WebRTC for P2P [was Re: Replacing corporate search engines with anonymous/decentralized search]

[Gerardus Hendricks]

> On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 6:53 PM, Jesse Taylor <jessetaylor84 at riseup.net> wrote:
> ...
> What would make more sense, and would lead to much more rapid/widespread
> adoption, is to use protocols like WebSockets / WebRTC to facilitate P2P
> connectivity in the web browser, so that everything can be done via a simple
> browser plugin that can be installed by anyone with few clicks, and would
> then just allow people to use the browser search bar as usual....

Thank you Jesse for your post and all the useful inline links. I've been 
thinking about doing a project with WebRTC as well, albeit about a 
simplified dining cryptographers anonymity network instead of a P2P 
search engine. You can read some of my rationale for wanting this in a 
post on Tor Talk [1].

Specifically, I'm interested in the Herbivore (proof of work) entry 
protocol and network topology [2], and the way in which the 
Dissent/Verdict system handles communication through 'servers' [3][4] to 
minimize bandwidth usage while maintaining a full key graph as long as 
at least one server is trusted (they call this the anytrust assumption).

I don't intent to make a separate server and client, but to add the 
ability to make certain clients super nodes. The paper you linked looks 
interesting.

I'm not currently interested in thwarting denial of service attacks 
(which are a plague in DC-nets), although the Verdict system presents a 
very elegant (but computationally expensive) solution. In any case, this 
could be a plug-in solution.

Regarding WebRTC itself, I've been looking at the PeerJS [5] library and 
two different implementations of the NaCl Javascript library [6][7]. I 
really like the opaque Cryptobox idea of salt [8]. Do you know any other 
recommendable tools?

I'm finishing up some remaining (dreaded) work of the last semester, but 
I'll start with this mid-February.

Regards,
Gerard

[1] 
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2013-December/031426.html
[2] http://freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/herbivore:tr.pdf
[3] http://freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/ccs10-dissent.pdf
[4] http://dedis.cs.yale.edu/dissent/papers/verdict.pdf
[5] http://peerjs.com
[6] https://github.com/tonyg/js-nacl
[7] ??? There is some native implementation of NaCL in Javascript, as 
opposed to the Emscripten compiled version of tonyg, but I can't find it 
anymore.
[8] http://cr.yp.to/highspeed/coolnacl-20120725.pdf