/noq/struct.Connection.html#method...
5. Peer anonymity as in hiding the ip addr of a endpoint id can be achieved, but not with the default config. The default config is tuned for performance. You can hide your ip address by using one of the mixnet custom transports and disabling the ip transport.
6. Iroh is just connections. If a and b are never online at the same time they won't be able to communicate. You would have to write an iroh protocol that talks to some always online node. We do have some protocols that can be used to implement this, such as iroh docs, but that is not the main product.
https://youtube.com/@n0computer
> But to finance the development of it, we offer additional services to make it easier to deploy and run it, especially for larger or more specialized use caes.
Interesting (and somewhat proven) idea to finance it, smart :)
Did you guys started doing this already on a case-by-case basis and have some experience of it already, and if so what are the common things you typically help out with exactly? I'm just curious what sort of things a company who'd use a protocol like that might need help with, that they wouldn't have experience with in-house, since they're going down a P2P road already (assuming that, maybe maybe need help with greenfield projects)?
If you use their offering, you probably get some kind of web interface for metrics that isn't open-source.
https://docs.iroh.computer/concepts/relays https://www.iroh.computer/services/hosting
"we want to be infrastructure for people, and a business towards professionals."
stuck between "we need cash to operate" and "we want to be a public good infrastructural system." , with the negative parts of a for-profit whisked away with "Well it's open source."
it's a business concept i'm okayish with as long as the "Well it's open source." caveat doesn't come with a total bespoke and unusable code base to figure out.
Our code is as good as we can make it, and everything is modular and well documented. For example our QUIC implementation noq which underlies every iroh connection can also be used as a standalone QUIC impl that implements QUIC multipath.
https://docs.rs/noq/latest/noq/
If we wanted to have "total bespoke and unusable code" we would have inlined all of this into the iroh repo to make it unusable.
Tailscale is a great service that happens to be open source, but Iroh is clearly structured as a library that you can build into whatever you want.
If you want to run an ISP or AS, believe me it will cost you a decent chunk of money.
I'm slowly trying to build an app on Iroh; it's progressing tiny bit by tiny bit, but I must admit I'm struggling a lot all the time, both with various low-level details, as well as with understanding many high-level aspects, concepts, and approaches. Oftentimes I have to resort to some LLM-generated "wiki" websites to help me progress. I really hope you'll manage one day to allocate some more resources to improve the docs. That said, when I manage to muster enough strength, I do manage to grind some progress, and also it's good to know the underlying tech seems robust, given how many real-world solutions you've built on it!
At this moment, if I can try to ask one question: AFAIU Iroh emerged from an attempt at fixing IPFS. I also understand you've since focused more on providing the lower-level building blocks that would allow this and other solutions. Understanding some basics, but still having hard time to get a really solid grasp of the whole of Iroh, I wonder: between Iroh, p2panda, and Willow, what's available and what's missing / needs to be added if one wanted to try and build an "IPFS-like" with those technologies? I'm especially interested in an idea of a "new web" that would defuse DDoS of static websites in a Torrent-like way, forcing the downloading peers to also share their upstream bandwidth while doing this. I'm also thinking of e.g. a "globally-distributed Internet Archive", where I can easily download part of the Archive to my computer, and this automatically improves its availability on such "new web" for subsequent downloaders and browsers. Would you care to give a newbie something of a high-level overview of how one could try to do it over maybe some appropriate combination of Iroh+p2panda+Willow+DHT?
If you want something like a globally distributed internet archive you would have to use protocols on top of iroh. For example iroh-blobs provides verified streaming of content-addressed data using the BLAKE3 tree hash function. It is very close to itself being 1.0 (probably Q3), but for now it requires you to know from where to stream the data.
What is missing to fully replace IPFS is a global distributed content discovery system. This is a really hard problem that IPFS itself never solved reliably in my opinion.
I also still want this to happen eventually, but the first step is to get the connection layer super reliable and fast, which we have done.
I wish you could also delegate this problem to the mainline DHT, but alas that is not possible because of some mainline limitiations. So I am working on the side on a new DHT, see https://www.iroh.computer/blog/lets-write-a-dht-1
You need urgently a "versus" page that talks about tailscale/netbird/netmaker/zerotier/twingate/openziti
Looking at the use cases, right now I don't see anything that cannot be done with Tailscale...
I love Tailscale, it's deployed on all my devices. But I might check this out for the transports part in particular.
IIUC you just send someone 'here is the connection information' and it just works automatically.
I love MagicDNS - A long time ago I wrote a stupid Python script to have it continually generate MagicDNS names until one of them contained a word I was looking for.
Tailscale is great for bringing devices/apps into a secure network when I cannot modify them in any way. If I have full access to the source code for everything, the story changes completely.
I think this tech (modern p2p) represents what agent-to-agent (a2a) should be built on.
Every agent should be reachable to each other without hosting itself as an http server.
related prototypes
https://github.com/eqtylab/agentbeam
https://github.com/eqtylab/real-a2a
[1] https://reticulum.network/
https://github.com/Nuhvi/pkarr/
As of now relays are completely self contained and pretty dumb. The protocol does not require relay to relay communication, which means that the relay code can be relatively simple.
From what I see, relay servers are doing a job that is equivalent to Stun + Turn + SignalingServer in WebRTC.
This is great for simplicity, but having Stun Turn and Signaling live in the same server would make it harder to secure. For example, since in webrtc signaling is up to the user, it is most common to have signaling implemented as a web server, this allows you to have it behind cloudflare with the signaling server ip never exposed to the internet. If you are not interested in supporting turn, there is plenty of public Stun servers that can be used and Stun itself is a really cheap server to run.
For iroh, it seems if I wanted to self host relay servers I'd be forced to expose their IP to the web which would make them really expensive to run if one wanted to make them DDoS proof.
This isn't Tailscale because it does secure P2P connections between any pair of devices, whether or not they have Tailscale. This enables real end-user P2P for, e.g., local-first apps with no server infrastructure except relays for resilience. And even if you lose the relay servers, things keep on working the same for any hosts that don't need them.
Iroh is kinda just a connection protocol. If you get given a public key for another computer, you can establish a connection. Like you would an IP address. The magic is in being able to establish that connection regardless of where either device is, and keeping that connection alive through changing network conditions.
If you look at an iroh connection using wireshark, it is just a QUIC connection. You can use all the existing tools, and a lot of things you learn when using iroh transfers to traditional QUIC connections and vice versa.
Most iroh contributors come out of the p2p world, and you could say that we had a bit of abstraction fatigue after working on regular P2P networks for some years.
We have also so far resisted the temptation to write a DHT, opting instead to use the biggest existing DHT, bittorrent mainline, for our p2p address lookup needs. Many traditional P2P networks come with their own implementation of a DHT for discovery.
Note that there are some "regular p2p networks" that use iroh under the hood, e.g. holochain https://blog.holochain.org/dev-pulse-154-holochain-0-6-1-is-... as well as various p2p chat apps.
https://blog.holochain.org/dev-pulse-154-holochain-0-6-1-is-...
Mainline is incredibly frugal in terms of resource use, but we want it disabled by default so mobile apps don't look like bittorrent clients and get flagged by the OS.
When we do a p2p address lookup, every mainline server node could possibly be responding. Any bep_0044 record gets stored on 20 random mainline server nodes.
So a bittorrent client that participates in the DHT as a server and is long running enough to be included into the DHT routing tables will respond, yes.
Bravo, because they always get it wrong.
DHTs used for decentralized DNS-like naming purposes have truly unique scaling requirements; you have to use a connectionless protocol (like bittorrent does) but everybody seems to be fixated on connection-oriented protocols like TCP, HTTP, and QUIC. The latter just don't work for this extreme use case.
No other use case on the entire internet requires such an extremely large out-degree for end-user nodes in the node connection graph. Allocating connection-state, even a very small amount, opens up the least-powerful nodes to easy DoS attacks. And from there it's easy for a motivated attacker to push the network away from decentralization and force it in to a highly-centralized state.
But at this point it is just a toy project to push the limits of what is possible with iroh and 0-rtt. It is not used in prod and won't be any time soon :-)
https://www.iroh.computer/blog/lets-write-a-dht-1
Seems like it'll be a hard sell since steam is already so dominant and enterprise is dominated by tailscale... I see the proposal for being able to work with many different networks from different companies at the same time, but it's a pretty rare usecase and nothing some iptables can't solve.
I can see the argument for chat in heavily censored regions of the world, but not sure if there's any advantages that iroh can offer over other solutions.
Market fit will be hard to find, but best of luck.
Here there seems to be no mention of ddos mitigation or shorter routes due to infrastructure. Yes you need a key to connect but your iroh relay server can still be attacked. I suppose you could roll your own distributed anycast system for this.
The fundamental component of Iroh is p2p routing by key, and the main utility provided by Zenoh is message semantics. The two seem complementary.
[0]: https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-c-ffi
Congrats iroh team!
Iroh addresses are (currently Ed25519) keys. They are not scarce, so you can create them on demand and keep them as you move from one network to another.
If IPv6 was everywhere I guess the hole punching feature of iroh would become less important, but the dial by key feature would remain just as important.
Regarding security, one thing to be aware of is that iroh connections are just standard QUIC connections secured using standard TLS with the (also standard) raw public keys in TLS extension.
We don't roll our own crypto. What little non-standard crypto we had previously was removed on the path to iroh 1.0.
So iroh connections are just as secure as the QUIC/TLS connections your browser makes to your banking app. Whenever there are some new concerns like for example post quantum security, we can benefit from industry standards.
E.g. we do already support optional post quantum key exchange to secure connections.
https://www.iroh.computer/blog/iroh-post-quantum-handshakes
For example: dns control, tls certification bans (just this month both let’s encrypt and globalsign started revoking Russian certificates), once google starts really complaining about https it gets ugly.
Russia aside, anyone else is closely watching (europe, brics, what have you)
E.g. you could write an excellent encrypted chat app using iroh, the Tor or Nym custom transport, and BLE or direct wifi for local connections.
You have to be careful though to make sure you configure the transports correctly in order not to expose data you don't want exposed. Iroh can be used in highly restricted environments, but the defaults favour performance over complete metadata privacy.
Besides, as a lot of people have mentioned already, if you want a dedicated server there are a lot of existing options.
We did write a few small dedicated applications to show off iroh, sendme https://www.iroh.computer/sendme and dumbpipe https://www.dumbpipe.dev/ .
How does it support semi-connected devices, intermittent connection failures, etc?
Iroh is built for environments where connectivity is unreliable or intermittent, so it can be a good fit for use cases involving connection failures, offline periods, or semi-connected devices.
We provide a range of peer-to-peer protocols that don't require a central server, including key-value stores, blob transfer, collaborative documents, and streaming audio/video. These protocols are designed to synchronize devices back to a consistent state, even after long disconnections or network interruptions.
If you'd like to explore whether iroh could work for your use case, we're happy to chat. Feel free to email us at support@iroh.computer, and we can set up a call.
Up to now our users are mostly teams that have a rust or C/C++ core, such as https://delta.chat/ . But now that we have bindings teams who use other languages should be able to use iroh.
So you can write e.g. an android and ios app that uses iroh direct connections under the hood, and the app user does not have to know or care about this at all.
About tailscale: It's similar, but iroh is not a VPN, so it doesn't add a TUN interface. Instead, you'd build iroh directly into your application. Using iroh you can build a VPN, and there are projects that do so (iroh-lan/iroh-vpn are some hobbyist projects). The upside of building it into your application is that it doesn't need special permissions and is easy to ship to the user.
However, I'm confused on the open source vs. commercial offerings. How do they differ? How do they work together?
In addition we provide services that any commercial deployment using iroh will probably find essential: observability and a custom non rate limited relay network, as well as priority access to the engineering team.
Is there an android SDK available?
A great thing about iroh is that due to it being just QUIC, when you learn about iroh you also learn about details of QUIC that are useful and transferrable for traditional p2p QUIC connections.
IP isn't going anywhere any time soon, but we add two capabilities on top. The ability to dial an endpoint by key, and the ability to get direct connections whenever possible.
That being said, if some other technology becomes popular that actually replaces the IP address paradigm, iroh is well positioned to make use of it. From the point of view of an iroh application developer nothing would change. You still dial by key, and iroh will just make sure under the hood to get you the best possible connection, IP or otherwise.
Also, they are very principled when it comes to peer to peer purity, whereas iroh is a bit more pragmatic. We use dedicated relays to faciliate hole punching, whereas holepunch tries to use other peers as a temporary relay for hole punching messages.
Another difference is that holepunch have their own DHT, where we have a less decentralised address lookup service by default and use the mainline DHT as a fully p2p alternative.
So TLDR if you are doing js in the browser, holepunch.to might be a good fit. If you work on native mobile apps or embedded devices, iroh will be better since it is pretty frugal. If you work with node.js, both will work. Just evaluate them both and use what works better for you.
E.g. we support tiny embedded devices such as esp32. https://www.iroh.computer/blog/iroh-on-esp32
I think that with Kotlin support, the creation of some android/multi-platform gui apps can be made easier if they want to use Iroh.
That being said, if IP ever gets replaced, your iroh based app will continue to work pretty much unchanged. Iroh will just get you the best possible connection (IP or whatever) under the hood.
So in theory a go implementation is possible using a go QUIC implementation that supports the multipath extension.
Our focus is the rust implementation, since it is very easy to use from compiled languages such as rust, C and C++ and to embed into languages such as js and python.
But there are some other projects that attempt to provide a native go implementation: https://github.com/tmc/go-iroh
Edit: since iroh is just a library, it is also possible to link iroh into a go program. Linking a go program from other native languages is a bit of a pain, but linking a C or rust library into a go program is relatively straightforward and high performance.
But as someone who's not a network specialist, I fail to see how this is not a glorified P2P DNS.
Maybe this example helps:
https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh#rust-library
IP addresses break, dial keys instead
Modular networking stack for direct, peer-to-peer connections between devices
iroh establishes direct connections whenever possible, falling back to relay servers if necessary. Get fast, efficient, reliable connections that are authenticated and encrypted end-to-end using QUIC.
> IP addresses can break, without warning, and it's outside of your device's control.
We have DNS?
> Keys, however, are created & controlled by you. They stay the same as your device moves, and are yours to throw away, or not.
So are domain names? This page does not do a good job of helping me find what it is that I'm missing.
Also you can join our discord and there's #showcase https://iroh.computer/discord
So basically they want to find out who is who. In other words: sniffing.
It's interesting how the discussion is currently shifting to meta-explain why sniffing is necessary. I noticed this at universities in the last years; people now either have a tablet or a smartphone or a yubico key. This will be extended in the future, there is no doubt about that. And they are selling it with fancy words, just as Iroh showed.
Our QUIC implementation noq is a standards compliant QUIC implementation that in addition to RFC9000 also implements the QUIC multipath draft RFC.
We try very hard not to invent new things unless absolutely necessary. In a few places we had to implement draft RFCs, QUIC multipath and QUIC NAT traversal. And there are some corners where we had to add our own extensions. But we try very hard to keep this to an absolute minimum.
Our default enabled address lookup service is using DNS in a creative way, but we also have a service that is fully peer to peer and is using the mainline DHT, specifically the bep_0044 extension that allows you to store a tiny bit of arbitrary data for an Ed keypair that you control.
https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0044.html
https://pkarr.org
Some custom transports such as TOR hidden services have a discovery system built in. In these cases we can just use the existing discovery system.
See for example https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-tor-transport
None of them require an API key.
https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh/tree/main/iroh/examples
https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-examples