Re: Device Discovery and Telehash

Hi Drasko,

Thanks!

P2P seems to me the natural and very obvious solution to manage device
discovery. I.e. user Alice purchase a door opener device, the device goes
on-line with its PPK public key and join to the P2P Kademlia DHT network,
user Alice mobile/tablet device find the door on the P2P network. Later
family member user Bob find and can control the device as well. The
communication is end to end encrypted with symmetric AES using ECDH key
exchange and the data integrity is guaranteed using ECDSA. The difficult
task of device discovery can be managed with a relatively simple open
source software without using Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. cloud nor the
need of a closed source proprietary corporate software. So the open source
solution can be peer reviewed to verify it complies with standards and
there are no security back doors exists. As long as two users are on the
internet the P2P network can be formed and more users - by the nature of
P2P data sharing - should make the network more stable and responsive. On
the other hand more users in the client/server paradigm require more
resources, licenses, load balancer and cluster servers.

I have designed a "private" P2P module and now I am integrating it into W3C
code base. The "private" P2P allows that for example a family or business
or community run a Kademlia DHT that is isolated from the public network
and only designated accounts can connect to such private network. This
introduces an additional layer of security as well as can isolate devices
from the public network.

Please note the code is experimental and early stage, but I am working on
the improvements. Please let me know if you need any assistance with the
code.

Regards,
Tibor





On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 4:38 PM, Drasko DRASKOVIC <drasko.draskovic@gmail.com
> wrote:

> Hi Tibor,
>
> On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 5:29 PM, Tibor Pardi <tibor@zovolt.com> wrote:
> > Hi Drasko
> >
> > We have started to implement a P2P device discovery module in the
> > https://github.com/w3c/web-of-things-framework project. Our P2P
> discovery
> > module uses the a Kademlia DHT table, the implementation and concept is
> very
> > similar to Telehash. I investigated Telehash as well, I understand IBM's
> > Adept (before it was abandoned) selected Telehash, but there are very
> little
> > Nodejs support for Telehash which I could integrate at the time. Our
> > underlying or ECDSA modules are based on Bitcoin crypto as well and use a
> > Bitcoin crypto library.
>
> Great!
>
> >
> > Device discovery is one of the main area which need to be addressed, and
> an
> > open source, decentralised, P2P device discovery mechanism that operates
> > without using a proprietary cloud or client/server module is one possible
> > way to manage the topic. In fact I believe P2P is the best possible
> solution
> > for device discovery.
>
> Agreed, this is exactly my opinion also.
>
> > P2P by definition addresses requirements such as
> > scalability and high availability without the need to spend a fortune on
> > load balancing and cluster infrastructure.
> >
> > There is a brief readme to explain our P2P device discovery module at
> >
> https://github.com/w3c/web-of-things-framework/tree/master/examples/p2p_demo
> >
> > Please note I am updating the P2P module at the DEV branch with
> optimizing
> > the module, providing tests for ECDSA and ECDH and using TCP/IP by
> default
> > instead of UDP (several users reported that their mobile operators blocks
> > UDP traffic).
>
> I will take a look at this solution - it looks very interesting indeed!
>
> BR,
> Drasko
>