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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...

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.

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.

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.

And me thinking it was a Linux distribution.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X

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

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.

50 comments and no one mentioned Treeship or Hyperion!!

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?

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.

something else in this space includes (New Kind of Network) NKN. (https://nkn.org)

I thought this was going to be about Yggdrasil. Why must every name in the world be destroyed by software labellers?

Still reading about this. Something strange is that ygg addresses are made to fit in ipv6 using the hash of a pubkey. How does vanity mining lead to any security benefit?

Why not just make a new TLD like .onion or .i2p and use base32?

Something else in this space includes the Reticulum Network Stack https://reticulum.network/

I used Onioncat, an IPv6 network over TOR:

https://github.com/rahra/onioncat

I'm quite surprised about the number of times I've seen the world 'yggdrasil'.

Came in thinking this was an extension for the game Valheim. Different yggdrasil apparently.

I don't know a lot about networking. Where does this stand in the networking layers? Transport? Network?

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)

This is not a technical point but does anyone know which font was used to typeset the logo? It looks really nice and clean.

>Yggdrasil is a new experimental compact routing scheme

Not that new anymore, right? It's at least 6 years old.