[Help-gnunet] Information request in preparation for a talk

[Antoine Guellier]

Dear GNUnet contributors/developers,

I am a PhD student at Inria Rennes (France), and I come here to request
more information on GNUnet. Indeed, I am to make a small talk in a week
or so on the subject of my choosing at Deakin Uni (Australia) and I
would like to check my understanding of the GNUnet project as a whole.
I've been through all the doc I could find without finding definite
answers to some of my questions:

- I tried to draw an ISO-like stack of the networking components in
GNUnet (see attachments). Could you (in)validate my understanding? Feel
free to modify the LaTeX source.
- Do the modules in the src/ folder correspond to each block/layer in
the diagram? e.g. src/core for CORE, src/cadet for CADET
- Where are the anonymity and privacy ensured? Apparently, only the
file-sharing application can do anonymity. But new  components, such as
an anonymous version of R5N, could be developed, couldn't they?
- What DHT/routing is actually in the src/dht module? R5N, GAP, X-Vine?
- What is the src/mesh module? Another name for CADET, i.e. a way to
indirectly reach arbitrary peers in the network via a multi-hop path?


Finally, I want to express my support to the GNUnet contributors. I
believe it is a very interesting (even necessary) project, and its goals
are laudable! It includes many good ideas (the public key oriented
routing, work  on anything from Ethernet to HTTP, and automatic
transport selection). In my thesis, I work on privacy in networking
using homomorphic cryptography, and I find your approach of redefining
the whole protocol stack "courageous" and very welcome.
However, although the large documentation on the GNUnet project is
welcome, navigating between the various sources (doxygen, the FAQ, the
developper handbook, the papers, ...) feels like a maze, especially
because some documentation is outdated. But I understand that
maintaining doc is laborious!

Thank you for your time.

Good luck in the future,
Antoine Guellier

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gnunet_arch.tex
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