DEF CON Infosec super-band the Cult of the Dead Cow has released Veilid (pronounced vay-lid), an open source project applications can use to connect up clients and transfer information in a peer-to-peer decentralized manner.
The idea being here that apps – mobile, desktop, web, and headless – can find and talk to each other across the internet privately and securely without having to go through centralized and often corporate-owned systems. Veilid provides code for app developers to drop into their software so that their clients can join and communicate in a peer-to-peer community.
In a DEF CON presentation today, Katelyn “medus4” Bowden and Christien “DilDog” Rioux ran through the technical details of the project, which has apparently taken three years to develop.
The system, written primarily in Rust with some Dart and Python, takes aspects of the Tor anonymizing service and the peer-to-peer InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). If an app on one device connects to an app on another via Veilid, it shouldn’t be possible for either client to know the other’s IP address or location from that connectivity, which is good for privacy, for instance. The app makers can’t get that info, either.
Veilid’s design is documented here, and its source code is here, available under the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0.
“IPFS was not designed with privacy in mind,” Rioux told the DEF CON crowd. “Tor was, but it wasn’t built with performance in mind. And when the NSA runs 100 [Tor] exit nodes, it can fail.”
Unlike Tor, Veilid doesn’t run exit nodes. Each node in the Veilid network is equal, and if the NSA wanted to snoop on Veilid users like it does on Tor users, the Feds would have to monitor the entire network, which hopefully won’t be feasible, even for the No Such Agency. Rioux described it as “like Tor and IPFS had sex and produced this thing.”
“The possibilities here are endless,” added Bowden. “All apps are equal, we’re only as strong as the weakest node and every node is equal. We hope everyone will build on it.”
Each copy of an app using the core Veilid library acts as a network node, it can communicate with other nodes, and uses a 256-bit public key as an ID number. There are no special nodes, and there’s no single point of failure. The project supports Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and web apps.
Veilid can talk over UDP and TCP, and connections are authenticated, timestamped, strongly end-to-end encrypted, and digitally signed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, and impersonation. The cryptography involved has been dubbed VLD0, and uses established algorithms since the project didn’t want to risk introducing weaknesses from “rolling its own,” Rioux said.
This means XChaCha20-Poly1305 for encryption, Elliptic curve25519 for public-private-key authentication and signing, x25519 for DH key exchange, BLAKE3 for cryptographic hashing, and Argon2 for password hash generation. These could be switched out for stronger mechanisms if necessary in future.
Files written to local storage by Veilid are fully encrypted, and encrypted table store APIs are available for developers. Keys for encrypting device data can be password protected.
“The system means there’s no IP address, no tracking, no data collection, and no tracking – that’s the biggest way that people are monetizing your internet use,” Bowden said.
“Billionaires are trying to monetize those connections, and a lot of people are falling for that. We have to make sure this is available,” Bowden continued. The hope is that applications will include Veilid and use it to communicate, so that users can benefit from the network without knowing all the above technical stuff: it should just work for them.
To demonstrate the capabilities of the system, the team built a Veilid-based secure instant-messaging app along the lines of Signal called VeilidChat, using the Flutter framework. Many more apps are needed.
If it takes off in a big way, Veilid could put a big hole in the surveillance capitalism economy. It’s been tried before with mixed or poor results, though the Cult has a reputation for getting stuff done right. ®
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Impressive design.
Implicit in the description is the weakness would be monitoring the entire network, somehow, if possible.
The more apps and nodes that run Veilid, the more private the system.
I look forward to adoption being vast and wide. The bigger the better.
But queue the 'but we need to protect the children ’ crowd and outlaw these protocols.
I wanted to have a look at the demo VeilidChat but it seems to be gone. Anyone has a working link?
How is this different from i2p?
I’m hyped AF, can’t wait till the documentation is a little more mature
I love this.
We need more security, more control over our own activities.
To people who plead we give up our anonymity to catch burglars, we already did that and we got mass surveillance by state, nation and the private sector. Seems like the burglars are still out there though.
I’m working on a similarish protocol (up, working) basically IPFS but better ;-) anyone know where I could get some feedback or show it to people interested in those kind of things?
Cheers
Holy cow, haven’t been to that bbs in like 30 years, awesome to see 👍🏽
I used to collect the Cult of The Dead Cow text files. Hacking, phreaking, and weird stories. Looks like someone gathered bunch of them here.
So, if I get it right, it’s basically a TOR network where every user is both an entry node, exit node and middle nodes, so the more users you get, the more private it is.
However, wouldn’t this also mean that just by using any of the apps, you are basically running an exit node - and now have to deal with everything that makes running a TOR exit node really dangerous and can get you into serious trouble, swatted or even ending up in jail?
From a quick google search, jail sentences for people operating TOR exit nodes are not as common as I though, but it still can mean that you will have to explain at a court why was your computer trasmitting highly illegal data to someone they caught. And courts are expensive, they will take all of your electronics and it’s generally a really risky endeavor.
Cause even in tor it eventually leaves the network.
This data could only be known that it came from your direction, but also known it wasn’t you transmitting it. Anything beyond that is just a sea - it’d be like arresting a truck driver for unknowingly moving drugs buried in stuffed animals.
They’d essentially have to by hand arrest every single node that participated to the source - assuming that chain was never broken along the way - to get anything reasonable out of an arrest.
Most importantly this is all public knowledge, so after a couple essentially useless arrests attempts for unknowingly hosting encrypted data, I believe they’d have to back off
They’d essentially have to by hand arrest every single node that participated to the source
I may be wrong on this, but I think that’s exactly the risk associated with hosting TOR Exit nodes.
If they bust a darknet server, for example one hosting child pornography, they sometimes end up with logs of every IP that was accessing the said node. IP of every exit node that someone used to route their traffic. And they do investigate, and it will affect your life, even if you are not doing anything illegal - and even that line is pretty blurry in some of the countries.
If that IP is yours, you will get a visit from police. Being accused of anything in regards to child pornography is not a laughing matter. From what I’ve heard, they may take all of your electronics, you will get interogated and you have to prove beyond doubt that you did not know that someone is using your computer - the exit node - for such activites. In some countries, merely enabling someone to distribute or access child porn - which is exactly what an exit node is doing - is illegal. And while TOR has been in the public knowledge for pretty long time, you may get a judge who has never heard about TOR and has to research it for your case. And in addition to that, you are now literally investigated of distributing child porn. If someone finds that out, it will ruin your reputation and history has shown that being accused of something is enough for many people, no matter the result. Good luck explaining to your grandmother how does TOR work, or to HR at your company why you are being investigated for child porn distribution or why they confiscated your company laptop.
That’s why there is so many warnings on never using your home IP for exit nodes - and that’s exactly what would happen in Veilid.
In general, running an exit node from your home Internet connection is not recommended, unless you are prepared for increased attention to your home. In the USA, there have been no equipment seizures due to Tor exits, but there have been phone calls and visits. In other countries, people have had all their home computing equipment seized for running an exit from their home internet connection.
So, it esentially boils down to who is handling the investigation of your case. The police can either accept that it’s an exit node and a waste of time and leave you alone, or they can make your life a living hell if they choose to.
what you are missing here is that they have to be able to prove that there’s illegal data going through your computer in the first place
If it’s the exit node for the illegal stuff, then would that point to you?
Veilid doesn’t have exit nodes
That’s how I read it too. More like a fully encrypted anonymized trackerless BitTorrent client (or even more like Hotline (a pair of sort of FTP/chat/bbs client and server apps) for the older pirates in the audience.
From how I understand it, in Veilid everyone is both and entry, relay and an exit node - there’s no distinction. Because you have to have exit nodes - the communication has to go though somewhere, so the receiving server will always know the IP of the last node (the exit one). It just has to go through somewhere. The whole main point of TOR (and Veiled, which seems based on the same thing) is that since you go through three nodes, each node can tell where is the request coming from, and where to send it. So the server doesn’t know where did the request came from, but knows the IP of the exit node.
The issue is that if they bust someone for doing illegal shit, your IP may be investigated. They don’t know what communication came from you, but something may have, since just by using veiled, you become an exit node. Or I’m misunderstanding it, but that’s what I understood from the description.
An exit node lets people inside the netwrok accesss clearweb website outside the netwrok. Veilid can’t do that. It’s for communicating inside the network only.
So far (to me) it looks like it doesn’t have the risks and compromises of TOR, and used right it can make the internet impossible to censor.
While the pirate in me says “hell yeah!”, the system administrator in me says “Fuuuuuuuck”. I was once part of an IRC network, and one of the biggest issue we had was with Brazilians who would break our rules and get banned. Just a minute or two later, they were back. It got so bad that we just said “Fuck it. We’re banning all of Brazil.” Not an ideal solution, but it beats spending our time chasing the majority offenders. It’s the 80/20 rule, where 80% of your problems are caused by 20% of your users.
Now let’s pretend somebody builds their new app around this new tech. I love the concept, but how do you keep order? How do you ensure people follow the rules? The only thing keeping users in line would be the fear of losing their “brand” (their username, their reputation). If the new app is something like a chatroom, there’s no “brand” to be had, and you can simply use a new name. It would, obviosly be very different if the app were based around file hosting like Google Drive, because you don’t want to lose your files, but anything with low retention will likely be rife with misconduct due to anonymity.
On the other hand, it would allow for a completely open internet, that no single government can shut down, which we’re seeing happening more and more, with China, Iran, Russia, and Myanmar all shutting down the Internet, or portions of it, when those in power feel there’s a threat to the status quo.
The only thing keeping users in line would be the fear of losing their “brand”
This is solving a non-problem. Yeah stupid script kiddies and trolls might care but that is noise easily blocked. The actual people causing harm, committing massive crimes that flood the system with government, or causing massive DoS attacks, none of them care or even want to have something they could lose on a system like this. Its better to be anonymous and not have a brand.
Look at what happens here in the Fediverse. People take time to exclude the havens of the problematic and that resolves enough of the issue to make the services work. But that means that someone is making decisions, and that someone can be targeted to take down a site or to not defederate even when the community thinks its best. There is still a human involved that can be bought or beaten.
The only way to make a system where people follow the rules is to make a place where people dont care to break them. Rules give those who follow them justification for punishing those who don’t. They don’t actually stop people from breaking them.
I think if this system can be hardened against attacks and its easy to deal with spam then we all just coexist with the shit that happens in the background we don’t see.
