[HN Gopher] Yggdrasil Network
___________________________________________________________________
Yggdrasil Network
Author : BSDobelix
Score : 208 points
Date : 2024-11-16 10:58 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (yggdrasil-network.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (yggdrasil-network.github.io)
| poincaredisk wrote:
| >Yggdrasil is a new experimental compact routing scheme
|
| Not that new anymore, right? It's at least 6 years old.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| is anything using something similar?
| jeanlucas wrote:
| by the original comment logic, everything that is older than
| 1 moment is not new anymore
| poincaredisk wrote:
| I wrote my comment, because I had to recheck if this is the
| same Yggdrassil I've read about 5 years ago. When I read
| about a new thing I also wonder will it be more popular in
| the future, and knowing it's already many years old reduces
| the chance of explosive growth in the future. At some point
| things just... stop being new.
| jeanlucas wrote:
| I didn't mean to be mean to you, but in terms of network
| protocols something can be a new approach for a while,
| especially if others are still trying out. What is it
| compared to? TCP/IP is past 50 years old.
|
| Then again, I agree with you: it wasn't created
| yesterday.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| I get why the name was used but if you start a project that you
| want to be heavily adopted, please pick a simpler name. The
| complexity of spelling or pronouncing this for most people
| creates an actual barrier to adoption. MP3 was easy to say and
| tell your friends about, Ogg Vorbis was not.
| opan wrote:
| Ogg Vorbis seems very pronounceable to me, and without an
| obvious wrong way to say it, using an english language
| perspective.
|
| Yggdrasil is a wild one, though, agreed. Better a unique name
| than another thing called Gemini or Atom or something, though.
| NemoNobody wrote:
| No, Fred is right - it would better if it was atom or gemini,
| that's literally what he is saying.
|
| Yggdrasil - I just had to type the entire word out and even
| then autocorrect didn't tell me I had a word. I think the Mp3
| vs Ogg Vorbis is perfect analogy.
|
| Tbh, I wouldn't use a Scandinavian language word for a global
| application as it will automatically frustrate any English as
| a second language users - the words defy practically all
| rules of English, they frustrate me even as no matter if I
| can read them, I often have no idea how to pronounce them
| unless I've already heard them said.
|
| This is one of those words I encountered many times before I
| first heard it said and actually knew how to say it.
|
| Fred is right 100
| NemoNobody wrote:
| Haha, I just realized I actually have used a Scandinavian
| word in an app I intended for global use - I just respelled
| the word so that it made sense in English.
| anotherhue wrote:
| To give a contrary opinion I think it's a beautiful world
| and an excellent gateway to one of our greatest
| mythologies. "The World Tree" is an aspect of human
| literary history.
|
| I'm not an ESL so I can only imagine the difficulties but I
| do not think we should be robbing the world of beauty,
| history and nuance for the sake of business English. Few
| English speakers can spell or pronounce it correctly so it
| even becomes a shared difficulty.
|
| Fun fact: several names of days of the week come from Norse
| mythology. Look up the names of the months if you want
| something more modern.
| F3nd0 wrote:
| I have English as my second language and can't think of a
| single reason why foreign words should frustrate me. On
| the contrary, I feel like I have an advantage; since
| English spelling/pronunciation is very messy, coming from
| a language with more regularity (and just being
| multilingual in general) probably just makes non-English
| words feel more natural to me.
|
| One anecdotal example is the name of 'GNU'. Somewhat
| often, I see English speakers on the internet mock the
| name for being difficult or odd to pronounce, and they
| usually end up explaining it by writing 'guh-noo', which
| somehow clarifies the matter. To me, 'GNU' reads
| naturally, I find the official explanation 'like "grew"
| but with an "n"' very clear, and I can't fathom how 'guh-
| noo' can feel more clear or comfortable to anyone,
| because to me it just looks utterly ridiculous. So for
| deviating from English, I have a hard time seeing a
| background in other languages as anything but an
| advantage.
| majoe wrote:
| The English language has the habit of taking perfectly fine
| Latin words and pronounce them in the most unintuitive way.
|
| Gemini is actually a good example, I rather take Yggdrasil.
| dizhn wrote:
| mp3 is easy to say.. in English. "ogg" is much easier. i.e that
| was not the reason.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I am pretty sure most of the world can figure out how to
| ponounce yggdrasil much easier than how to pronounce
| infrastructure or litterature in english.
|
| https://youtu.be/RpCTu2ymqiM?feature=shared
| NemoNobody wrote:
| Not once they have familiarity with the language at all.
|
| One of your examples has a word within a word, so it's like
| half pronounced if you can say "structure" which I think
| difficult to mispronounce.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| Every kid learning English in my country will pronounce
| "structure" incorrectly at first, because it's similar to a
| word (with the same meaning) in my native language, and the
| correct English pronunciation of -ture doesn't make sense.
| I've looked up Yggdrassil pronunciation and... it's not
| surprising and I guessed the pronunciation correctly
| already?
| neilalexander wrote:
| The name wouldn't necessarily stay if we succeed in our goals
| and formally specify a protocol, but for now it hasn't really
| been much of a barrier in terms of interest or experimental
| deployments.
| askvictor wrote:
| I thought it was an knock-off brand sold on amazon
| linsomniac wrote:
| I was pretty excited about it 3-4 years ago, but it seems like
| it's kind of an abandoned project at this point. Anyone making
| use of it and have any impressions?
| DanAtC wrote:
| There have been a few updates recently including a revival of
| the iOS app which had languished for some time.
|
| I use it as a VPN to connect my phone to my home network which
| are both peered privately to a VPS.
|
| It's a bit convoluted vs directly connecting to home, but it
| was easier to set up than worrying about dynamic IPs, port
| forwarding, and exchanging Wireguard keys.
|
| Multicast peering is neat in that I can access my home server
| directly using the same Ygg IP when I'm home. Problem is, I
| have to use an IP; the iOS app doesn't support configuring a
| custom DNS server for the Ygg VPN connection.
|
| Headscale is really a better solution for this use-case, but
| it's kind-of neat to know there's an alternative Internet
| available with just an additional peering.
| sunshine-o wrote:
| Using Yggdrasil as a mesh VPN for your devices could be a
| great use case.
|
| From a quick search it seems you do not even need a static IP
| address [0]
|
| I am not familiar with Yggdrasil and can't wrap my hear
| around how this is possible !
|
| - [0] https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/472679
| scottyeager wrote:
| To join the larger public Yggdrasil network, you need to
| peer with at least one publicly reachable node. Most likely
| that machine has a static IPv4 address. There are a number
| of such nodes operated by volunteers, and they enable the
| magic that allows any device to join the network and
| immediately start receiving inbound traffic from the rest
| of the network. By opening an outbound connection to the
| public node, a channel is created for traffic to flow back
| to the non public node.
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| Agreed. If the Yggdrasil Android and iOS apps supported zero-
| touch MDM configuration like Tailscale, I'd try it out but my
| guess is the performance still wouldn't match WireGuard.
|
| Update: 83% comparitive speed using a US QUIC peer, not bad
| actually...
| neilalexander wrote:
| Definitely not abandoned, but it's a free-time project for
| myself and another developer. At the end of last year we
| released version 0.5 with a new protocol design, and roughly a
| month ago released 0.5.9 with link cost changes to dramatically
| improve network latency.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Thanks for that update, you might want to post a quick blog
| update because that was where I was looking to see what the
| activity was. I get it about free-time projects, I have some
| of those myself. Thanks for your work on this, it is
| definitely very neat!
| neilalexander wrote:
| One or two others have also asked for a project update on
| the blog so I'll be sure to draft something up soon! :-)
| Thanks for your interest!
| PhilippGille wrote:
| Why would you not look at the code repo for checking
| activity? There are so many active projects without regular
| blog posts.
| evbogue wrote:
| Yggdrasil just works, so there is less of a need for developers
| to be in the chatroom discussing how to fix the problems with
| it.
|
| I use yggdrasil right now on all of my devices so I can ssh
| between them even if they are behind NAT.
|
| Using termux on android and the yggdrasil android app I can
| access files located on my home computer while I'm on the go
| without storing them in a cloud somewhere.
| prurigro wrote:
| I use it all the time to connect to my boxes at home when I'm
| out and about, and I chat with friends on an IRC server running
| on there.
|
| Development is pretty active, and the latest release just
| improved the routing algorithm by having it favour hops with
| the lowest latency which had a noticeable improvement.
|
| If you're looking for a big community hub within the network
| you might be disappointed (you could always try to set one
| up!), but there are a lot of people using it for their own
| purposes and the protect is far from abandoned.
| hahajk wrote:
| Ok, so as I understand it, yggdrasil and cjdns are virtual P2P
| networks that offer the normal layer 3 routing services, but
| built on top of the existing internet. So they still require ISPs
| and internet backbones, etc.
|
| Are there any projects attempting to build a worldwide P2P
| network that can replace the IP layer? Like a mesh network that
| can operate without verizon, cisco routers, etc? I know of some
| mesh network technologies aimed at small disconnected networks
| but nothing consumer-facing and supporting anything more than a
| few thousand nodes.
| u8080 wrote:
| There was cjdroute project with own OpenWRT-based Yggdrasil
| firmware for routers. But it seems failed to gain traction and
| died - https://habr.com/ru/companies/cjdns/articles/198428/ [in
| Russian]
| dartos wrote:
| There's meshtastic, but it's not a full internet stack
| replacement iirc
| prurigro wrote:
| It can do tcp/ip, but it's extremely slow. Like 5+ seconds
| for a character to appear over ssh with a direct connection.
| prussia wrote:
| reticulum.network perhaps? It certainly fits the "replace the
| IP layer" requirement, and I believe in theory it can be very
| large scale, though unsure how it would do in reality.
| fragmede wrote:
| It's a very romantic notion, but there's a lot of resources
| (time/money/hardware/effort) that go into the existing IP layer
| that's totally invisible. Without a plan on how to supplant
| those resources, any replacement network will struggle.
| lambdaone wrote:
| I think the idea here is that somebody else runs an
| underlying IP layer, and this rides on top as an overlay
| network.
|
| You could, of course, run a local wireless IP layer and use
| this to route, but peer-to-peer wireless has well-known
| scaling problems.
|
| Still, it looks like a very interesting and reasonably well
| thoughout out idea.
| Communitivity wrote:
| There was the Locker project by Jeremie Miller (XMPP), but it
| failed to gain traction and I think he pivoted into a more
| small scale commercial effort with it IIRC. The telehash
| protocol of Locker was extremely interesting.
| bythreads wrote:
| 6lowpan was also a pretty nice attempt at overcoming some of
| the deficiencies - i think that operated on both lvl 2 and 3
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Why would you want to remove the IP layer?
|
| Or are you thinking about IP layer, just not on the "internet",
| but on a separate network? If this, then how do you suggest
| connecting people together? Mesh becomes innefficient due to
| mesh routing at larger sizes and sooner or later you just
| reinvent "your own internet", but not worldwide, because you
| don't have the resources to actually connect the whole world
| together.
| hahajk wrote:
| In order to access the internet you are required to enter
| into a contract with a corporate entity. That's not because
| the internet is "theirs" (like Facebook's servers and systems
| are Meta's), but because the network layer was design with
| the assumption that companies would do the work of setting up
| ISPs, core routers, peering agreements, etc.
|
| I'd like to see a P2P protocol that doesn't assume this but
| instead is designed to be completely decentralized, and
| anyone running the protocol can join. This protocol would
| provide addressing routing like our current IP protocol, and
| TCP/UDP etc can run on top of it. Would this be a separate
| "internet" or could it have gateways to the proper internet?
| Preferably the latter. There are obvious technical challenges
| with routing, addressing, mobility, all in a decentralized
| way but are they truly impossible?
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| It's not nearly like that, it's designed that you can build
| your own, separate networks, before the concept of internet
| providers even existed (and a few colleges and DoD were the
| only users). It is completely decentralized (with the
| exception of DNS, which can be decentralized easily, but
| isn't).
|
| Setting up networks is easy and cheap. the expensive part
| is pulling cables and connecting people, that's why many
| countries have the local governments do that. If you live
| in an apartment building, you can easily create a separate
| network for all the apartments. If you want to connect to
| the next building, you'll need a lot more cables and
| someone to actually dig in the cable or erect the poles and
| use those to carry the cable... but who will pay for that?
| What if you want to connect to the next city over... who
| will pay for the cabling, digging etc? And of course, the
| paperwork? Underseas cable? Good luck with that.
|
| It's not a protocol problem, it's a cost problem.
| DanAtC wrote:
| Yggdrasil can do this but you have to bring the physical
| layer.
| toast0 wrote:
| What you've described sounds a lot like running an AS with
| BGP. Yes, there's centralized allocation of ASNs and IP
| ranges. Otherwise, the whole thing is pretty decentralized,
| but you've got to figure out how to connect to peers and
| transit providers.
|
| Many peers will connect without a real contract, especially
| if you're both present on a peering fabric, but transit
| usually needs a contract because transit isn't mutually
| beneficial.
|
| For some sort of overlay/alternative network, reliable
| transit seems highly likely to have a cost too. Probably
| not a contracted cost while it's experimental; and maybe
| optimistically, much lower than today's costs for IP
| transit, but still there would be a cost. Actually, IP
| transit costs are much lower today than years ago, but last
| mile transport costs are more important to your bill and
| running wires requires skilled labor and specific capital
| equipment, so it remains expensive; bandwidth capacity of
| wiring increases over time, but you still need one
| connection per home for best service; although wireless
| seems poised to reduce costs for good enough service in
| favorable conditions.
| YesThatTom2 wrote:
| IP was originally an overlay network on top of the telco
| network.
|
| That has many benefits most importantly it makes adoption easy.
|
| Now we run telco networks over IP for legacy apps. If this
| Yggdrasil stuff is successful, I presume eventually we'll run
| IP over it for legacy systems.
| rolph wrote:
| mesh over a starlink like system, but i think he would want a
| goodly sum for it.
| progval wrote:
| That was the original goal of cjdns, which is why it
| automatically peers with other nodes reachable over Ethernet
| (no IP needed), including WiFi (see the first paragraph of http
| s://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/doc/Whitepape...).
| Unfortunately, its approach to routing turned out to not scale
| in practice. Yggdrasil uses a different routing algorithm so it
| might.
| neilalexander wrote:
| Yggdrasil was actually inspired in part by cjdns but the
| design is very different. We care deeply about scale and we
| want an Yggdrasil network to be able to grow organically
| without requiring a strict hierarchy, huge amounts of state
| etc. We're still working on it of course but for now the
| public test network is somewhere around 5000-6000 nodes and
| continues to work pretty well as it grows.
| bityard wrote:
| People have been dreaming of mesh networks forever.
| Unfortunately they scale very poorly (among other issues) and
| this is a fundamental limitation of their design. The Internet
| (ARPAnet) started out as a mesh network and the concept of
| trunks, backbones, and routing came about to solve those
| scaling issues.
| rapnie wrote:
| Maybe Irdest [0] mesh network.
|
| > Irdest is a networking research project that explores
| different technologies and ideas on how to build more
| sustainable, user-controlled communication networks.
|
| [0] https://irde.st/
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| I really like the idea of address being derived from public key,
| but there is a problem with this approach - since Yggdrasil
| currently uses IPv6 addresses, the length is very limited and you
| can find collisions (there is a workaround which involves brute
| forcing a key with more leading bits). As I understand, the long
| term plan is adding a custom protocol which has no limits for
| address length.
| Retr0id wrote:
| My napkin math says it'd be plausible to generate a pair of
| colliding addresses (birthday paradox etc.), but still
| implausible to collide with the set of existing in-use
| addresses. How much would the former actually matter, in the
| context of Yggdrasil?
| Its_Padar wrote:
| Why not use the entire public key and let entropy do the rest,
| like the Reticulum Network?
| neilalexander wrote:
| Truncating the public key to fit in an IPv6 address isn't
| totally ideal, agreed, but for now it means that just about any
| existing IPv6-capable application will work over Yggdrasil
| without modification, which is a nice property for a testnet.
| Retr0id wrote:
| What about truncating a hash of the whole public key? (what's
| what I'd assumed was happening already)
| Its_Padar wrote:
| Something else in this space includes the Reticulum Network Stack
| https://reticulum.network/
| foundry27 wrote:
| The first thing I tried to find on their website and their GitHub
| was a protocol specification, to be able to implement it
| independently from the reference implementation. I thought this
| would be straightforward since it's advertised as a
| scheme/protocol, but such a spec isn't referenced anywhere!
| Digging on my own I eventually found [1] on a side-branch of one
| of their other GitHub projects.
|
| Kudos to the author: I think it actually covers a _lot_ of what
| you'd need to know: crypto identities, message formats, wire
| protocols, peering and stream semantics, spanning tree updates
| and root selection, the DHT, forwarding logic, sessions, etc. A
| couple things are TODOs like how to verify and sign root updates,
| and there's some ambiguity in the tiebreaker algorithm for next-
| hop selection.
|
| It seems to be very tightly coupled to TCP as the transport layer
| though, since all packets need to be delivered reliably and in
| the order they were sent, and need to be capable of being
| fragmented into smaller packets for varying MTU sizes.
|
| [1] https://github.com/yggdrasil-network/yggdrasil-
| specs/blob/ys...
| neilalexander wrote:
| We did spend a little bit of time documenting the earlier v0.3
| protocol, as you have linked, but the protocol has changed
| significantly in design twice since then. v0.4 changed the DHT
| quite a bit and v0.5 removed the DHT altogether. As a research
| project it likely will continue to change until we settle on a
| design we are happier with, at which point we will definitely
| spend more time documenting it.
|
| The need for ordered/reliable links is mostly for convenience
| of development at this stage, but that can be fixed for sure.
| Rhapso wrote:
| Look at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.06461 if you want to try a
| chord dht again.
|
| Kademlia is a lot less intuitive, but by not ever assuming
| it's tables are correct, it handles and corrects
| inconsistency (and malicious nodes) better.
|
| Chapter 6 of this pile of (my) crap
| https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cs_diss/106/ talks about doing
| latency optimization on dht routing. Basically just embedding
| then network graph into a metric space.
| colordrops wrote:
| Is coupling with TCP a problem? Does it do anything that goes
| against their goal of full decentralization?
| macawfish wrote:
| Makes it hard to do hole punching I think? At any rate,
| direct connections currently cannot be established between
| multi-hop peers, traffic gets routed through peers instead. I
| think this has something to do with the TCP choice.
| foundry27 wrote:
| Yeaaah. TCP hole punching is goofy and unreliable, last I
| checked. You have to do some arcane ritual of having both
| peers start a three-way handshake to each others's public
| endpoints simultaneously, relying on NATs to accept inbound
| SYN packets if they match the outgoing SYN. And nobody's
| NAT devices implement simultaneous-open the same way, so
| all your connections just fail.
|
| Naturally this leads to slapping even more arcane fixes on
| top of that, like NAT port assignment oracles to
| adversarial interoperate with different port allocation
| strategies (random, sequential, single, etc.) by analyzing
| patterns in previous port assignments. Networking sucks.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I think this is a pragmatic choice. NAT Hole Punching can
| be hit or miss no matter the method but doing peer routing
| guarantees even a client that can only initiate outbound
| connections can route packets. It can be slow though.
|
| I also know there's support for other transports like QUIC
| but TCP is the main default.
| AyyEye wrote:
| > At any rate, direct connections currently cannot be
| established between multi-hop peers, traffic gets routed
| through peers instead. I think this has something to do
| with the TCP choice.
|
| Yggdrasil is designed for physical links and multi-hop
| routing first and foremost. Internet peering is just a way
| to test/use/join the network until then.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| FAQ >> Is Yggdrasil anonymous? No, it is not a goal of the
| Yggdrasil project to provide anonymity.
|
| I understand that the problem is hard, has its own set of issues
| to solve beyond just technical, but this honestly makes it a non-
| starter for me. Anything that would be an actual internet
| evolution would need to include actual anonymity. Apart from
| this, I simply do not see what problem it actually solves for the
| existing internet that is not already solved with the current
| setup.
| neilalexander wrote:
| Anonymity isn't a goal for Yggdrasil anymore than it is a goal
| for for BGP, OSPF, BATMAN etc. Anonymous networks also
| generally have very high costs/overheads as they often engineer
| long and indirect paths for obscurity. See the generally poor
| performance/reliability of Tor circuits for an example of why
| we probably wouldn't want the entire Internet to work this way.
| pjmlp wrote:
| And me thinking it was a Linux distribution.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
| omani wrote:
| something else in this space includes (New Kind of Network) NKN.
| (https://nkn.org)
| jcmontx wrote:
| I don't know a lot about networking. Where does this stand in the
| networking layers? Transport? Network?
| myspeed wrote:
| Sounds like Teredo tunnels which was part of Windows 7. It builds
| ipv6 tunnel over ipv4 and assigns a global IPv6 address to
| Windows machines. But these tunnels were later removed from
| Windows 10.
| varunnrao wrote:
| This is not a technical point but does anyone know which font was
| used to typeset the logo? It looks really nice and clean.
| epapsiou wrote:
| 50 comments and no one mentioned Treeship or Hyperion!!
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| Yeah, this is what I was thinking! The Templars would be so
| disappointed...
| block_dagger wrote:
| Came in thinking this was an extension for the game Valheim.
| Different yggdrasil apparently.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Yggdrasill is a name from Norse mythology. It's the tree along
| which the nine worlds were believed to exist.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Yggdrasil Network_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41669625 - Sept 2024 (3
| comments)
|
| _Yggdrasil P2P mesh E2EE IPv6 network_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30156551 - Jan 2022 (77
| comments)
|
| _Yggdrasil - Early-stage implementation of an end-to-end
| encrypted IPv6 network_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27577201 - June 2021 (102
| comments)
|
| _Show HN: Yggdrasil Network - compact mesh routing experiment
| for mesh networks_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18863554 - Jan 2019 (15
| comments)
|
| _Announcing Yggdrasil Network v0.3_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18751991 - Dec 2018 (3
| comments)
|
| _Yggdrasil: End-To-end Encrypted IPv6 Networking_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18666245 - Dec 2018 (1
| comment)
| coppsilgold wrote:
| If you want an actual mesh p2p IP-network that can punch through
| firewalls/NATs you can use Tailscale/Headscale
|
| If you want a crypto-key addressable p2p connection-network there
| is a somewhat recent project which does this rather well:
|
| https://www.iroh.computer
|
| It punches through firewalls/NATs and establishes QUIC
| connections.
|
| They have two already useful PoC's:
|
| https://github.com/n0-computer/sendme
|
| https://github.com/n0-computer/dumbpipe
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(page generated 2024-11-16 23:00 UTC)