Re: NGI Pointer application

[hyazinthe]

Hello,

trying to help, as usual:

1.
> ### Impact 2 Open source contributions (1000c):
>
> We will release all documentation, specification, source code, test
> cases and benchmarking tools under the GNU Affero General Public License
>
> and/or Creative Commons License where applicable.  We will contribute to
>
> and engage with the standardization process of the IETF trust under the
> canonical public license for RFCs.  We will also submit proposals for
> talks about the project to European hacker and tech conferences.

Improvement suggestion with a few changes here and there:
"### Impact 2—contributions to the commons (1000c):

We will release all documentation, specification, source code, test
cases, and benchmarking tools under "GNU Affero General Public License, version 
3 or any later version"
and/or Creative Commons License where applicable.
This way said resources paid by the people are given to and stay in the hands 
of the people;
so, all members of society are and stay free to use, copy, distribute, study, 
change, and improve said resources.

We will contribute to and engage with the standardization process of the IETF 
trust under the
canonical public license for RFCs.  We will also submit proposals for
talks about the project to European hacker and tech conferences."

Reasoning:
+ More emphasis on the benefit from regulators' perspective in easy to 
understand words and explanation in headline and text
+ Practical license clarification, implicitely highlighting that the projects' 
license approach protects user's freedom even better


2.
> ### Team motivation (500c):
>
> Bernd Fix has been involved with a privacy-preserving Internet as part
> of his duties at the Wau Holland foundation, which supports research,
> development and education in this domain. Bernd has been instrumental in
>
> furthering the standardization process for the GNU Name System, an
> privacy-enhanced alternative to DNS. DHTs play a crucial role for
> performance, availability and privacy in many P2P architectures,
> motivating Bernd to work on improving the state of the art in this
> important domain.

Improvement suggestion:
"...furthering the standardization process for the GNU Name System, a 
privacy-enhanced alternative to DNS."

Reasoning:
Typo fix—"a", not "an"


Regards, Bastian Schmidt


--- Ursprüngliche Nachricht ---
Von: Bernd Fix <brf@hoi-polloi.org>
Datum: 28.05.2020 19:56:51
An: gnunet-developers@gnu.org
Betreff: NGI Pointer application

> Hi all.
>
> Last year we (Martin, Christian and I) successfully applied for a NGI
> Discovery grant (through NLnet) to write an RFC draft and to
> re-implement GNS in Golang (as well as some GNUnet packaging for
> distros) - which worked out pretty well and improved GNUnet crypto and
> other things.
>
> We are now in the process of re-applying for a NGI Pointer grant; the
> idea is to do the same thing for the DHT. As the grant is covering for
> much more work, we would like more people to participate.
>
> If you are interested in joining the application, we would be happy to
> receive your input. What we basically need as information is the following:
>
>
>   - Name:
>   - Gender: (m/f/d/-)
>   - Role/Responsibility: (what you can/want to do, see section below)
>   - CV/Background: (link or pdf)
>   - Commitment: (How much time you can spend over the next 12 month)
>
> Please read the following text we are going to apply with; if you are
> interested in joining, we need your reply as soon as possible (latest is
>
> Saturday noon) as we have to submit the application by then.
>
> I apologize that this is on very short notice; we thought it would be
> sufficient to apply as GNUnet e.V. and sort out the task assignment
> later, but decided it would improve our chances of getting accepted if
> we list people that want to participate in application itself.
>
> Of course we are just applying and there is no garantee that we will get
>
> funded - but chances are not that bad after our last successful project...
>
>
> Regards, Bernd.
>
> -------------------------------------
>
> # DHT
>
> ## Basic Information
>
> ### Name
>
> R5N-DHT
>
> ## Project
>
> ### Tagline (280c)
>
> Specifying and implementing a resilient DHT: Enabling new concepts for
> decentralized name resolution, network governance and content management
>
> through distributed privacy-preserving and censorship-resistant
> key-value stores.
>
> ### Brief description (1000c)
>
> Tomorrows internet will still have to rely and run on todays physical
> infrastructure which at its core is hierarchically organized, owned and
> operated by just a few global actors.  Decentralization is therefore
> becoming a major building block to strengthen the values of freedom and
>
> informational self-determination against the particular interests of
> such actors that are not driven by the idea of the commons, but by
> for-profit or nationalist interests.  Distributed Hash Tabes (DHTs) are
> at the foundation of many of these new decentralized applications today
>
> - from alternative naming systems to self-organized routing to content
> sharing, social media and IoT management.  Based on the DHT
> implementation (R5N) in GNUnet the project is set to provide a
> specification (as an RFC draft submitted to the IETF) and two
> independent FLOSS implementations (C/C++ and Go) for common use.  The
> project will extent the work on GNS (funded by the NGI Discovery
> programme) by the same project team.
>
> ## Excellence
>
> ### Problem Need (1000c):
>
> Distributed hash tables (DHTs) are at the core of many decentralized
> applications on P2P networks like BitTorrent, FreeNet, the GNU Name
> System, Tor hidden services, RetroShare, I2P, IPFS and many other
> experimental designs.  Most P2P networks deploy their own version of a
> DHT, limiting not only interoperability across P2P networks, but also
> frequently resulting in sub-par DHT designs, especially with respect to
> security, privacy preservation, censorship resistance and resilience
> against denial-of-service attacks.  The lack of standardization
> (although there are some RFCs that try to cover at least some specific
> DHT uses-cases or protocols) and the academic nature of DHT designs
> (which usually only provide a simplistic key-value store without even
> the ability to verify whether values stored under a particular key are
> well-formed) are a limiting factor in a broader acceptance and
> deployment of DHTs across plattforms and application domains where DHT
> middleware would be beneficial.
>
> ### Ambition (1000c):
>
> The goal of this project is (a) to draft a RFC standard paper for
> distributed hash tables that satisfies a wide range of needs from
> various applications, among others including censorship-resistant
> key-value lookup (as needed by decentralized naming systems),
> privacy-preserving lookups (as needed by anonymity-enabling services),
> scalability (as needed by content distribution, social media federations
>
> and IoT management) and build-in path discovery (as needed by
> decentralized routing) -- and (b) to provide two independent FLOSS
> implementations of the specification (in C/C++ and Go) than can be used
> by domain architects.  The DHT will offer self-organized routing in
> O(log n) hops that degrades gracefully in the presence of Byzantine
> failures.  We will alo include a test suite and test vectors to allow
> others to more quickly develop additional interoperable applications and
>
> services based on DHTs.  The project will use the R5N DHT from GNUnet as
>
> a starting point for its work.
>
> ### Technical approach (1000c):
>
> The R5N DHT (as used in GNUnet) is an improvement over the first DHT
> with self-organized and decentralized routing (Freenet; based on a
> design from Oskar Sandberg's PhD thesis).  The GNUnet developers found
> (and solved) serious security issues with the Freenet design (see
> https://freenetproject.org/pages/about.html, including the "Pitch Black"
>
> reference), and with R5N proposed a more resilient alternative.
> However, the whole design and the actual protocol of R5N is not
> specified in a consistant way, so the only "protocol specification"
>
> today is the reference  implementation itself. Our goal is to provide a
> full binary network protocol specification and the network size
> estimation protocol of the R5N DHT, as well as a second interoperable
> implementation of these components in Go. Furthermore, we intend to
> carefully review the R5N design for potential improvements and attack
> surface reduction e.g. mitigating the risk of rogue nodes spreading
> false path information.
>
> ## Impact
>
> ### Impact 1 Internet Archtecture Renovation (1000c):
>
> DHTs can help solve the decade-old problem of secure routing on the
> internet.  The approaches around BGP (certifying ownership of IP address
>
> blocks to certify routes, e.g. ETH Zurich's SCION architecture) are
> resulting in a re-nationalization and balkanziation of networks.  In
> contrast to this top-down authoritarian approach to routing, distributed
>
> hash-tables follow a bottom-up self-organizing methodology that utilize
> adverserial learning, self-healing and self-stabilization mechanisms
> instead of administrative configuration and policies.  Beyond routing,
> DHTs also offer decentralized storage, a major building block for
> content centric networks (Web3) that are believed to be the successor to
>
> today's Web.  The GNU Name System, a proposed privacy-enhancing
> successor for DNS, also depends on a censorship-resistant and performant
>
> DHT.  Various blockchain/distributed ledger implementations (such as
> libp2p) also include a DHT to facilitate efficient key-value lookups.
>
> ### Impact 2 Open source contributions (1000c):
>
> We will release all documentation, specification, source code, test
> cases and benchmarking tools under the GNU Affero General Public License
>
> and/or Creative Commons License where applicable.  We will contribute to
>
> and engage with the standardization process of the IETF trust under the
> canonical public license for RFCs.  We will also submit proposals for
> talks about the project to European hacker and tech conferences.
>
> ### Impact 3 Standardization and roll-out potential (1000c):
>
> The main objective of the project is to specify and submit a RFC draft
> to IETF describing the R5N protocol in detail and to provide a second
> reference implementation of R5N to satisfy the IETF requirement of two
> independent interoperable implementations for any standard. The initial
>
> roll-out will be useful for the GNU Name System (partly funded by the
> NGI Discovery Programme); later roll-outs are expected to be used by the
>
> P≡P foundation (routing message traffic with the help of a DHT) and
> other projects that have already voiced their interest, e.g. the
> developers of qTox that are considering using R5N in the future (see
> https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/517).  The potential for a
> DHT standard to have a broader impact is highlighted by the multitude of
>
> projects that already use some DHT, often roughly based on the various
> DHTs proposed in the literature (CAN, Chord, Kademlia, etc.) but
> ultimately not interoperable and often with sub-optimal results.
>
> ## Implementation
>
> ### Team introduction (500c):
>
> The project will be located under the umbrella of GNUnet e.V. (München,
> Germany), supported and officially approved by the management board of
> GNUnet e.V. and the GNU maintainers. Various members of the association
>
> will work on different work packages; Bernd Fix will act as project lead
>
> for the whole project. Various contributors are expected to assist with
> the writing of the specification, improving the GNUnet C reference
> implementation and to work on testing and benchmarking.
>
> ### Team motivation (500c):
>
> Bernd Fix has been involved with a privacy-preserving Internet as part
> of his duties at the Wau Holland foundation, which supports research,
> development and education in this domain. Bernd has been instrumental in
>
> furthering the standardization process for the GNU Name System, an
> privacy-enhanced alternative to DNS. DHTs play a crucial role for
> performance, availability and privacy in many P2P architectures,
> motivating Bernd to work on improving the state of the art in this
> important domain.
>
> [For all members]:
>
> * Coordinator:
>   - Name: Bernd Fix
>   - Gender: male
>   - Role: Lead Developer
>   - CV: https://hoi-polloi.org/~brf/download/CV.Bernd_Fix.en.short.pdf
>   - Background (link to previous project): https://hoi-polloi.org/~brf/
>
> * Member:
>   - Name:
>   - Gender:
>   - Role:
>   - CV:
>   - Background (link to previous project):
>
> * Comittment: between 20% and full time (depending on role)
> * Gender balance (y/n):
> * New to H2020: N
> * NGI funds: Y, "GNU Name Service" (NLnet grant #2019-02-022)
>
>
> #### Work plan with major milestones (1000c):
>
> - Specification extraction
> - Enhance reference C-implementation with signatures on paths
> - Re-implementation in Go
> - Interoperability test
> - Performance/resilience evaluation
> - submitting a RFC draft
>
>