Iroh 1.0

https://www.iroh.computer/blog/v1

by chadfowler • 1 month ago

1398 462 1 month ago

j4cobgarby• 1 month ago

Doesn't it seem odd to have "Pricing" for a protocol that's meant to serve a similar function to IP addresses? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

adammarples• 1 month ago

Maybe. It's offering "Customized hosting and monitoring for Iroh apps".

Kinrany3• 1 month ago

From the same pricing page, it's all additional services: observability, relay hosting, support engineers.

dignifiedquire13• 1 month ago

As others have already mentioned, iroh the core library and protocol is fully open source. But to finance the development of it, we offer additional services to make it easier to deploy and run it, especially for larger or more specialized use caes.

embedding-shape9• 1 month ago

Congrats for the launch, seems to have matured a bunch and Iroh gotten a bunch of neat additions since I last looked! You even managed to get 1.0 out the door before go-ipfs / Kubo ;)

But to finance the development of it, we offer additional services to make it easier to deploy and run it, especially for larger or more specialized use caes.

Interesting (and somewhat proven) idea to finance it, smart :)

Did you guys started doing this already on a case-by-case basis and have some experience of it already, and if so what are the common things you typically help out with exactly? I'm just curious what sort of things a company who'd use a protocol like that might need help with, that they wouldn't have experience with in-house, since they're going down a P2P road already (assuming that, maybe maybe need help with greenfield projects)?

rafram• 1 month ago

I think it would be clearer if you put the "Pricing" navbar link under "Services."

noworriesnate• 1 month ago

I don't mind paying for a subscription, as long as I'm not also paying for the privilege of being locked in to a specific vendor. If I pay for a subscription and then your prices quadruple or something, what are my options? Can I self-host a relay? Do I lose features if I do so?

TheDong• 1 month ago

The equivalent for IP addresses to what they offer would be closer to running a BGP router or ISP, or generally contracting with network engineers for your data-center's networking.

If you want to run an ISP or AS, believe me it will cost you a decent chunk of money.

icedchai2• 1 month ago

I've been running my own AS for years. You can get an ASN and IPv6 from a RIPE LIR for $200/year or less. Then you need a couple of VPSes that are BGP capable. You can get those for $20 month. Then you can tunnel traffic back to your location with a Wireguard tunnel or whatever you prefer. It's relatively cheap! I also have a legacy IPv4 block I'm routing, which doesn't cost me anything.

serf• 1 month ago

tailscale syndrome.

"we want to be infrastructure for people, and a business towards professionals."

stuck between "we need cash to operate" and "we want to be a public good infrastructural system." , with the negative parts of a for-profit whisked away with "Well it's open source."

it's a business concept i'm okayish with as long as the "Well it's open source." caveat doesn't come with a total bespoke and unusable code base to figure out.

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

Take a look yourself.

Our code is as good as we can make it, and everything is modular and well documented. For example our QUIC implementation noq which underlies every iroh connection can also be used as a standalone QUIC impl that implements QUIC multipath.

https://docs.rs/noq/latest/noq/

If we wanted to have "total bespoke and unusable code" we would have inlined all of this into the iroh repo to make it unusable.

colinmarc4• 1 month ago

Not affiliated, but I am a very happy user of Tailscale and a very happy user of Iroh; we use the latter in production at work.

Tailscale is a great service that happens to be open source, but Iroh is clearly structured as a library that you can build into whatever you want.

w4der• 1 month ago

RustDesk has a similar business model and works fine for what it is, is there something particular about TailScale and Iroh that makes you think it will not work?

Kinrany3• 1 month ago

I wonder if Iroh and Zenoh could/should be used together.

The fundamental component of Iroh is p2p routing by key, and the main utility provided by Zenoh is message semantics. The two seem complementary.

Imustaskforhelp2• 1 month ago

Zenoh seems interesting but can you please give me some use case where both Iroh + zenoh can be combined to achieve something more trivially (ie. without hassle) or the use-cases of this combination. I'd be curious to know more about their combined use-cases!

Kinrany3• 1 month ago

...that's what I'm asking :)

Imustaskforhelp2• 1 month ago

Good for Iroh to have libraries within different languages.

I think that with Kotlin support, the creation of some android/multi-platform gui apps can be made easier if they want to use Iroh.

Arqu11• 1 month ago

Thanks, we agree! We used to have bindings for while but the maintenance burden at that point was too high. Now that 1.0 guarantees everyone some stability and we feel confident in the library, we have enough room to properly support it.

dignifiedquire13• 1 month ago

hey, I helped make this :) will try to answer questions where I can

zelias• 1 month ago

how can i make it give me zen-inspired life advice?

Hugsbox• 1 month ago

I'd also like for it to prepare tea

projektfu• 1 month ago

Jasmine tea and a game of Pai Sho.

dignifiedquire13• 1 month ago

the zen life advice will come if you use it long enough :)

amatheus• 1 month ago

This looks very interesting. I’m not sure I understand this, but it seems to me like it competes (or is in the same space as) both Tailscale and zeromq/nanomsg via the protocols? I think it would be nice to have a comparison page to make it easier to position it (I didn’t find one).

matheus234• 1 month ago

We keep thinking about ways to combine iroh + zeroMQ! I think these two could compose. (Not familiar with nanomsg myself)

About tailscale: It's similar, but iroh is not a VPN, so it doesn't add a TUN interface. Instead, you'd build iroh directly into your application. Using iroh you can build a VPN, and there are projects that do so (iroh-lan/iroh-vpn are some hobbyist projects). The upside of building it into your application is that it doesn't need special permissions and is easy to ship to the user.

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

A key distinguishing factor is that iroh is meant to be used as a library that you can embed into your desktop, mobile or embedded apps.

Up to now our users are mostly teams that have a rust or C/C++ core, such as https://delta.chat/ . But now that we have bindings teams who use other languages should be able to use iroh.

So you can write e.g. an android and ios app that uses iroh direct connections under the hood, and the app user does not have to know or care about this at all.

piskov• 1 month ago

Does this solve the problem of internet segmentation due to politcs?

For example: dns control, tls certification bans (just this month both let’s encrypt and globalsign started revoking Russian certificates), once google starts really complaining about https it gets ugly.

Russia aside, anyone else is closely watching (europe, brics, what have you)

dignifiedquire13• 1 month ago

While it doesn't solve all the issues that come up through the current segmentation, it is very much possible today to assemble components that let you forget about segmentation while you use it. And it is designed from the ground up, to use existing internet technologies, while avoiding the lock in and dependencies on browser vendors or other large players.

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

I would say it is an excellent building block for application developers to route around the segmentation. There are several projects that work well in restricted enviroments that use iroh for some features. E.g. https://delta.chat/en/

E.g. you could write an excellent encrypted chat app using iroh, the Tor or Nym custom transport, and BLE or direct wifi for local connections.

You have to be careful though to make sure you configure the transports correctly in order not to expose data you don't want exposed. Iroh can be used in highly restricted environments, but the defaults favour performance over complete metadata privacy.

tmzt• 1 month ago

I've been working on a mesh network for private AI models running remotely, controlled by mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.). The mesh is constructed like a piconet, a few devices controlled by a single individual, layered on top of the internet.

How does it support semi-connected devices, intermittent connection failures, etc?

karissa7• 1 month ago

Hi, I also work on iroh.

Iroh is built for environments where connectivity is unreliable or intermittent, so it can be a good fit for use cases involving connection failures, offline periods, or semi-connected devices.

We provide a range of peer-to-peer protocols that don't require a central server, including key-value stores, blob transfer, collaborative documents, and streaming audio/video. These protocols are designed to synchronize devices back to a consistent state, even after long disconnections or network interruptions.

If you'd like to explore whether iroh could work for your use case, we're happy to chat. Feel free to email us at support@iroh.computer, and we can set up a call.

eikenberry• 1 month ago

Why a library and not a service/daemon? Or are you planning to write a server based on the library and just haven't got to that yet?

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

We think a library is more useful for widespread adoption. I can't get my mother to install a daemon, but I can get her to download an app that uses iroh under the hood.

Besides, as a lot of people have mentioned already, if you want a dedicated server there are a lot of existing options.

We did write a few small dedicated applications to show off iroh, sendme https://www.iroh.computer/sendme and dumbpipe https://www.dumbpipe.dev/ .

genpfault• 1 month ago

C binding: [0]

[0] https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-c-ffi

dignifiedquire13• 1 month ago

Which I just finished updating to 1.0. But it is currently lacking in breadth of API, so if you start using it let us know what you are missing. In the meantime https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-ffi has the other language bindings with a more comprehensive API

convolvatron• 1 month ago

I should read the specs, but since it's such a foundational issue maybe someone who knows could respond briefly? the problem with a flat addressing space is that it requires every intermediate node to have state about every address, or perform a costly discovery mechanism for those it doesn't know about. is there a clever answer to this?

matheus234• 1 month ago

The secret is that iroh still uses IPs under the hood :) But with QUIC, your connections aren't bound to your four-tuple, your connection can migrate from e.g. WiFi to Cellular with only a small blip/hiccup. And with QUIC multipath, you can have multiple four-tuples "active" at the same time. iroh uses e.g. a "real" IP path mainly, with a websocket-based HTTPS path via relay servers as the backup (e.g. in case UDP is blocked).

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

We have an answer, but it isn't really clever. We do have both built in and pluggable address lookup services.

Our default enabled address lookup service is using DNS in a creative way, but we also have a service that is fully peer to peer and is using the mainline DHT, specifically the bep_0044 extension that allows you to store a tiny bit of arbitrary data for an Ed keypair that you control.

https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0044.html

https://pkarr.org

Some custom transports such as TOR hidden services have a discovery system built in. In these cases we can just use the existing discovery system.

See for example https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-tor-transport

andy_xor_andrew• 1 month ago

The "address lookup" strategy is really interesting, especially how it uses actual DNS: https://docs.iroh.computer/concepts/address-lookup

https://github.com/Nuhvi/pkarr/

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

I am one of the iroh developers.

A question that frequently comes up: when will iroh support webrtc, or BLE, or LoRa, or ...

Iroh as of now supports only IPv4, IPv6 and relay transports out of the box. There is such a large variety of potentially interesting transports out there that we can't support all of them without turning the codebase into an unmaintainable maze of feature flags.

But we have added the ability to implement custom transports. That way your transport implementation can live in a completely separate crate.

Existing experimental custom transports include Tor, Nym and BLE. https://github.com/mcginty/iroh-ble-transport

Here is how custom transports work under the hood: https://www.iroh.computer/blog/iroh-0-97-0-custom-transports...

Bender2• 1 month ago

What are the risks if any of running public relays? Is this similar in concept to running Tor Guard Nodes / Relays?

Arqu11• 1 month ago

All the data is e2e encrypted and nothing is stored. The usual self hosting public things rules apply.

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

If you run a public unauthenticated relay you act as a home relay for whoever has your relay configured in their relay map and is close in terms of latency.

So you might get a lot of traffic. You can configure rate limiting, as we do on our public relays.

The traffic is fully encrypted and can not be decrypted by the relay. The only information the relay has is what is necessary for it to function - the endpoint id and ip addresses of the endpoints that are connected to it at any given time, as well as endpoint pairings.

You relay encrypted traffic with no egress to the open internet. So if you want to compare it with Tor, it would be like a tor guard/middle relay, not an exit node.

refulgentis• 1 month ago

FWIW I think for “new user” audiences you’re better off describing why we’d use this instead of IP, than why you haven’t gotten it everywhere yet: there’s a certain sort of “complaint I see the most from current users” myopia that sets in, at least for me, over the years. :)

ascii0eks84• 1 month ago

If you don't mind, what are other low-effort but high signal forums other than HN, Perplexity and X for accurate news that skip the annoying part?

larodi2• 1 month ago

Lora is a must

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

There are already some crates providing a bridge between LoRa using iroh. See for example https://crates.io/crates/donglora-bridge

I am not aware of a LoRa custom transport yet, but that is not unexpected given that the custom transport API is relatively new, and our main focus has been on getting iroh 1.0 out of the door.

mhluongo• 1 month ago

Hi! As someone who has historically built on libp2p, I'd love to see an updated comparison focused on app developers!

Last year, I was trying to choose between the two and went with that I know... but it feels like there's real momentum on Iroh's side.

Folcon2• 1 month ago

Hey, just reading through the docs, this looks like a pretty cool project and I found your p2p chat example[0]

I'm trying to understand it's limitations, if I used this to build a p2p client / server setup or even two peer machines, what else do I need to setup to be able to have connections between the two applications?

For example, could I create an application that runs on my phone and another that runs on my laptop and finally get a direct secured working connection between the two of them? Or is this solving a different problem? =)

-[0]: p2p chat, in rust, from scratch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogN_mBkWu7o

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

Yes, you will get secure direct connections. This matters for privacy in case of an encrypted chat, but also has a lot of benefits for more demanding use cases such as video streaming.

Here is a video of frando from our team demoing media over QUIC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3qqyu1mmGQ

If you use the default setup you are still depending on a tiny bit of cloud infrastructure such as our public relays to faciliate the hole punching. However, we also have optional local discovery using e.g. mDNS.

apitman7• 1 month ago

You'll get a direct connection in most cases, but sometimes it will need to fall back to relays. n0 provides free relays, but ultimately that can get rather expensive. You can also run your own relays for your app.

SillyUsername• 1 month ago

You may want to consider using a feature flag API if you think it will be unmaintainable.

Strategy patterns and code-centralised feature management ftw :)

teravor2• 1 month ago

    > Tor

https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-tor-transport

you are using a Tor daemon in it. tor has a rust implementation and when used with rust has stream objects etc.

an example of how it's used can be found in https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/oniux

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

Yes, I wrote the current tor transport as a quick demo/testground for custom transports.

Arguably directly embedding the rust tor implementation would be more useful for the typical iroh user that wants an embeddable library. I just did not get to it yet.

But thanks for the link.

opem3• 1 month ago

Can the relay servers, when used as fallback, read the data between two parties by providing its own public key to both of the peers?

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

No. The data in each direction is encrypted by TLS, using ephemeral keys.

Only the owner of the corresponding private key can initiate a connection from their public key, or receive a connection attempt to their public key.

Let's say you have alice and bob talking via a relay. Even if you have the private key of alice, you can impersonate alice to bob, but not vice versa. So you can't initiate a connection between the two.

To really intercept data you would need the private keys of both participants.

khowells2• 1 month ago

As I understand it the “peer ID” you dial acts like the public key, of the public/private key pair. So the public key doesn’t come from the relay. You need to do the initial public key/ID exchange out of band, and then dial the connection to each other via the relay.

So the relay is never in a position to send you the wrong public key, because it doesn’t give it to you in the first place.

flub3• 1 month ago

Iroh uses QUIC connections and uses the EndpointId, the public ed25519 key, in the TLS handshake for authentication. This makes it impossible for a server to try and machine-in-the-middle the connection.

matheus234• 1 month ago

You need to know the public key you communicate with ahead of connecting to the correct relay. It needs to be shared securely out-of-band, relays don't help with that.

hathawsh• 1 month ago

Iroh looks very interesting!

How current is the PyPI package? https://pypi.org/project/iroh/

Arqu11• 1 month ago

We bumped to 1.0 an hour ago https://pypi.org/project/iroh/#history

syllogistic3• 1 month ago

when will iroh support webrtc...

This would give you a native iroh node that also speaks webrtc but I find that what folks want is for browsers to participate as peers.

I build p2claw, p2p for self-hosted web apps, and ended up doing both halves separately. Box to box is iroh, although I use my own coordinator service and run my own iroh relay. Browser to box is webrtc with a service worker that makes the browser act like a peer. The worker grabs fetches and sends them as HTTP frames over the data channel, the box answers on localhost. The browser bit has to be webrtc because it's the only browser api does ICE.

Wiring up the iroh half went smoothly, very much enjoying working with the library. Congrats on 1.0!

samantp• 1 month ago

Yes, seems that browser support for services running on P2P boxes behind NATs cannot leverage iroh. Need the service worker hijacking the browser’s fetches as well as monkey patching the browser’s websocket SDK and sending all that traffic over webrtc data channels.

apitman7• 1 month ago

I discovered p2claw the other day and it's really cool. I'm a little surprised you're running Iroh as well. Why not just use WebRTC for everything once you're forced to for the browser anyway?

jhancock• 1 month ago

Nice. How easily is the protocol categorized by an external observer? I'm noticing protocols like wireguard more commonly hitting problems as websites rely on third party systems to protect them from non-human interactions.

matheus234• 1 month ago

Somewhat easy, unfortunately.

If you look at Wireguard traffic, you'll see a <EndpointID>.iroh.invalid SNI in the QUIC Initial packet.

Encrypted ClientHello can fix that, but support hasn't shipped into rustls yet. So it's definitely fixable.

The interesting thing is that the ClientHello is undetectable when it's sent via the relay transport (sent inside a WSS connection). And in that case, any traffic that happens on IP is fully encrypted and can't be categorized.

mkl4• 1 month ago

Please consider putting the first paragraph of [1], "iroh is a modular networking stack written in Rust. It provides the building blocks to create applications that can communicate using fast, cheap, and reliable connections.", at the top of the blog post and the main website. The middle two lines of [2] are good as a follow-up.

The current stuff about dialling is pretty incomprehensible, as shown by the many confused comments here. No one "dials" IP addresses (or keys), and no one wants to, so the word "dial" shouldn't be part of the title or description. The word "key" would be better not mentioned until you start talking about implementation, and the brief high level "what it is" and "what it is for" stuff should come before implementation.

Iroh seems quite relevant to some projects of mine, but after reading the blog post and the main page, I still had no idea of that relevance until I had read over a hundred comments here (many of them confused about what Iroh was).

[1] https://docs.iroh.computer/what-is-iroh

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543554

munksbeer• 1 month ago

"iroh is a modular networking stack written in Rust.

You can omit the "written in Rust" part, but then you'd lose street cred.

logankeenan2• 1 month ago

Iroh has been amazing to work with and the engineers are so nice in the discord channel. The pragmatic approach to making p2p just work has been easy to understand. Their YouTube channel has great content too. Congrats on v1!

https://youtube.com/@n0computer

dignifiedquire13• 1 month ago

thank you!

musicmatze• 1 month ago

Shame they use discord though.

logankeenan2• 1 month ago

Why’s that? What would be the alternative?

commandersaki• 1 month ago

So what has the reception been like with IETF?

Arqu11• 1 month ago

Were interacting with IETF on a number of projects and so far it's been going well :)

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

Iroh is a project that combines existing IETF standards in an interesting way. For example we use raw public keys in TLS for the key exchange https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7250 instead of coming up with our own key exchange scheme.

Our QUIC implementation noq is a standards compliant QUIC implementation that in addition to RFC9000 also implements the QUIC multipath draft RFC.

We try very hard not to invent new things unless absolutely necessary. In a few places we had to implement draft RFCs, QUIC multipath and QUIC NAT traversal. And there are some corners where we had to add our own extensions. But we try very hard to keep this to an absolute minimum.

saberience• 1 month ago

This page is basically useless in explaining what Iroh is or does and why I should care.

bel82• 1 month ago

As I see, it tries to explain.

But as someone who's not a network specialist, I fail to see how this is not a glorified P2P DNS.

Maybe this example helps:

https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh#rust-library

    const ALPN: &[u8] = b"iroh-example/echo/0";

    let endpoint = Endpoint::bind().await?;

    // Open a connection to the accepting endpoint
    let conn = endpoint.connect(addr, ALPN).await?;

    // Open a bidirectional QUIC stream
    let (mut send, mut recv) = conn.open_bi().await?;

    // Send some data to be echoed
    send.write_all(b"Hello, world!").await?;
    send.finish()?;

    // Receive the echo
    let response = recv.read_to_end(1000).await?;
    assert_eq!(&response, b"Hello, world!");

    // As the side receiving the last application data - say goodbye
    conn.close(0u32.into(), b"bye!");

    // Close the endpoint and all its connections
    endpoint.close().await;

dignifiedquire13• 1 month ago

I would love to see that P2P DNS you are talking about

embedding-shape9• 1 month ago

Such is life when you choose to be introduced to something by a version update blogpost, instead of clicking in the top-left corner and reading the landing page.

SubiculumCode• 1 month ago

Did we choose, or was that the link we were given that introduced us to it.

pseudalopex• 1 month ago

This is true. But you could click the name in the top left. Or Docs.

IP addresses break, dial keys instead

Modular networking stack for direct, peer-to-peer connections between devices

iroh establishes direct connections whenever possible, falling back to relay servers if necessary. Get fast, efficient, reliable connections that are authenticated and encrypted end-to-end using QUIC.

WhereIsTheTruth• 1 month ago

Looking at the pricing page, how can this be the future, maybe the post was written in 1998

astonex• 1 month ago

Not sure what the difference is between this and any regular P2P network?

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

A difference between iroh and many p2p networks is that we try to use existing IETF standards (QUIC, TLS) as much as possible instead of reinventing the wheel. An iroh connection is just a QUIC connection, using TLS and TLS ALPNs for protocol negotiation.

If you look at an iroh connection using wireshark, it is just a QUIC connection. You can use all the existing tools, and a lot of things you learn when using iroh transfers to traditional QUIC connections and vice versa.

Most iroh contributors come out of the p2p world, and you could say that we had a bit of abstraction fatigue after working on regular P2P networks for some years.

We have also so far resisted the temptation to write a DHT, opting instead to use the biggest existing DHT, bittorrent mainline, for our p2p address lookup needs. Many traditional P2P networks come with their own implementation of a DHT for discovery.

Note that there are some "regular p2p networks" that use iroh under the hood, e.g. holochain https://blog.holochain.org/dev-pulse-154-holochain-0-6-1-is-... as well as various p2p chat apps.

https://blog.holochain.org/dev-pulse-154-holochain-0-6-1-is-...

weavejester• 1 month ago

Forgive me if this is an ignorant question, but does your use of the Mainline DHT mean that Bittorrent clients will be responding to P2P address lookups from Iroh?

octoberfranklin3• 1 month ago

We have also so far resisted the temptation to write a DHT, opting instead to use the biggest existing DHT, bittorrent mainline, for our p2p address lookup needs. Many traditional P2P networks come with their own implementation of a DHT for discovery.

Bravo, because they always get it wrong.

DHTs used for decentralized DNS-like naming purposes have truly unique scaling requirements; you have to use a connectionless protocol (like bittorrent does) but everybody seems to be fixated on connection-oriented protocols like TCP, HTTP, and QUIC. The latter just don't work for this extreme use case.

No other use case on the entire internet requires such an extremely large out-degree for end-user nodes in the node connection graph. Allocating connection-state, even a very small amount, opens up the least-powerful nodes to easy DoS attacks. And from there it's easy for a motivated attacker to push the network away from decentralization and force it in to a highly-centralized state.

Seattle3503• 1 month ago

What are people building with Iroh?

Arqu11• 1 month ago

By far not a complete list but a starting point https://github.com/n0-computer/awesome-iroh/

Also you can join our discord and there's #showcase https://iroh.computer/discord

karissa7• 1 month ago

See https://www.iroh.computer and "use cases" at the top of the page

mnutt• 1 month ago

I have been playing around with building an Iroh Tunnel Sandstorm app that can connect two Sandstorm instances, and share some capabilities exposed from one Sandstorm instance to the other, as if the capabilities were local. Iroh has been very reliable throughout the process.

tumdum_• 1 month ago

How is that different from https://yggdrasil-network.github.io ?

ben-schaaf8• 1 month ago

Not an expert but this is how I understand it. Yggdrasil is a P2P mesh network. You configure peers to join the network and your computer becomes a relay node for everyone else to use. It doesn't work behind a NAT without port forwarding.

Iroh is kinda just a connection protocol. If you get given a public key for another computer, you can establish a connection. Like you would an IP address. The magic is in being able to establish that connection regardless of where either device is, and keeping that connection alive through changing network conditions.

28304283409234• 1 month ago

I love it. I think. But I find it hard to parse tech videos with music in the background.

Thaxll• 1 month ago

I don't understand the problem its trying to solve in the first place, IP works just fine, such as DNS.

There is already IPv6 and quic, you need vendor and major software to have any traction in that field.

Arqu11• 1 month ago

Establishing direct connections on the other hand is a much harder problem with the current internet infrastructure.

Kevcmk• 1 month ago

I'm not affiliated with Iroh or even using it, but... "IP works just fine". What!? This is _not_ a solved problem

PantaloonFlames• 1 month ago

I think that was the question: What is the problem it is solving ?

You’ve asserted “THIS is not a solved problem,” which suggests everyone is clear on what THIS means. I think that is not a good assumption.

shevy-java2• 1 month ago

But what is the actual problem?

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

Iroh is QUIC. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel here, just combining existing IETF RFCs in a creative way.

Here is a concrete problem we solve. You have one device in your home WLAN behind a NAT. Your other device is in a 4g network, or behind another NAT at work.

In most cases we can give you a direct connection between the two devices very quickly via hole punching, so you get the highest possible bandwidth and the lowest possible latency.

This was not a solved problem until now.

handoflixue• 1 month ago

Excuse my ignorance on the subject, but what does this solve that VPNs didn't already address?

kkapelon10• 1 month ago

isn't this exactly what tailscale (and also zerotier, netmaker) do?

https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works

aliasxneo• 1 month ago

Is that not what libp2p already offers? Not sure if it has QUIC out of the box, but hole-punching to UDP connectivity and then running QUIC over it isn't that hard.

system2• 1 month ago

Is bypassing the router a good idea?

johndevor2• 1 month ago

I made a demo showing it work: https://hw-e4592d7e.web.hallway.com/

kfarr• 1 month ago

Classic... want to cast to the chromecast but I'm on the wifi

opem3• 1 month ago

So iroh is basically WebRTC, except it works in and outside of a browser. Relays seems quite similar to TURN/STUN servers except they also handle fallback traffic much like TOR guard/relay nodes

1vuio0pswjnm72• 1 month ago

"This was not a solved problem until now."

CommanderData3• 1 month ago

DNS isn't decentralised it's more federated. I believe Iroh has the option to use DHT here, last I looked at least.

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

Exactly. We use DNS TXT records for our default address lookup system. But we also support fully p2p address lookup via the mainline DHT.

And if you have another suitable system, you can also plug it in. E.g. you might want to use another DHT that allows mapping from a key to some address data.

UltraSane3• 1 month ago

From what I can tell Iroh seems to be trying to create the missing Session layer from the OSI model. Another example of trying to do this is Cisco's Location-Identity Separation Protocol.

Lack of a true session layer in TCP/IP is why vmotion is normally only possible in a single broadcast domain because in this situation you only really use mac addresses for addressing and can thus use the IP as a stable identifier when the MAC address changes after a vmotion. And the switch mac address table handles the mapping.

octoberfranklin3• 1 month ago

DNS is highly centralized. Iroh isn't.

otabdeveloper4• 1 month ago

DNS isn't centralized at all.

The top-level domain registrars are centralized. But you don't need to use them - you're free to use your own TLD's instead of, or even in parallel to, the official ones.

40four2• 1 month ago

I’ve recently been building some hobby projects that focus on local first, decentralized architecture and that’s how I discovered Iroh. In my apps, I want the user data to be stored local only, no server, and have p2p sync ability. So for something like that, Iroh appears to be the state of the art.

keepupnow• 1 month ago

local-first, offline-first, no server holding the data and simply p2p sync is a great shout for projects. Have you thought any further about it?

MostlyStable• 1 month ago

I'm out of my technical depth here, but out of curiosity: is this meant to be a full replacement for the current IP address paradigm, or is this meant to be a specific tool on top of/alongside IP addresses that solves particular problems/frictions?

Arqu11• 1 month ago

A little bit of both. Natively it relies on QUIC and leverages existing IP infrastructure, however it also works with custom transports just as fine so you can interact via bluetooth for example.

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

I would say it is not a replacement but an addition.

IP isn't going anywhere any time soon, but we add two capabilities on top. The ability to dial an endpoint by key, and the ability to get direct connections whenever possible.

That being said, if some other technology becomes popular that actually replaces the IP address paradigm, iroh is well positioned to make use of it. From the point of view of an iroh application developer nothing would change. You still dial by key, and iroh will just make sure under the hood to get you the best possible connection, IP or otherwise.

kamranjon• 1 month ago

To me this sounds like tailscale - does anyone have any insight into how what this is doing is similar or different?

forsalebypwner3• 1 month ago

Their use of addressing by keys instead of by IPs seems to be the main differentiator. Also the support for custom transports (BLE, LoRa, Tor) which appears to be in progress and not yet fully implemented.

I love Tailscale, it's deployed on all my devices. But I might check this out for the transports part in particular.

RationPhantoms• 1 month ago

Tailscale uses MagicDNS which allows one to auto-generate a semi-memorable private hostname as well. I'm in the networking industry so I'm not seeing anything truly groundbreaking or that isn't offered elsewhere.

hazkoulia• 1 month ago

My 5 second summary: Tailscale connects devices and Iroh connects applications.

dignifiedquire13• 1 month ago

Tailscale is built to be global to your device, while iroh is built to be embedded into each application. This allows application developers and users a much more fine grained and bespoke setup, than having a single global bridge.

kkapelon10• 1 month ago

you can embed tailscale on the application level https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tsnet

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

I work on iroh.

On the technical level, the biggest difference is probably that we build on QUIC whereas tailscale builds on wireguard. Iroh is a library that is made to embed into your application, whereas the tailscale offering started as a daemon. It allows embedding, but you are still carrying the baggage of a go runtime. Iroh is written in rust. Rust compiles to a native library and is therefore easier and more lightweight to embed in compiled programs (C, C++) and languages such as js and python.

Another big internal difference is that we use relay URLs whereas tailscale is using relay IDs. The consequence is that every iroh endpoint, no matter if using self-hosted relays, the n0 public relays, or the n0 paid relays, can reach any other. In tailscale two nodes will only be able to talk if they use the same mapping from relay id to relay ip address, which usually means that they use the same coordination server.

Last but not least, while we do have a commercial offering, everything you need to run iroh is open source, licensed MIT and Apache2. With tailscale the coordination server is closed source and operated by tailscale, and the only way to run your own tailnet is to use the headscale community project.

schlap• 1 month ago

Were all building the exact same shit.

dignifiedquire13• 1 month ago

are we?

AgharaShyam• 1 month ago

LM studio recently released a mobile app powered by Tailscale -- https://lmstudio.ai/link . Iroh seems like a perfect OSS alternative for implementing similar p2p features.

forsalebypwner3• 1 month ago

Tailscale is OSS AFAIK. Not their backend of course, but if you use Headscale then I believe every part is OSS.

dignifiedquire13• 1 month ago

tailscale also is written in go, making the integration on mobile especially, often times a lot harder and more expensive

jMyles2• 1 month ago

So is this like an unfree CJDNS? What are the main differences?

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

There is nothing unfree about iroh. All core crates are published with the standard MIT and Apache2 licenses.

jMyles2• 1 month ago

Oh gotcha - the 'pricing' page initially gave me the impression that routing was closed/paid. But I guess it's just hosted deployment?

suwapat• 1 month ago

Missing a native go version

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

Iroh is just a clever combination of existing standards such as QUIC with some draft RFCs and a tiny bit of clever custom logic added via TLS extensions.

So in theory a go implementation is possible using a go QUIC implementation that supports the multipath extension.

Our focus is the rust implementation, since it is very easy to use from compiled languages such as rust, C and C++ and to embed into languages such as js and python.

But there are some other projects that attempt to provide a native go implementation: https://github.com/tmc/go-iroh

Edit: since iroh is just a library, it is also possible to link iroh into a go program. Linking a go program from other native languages is a bit of a pain, but linking a C or rust library into a go program is relatively straightforward and high performance.

karissa7• 1 month ago

Would you use it if there was a go version?

gamegod• 1 month ago

Sounds good, but the first step in your quickstart is getting an API key, and I'm oh, so I guess your sales pitch was a lie and this is really just another Cloudflare-like play to build another intermediary in the internet. If that's not the case, then I shouldn't need an API key for hello world...

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

If you are a rust developer, you can just take a look at the examples in the iroh repo itself or in our iroh-examples repo.

None of them require an API key.

https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh/tree/main/iroh/examples

https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-examples

jhbruhn• 1 month ago

That to me looks like Reticulums [1] adressing ("Destinations") with transport done via QUIC. Does it add anything what Reticulum didn't already solve, other than using slightly different protocols - do they have an advantage?

[1] https://reticulum.network/

giloux314• 1 month ago

This is the comment I was about to make. Reticulum is already a very complete network stack.

nunobrito2• 1 month ago

Or I2P that even comes with reinforced privacy: https://i2p.net/en/

forkerenok• 1 month ago

Besides the novel/different form of addressing Reticulum pretty much imposes its Zen on users. So in a lot of things where Reticulum is quite dogmatic, something like Iroh I'd assume (if it's reaching corporates) would provide more flexibility. I haven't checked out the source though.

As an example, AFAIK, Reticulum encrypts packet origin, so only recipient can see them. I don't think this is admissible in a corporate network.

r0l1• 1 month ago

Netbird offers the same. Just based on wireguard and everything is open source.

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

There are some technical differences since we build on QUIC, not on wireguard. We think that QUIC offers some advantages for demanding use cases.

But everything we do is open source as well. Everything in the core is MIT and Apache2 licensed, including the relay binary/library.

colinmarc4• 1 month ago

We use Iroh in production at work, and I'm absolutely in love with it. I'd describe it primarily as "Tailscale-style hole punching as a rust crate", but of course you can sprinkle a lot of cool p2p stuff on top of the basic QUIC connections.

dignifiedquire13• 1 month ago

thank you!

kkapelon10• 1 month ago

Congrats on shipping

You need urgently a "versus" page that talks about tailscale/netbird/netmaker/zerotier/twingate/openziti

Looking at the use cases, right now I don't see anything that cannot be done with Tailscale...

dandanua• 1 month ago

Nebula by Slack is also a decent player in this company.

ssx-x1• 1 month ago

reticullum is better, and faster

konart• 1 month ago

better and faster how?

geoctl• 1 month ago

Honestly I am happy that more remote access products are using QUIC, not WireGuard, for tunneling and realizing its technical benefits (e.g. AES hardware acceleration, dynamic endpoints, custom auth with JWT or mTLS, FIPS compliance, traffic masquerading as HTTP/3, etc.). I am a big fan of QUIC myself and I implemented it long ago in Octelium, which is a similar remote access product that's more centered around access control and zero trust rather than P2P connectivity. I believe QUIC should be the future of tunneling, especially when it comes to business and enterprise remote access use cases. Congrats on launching an I wish you the best of luck.

basro• 1 month ago

I wish it had support for a system similar to webrtc's offer and answer SDP messages.

From what I see, relay servers are doing a job that is equivalent to Stun + Turn + SignalingServer in WebRTC.

This is great for simplicity, but having Stun Turn and Signaling live in the same server would make it harder to secure. For example, since in webrtc signaling is up to the user, it is most common to have signaling implemented as a web server, this allows you to have it behind cloudflare with the signaling server ip never exposed to the internet. If you are not interested in supporting turn, there is plenty of public Stun servers that can be used and Stun itself is a really cheap server to run.

For iroh, it seems if I wanted to self host relay servers I'd be forced to expose their IP to the web which would make them really expensive to run if one wanted to make them DDoS proof.

0x59• 1 month ago

So this could be used as a streamlined way for client devices (mobile phones for example) to phone home to servers (google.com for example) with user data and bypass some local network controls? (DNS block lists, for example)

Is there an android SDK available?

karissa7• 1 month ago

Yes there is an Android SDK: https://docs.iroh.computer/languages/kotlin

peddling-brink• 1 month ago

I’m thinking similarly. Seems delightful for malware development and exfil. But I haven’t confirmed how the actual connections are made.

dangoodmanUT• 1 month ago

iroh is consistently one of the most delightful projects i've ever worked with. The people reflect that too.

Congrats iroh team!

nicebyte3• 1 month ago

I am confused why this is needed.

IP addresses can break, without warning, and it's outside of your device's control.

We have DNS?

Keys, however, are created & controlled by you. They stay the same as your device moves, and are yours to throw away, or not.

So are domain names? This page does not do a good job of helping me find what it is that I'm missing.

ben-schaaf8• 1 month ago

Your phone and laptop don't have stable IPs, let alone DNS entries pointing to them.

kkapelon10• 1 month ago

They do if you use tailscale and friends

nicebyte3• 1 month ago

but dynamic DNS is a thing. I've had setups for it since god knows how long, though admittedly not on my phone.

guywithahat2• 1 month ago

What you're missing is that they can't charge you for IP's, and someone else already charges you for DNS/domains. They would like to replace your IP's with keys they lookup. It's a cool idea and I would expect that they'll find a market, but I'm not sure this would be a breakthrough product for me

nicebyte3• 1 month ago

that just sounds like DNS but more centralized and not super human-friendly...

mtndew4brkfst6• 1 month ago

Not affiliated, just a happy dev.

Nothing about Iroh usage as operator or end-user entails billable metering of keys, clients, QUIC endpoints, bytes transferred etc and to be honest you could deploy pretty extensive Iroh-based software without ever having a financial relationship with number0.

arilotter• 1 month ago

My company was using Iroh for a production distributed ML training system & we LOVED it. The team was incredibly responsive even before we hooked up with an enterprise support contract, they're incredibly knowledgeable and the library itself worked amazingly. ++ to this lib. would use again over libp2p anytime.

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

thank you!

shevy-java2• 1 month ago

And because all data that comes from the connection is secured by that key, we can build up from that same key into identity, permissions, and attribution.

So basically they want to find out who is who. In other words: sniffing.

It's interesting how the discussion is currently shifting to meta-explain why sniffing is necessary. I noticed this at universities in the last years; people now either have a tablet or a smartphone or a yubico key. This will be extended in the future, there is no doubt about that. And they are selling it with fancy words, just as Iroh showed.

porsager2• 1 month ago

How is this different from https://holepunch.to/ ?

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

Holepunch, formerly hypercore, formerly dat, is a great project. Their main language is js, which makes it difficult to embed into anything but js/ts applications.

Also, they are very principled when it comes to peer to peer purity, whereas iroh is a bit more pragmatic. We use dedicated relays to faciliate hole punching, whereas holepunch tries to use other peers as a temporary relay for hole punching messages.

Another difference is that holepunch have their own DHT, where we have a less decentralised address lookup service by default and use the mainline DHT as a fully p2p alternative.

So TLDR if you are doing js in the browser, holepunch.to might be a good fit. If you work on native mobile apps or embedded devices, iroh will be better since it is pretty frugal. If you work with node.js, both will work. Just evaluate them both and use what works better for you.

E.g. we support tiny embedded devices such as esp32. https://www.iroh.computer/blog/iroh-on-esp32

porsager2• 1 month ago

Thank you so much for the great reply! Answered all my questions - will definitely look closer!

gnarlouse• 1 month ago

Is the intent to replace the IP protocol ever?

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

No. IP isn't going anywhere. The intent is to provide additional capabilities on top of IP.

That being said, if IP ever gets replaced, your iroh based app will continue to work pretty much unchanged. Iroh will just get you the best possible connection (IP or whatever) under the hood.

ramoz2• 1 month ago

Ive been prototyping with Iroh for awhile.

I think this tech (modern p2p) represents what agent-to-agent (a2a) should be built on.

Every agent should be reachable to each other without hosting itself as an http server.

related prototypes

https://github.com/eqtylab/agentbeam

https://github.com/eqtylab/real-a2a

mckirk• 1 month ago

_Every_ agent? I surely hope not. But it would be an interesting... artisocial experiment?

ramoz2• 1 month ago

I mean, I didn't mean specifically every agent, and I also did not mean as a experiment. I see real at scale uses for this. Agents operating on their own networks, cross-team agents, my own agents on my own laptop, etc. Sharing context only gets more important the better these things get.

jbverschoor• 1 month ago

Nice video production, but as you can see on this thread of nerds, the messaging is not clear.. Content first, presentation later.

MoonWalk2• 1 month ago

Not to mention that the title of the post doesn't even say what it is.

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

We have plenty of very deep technical content on our blog, explaining features of QUIC such as 0-rtt, post-quantum key exchange, address validation tokens, embedded devices.

A great thing about iroh is that due to it being just QUIC, when you learn about iroh you also learn about details of QUIC that are useful and transferrable for traditional p2p QUIC connections.

jmward01• 1 month ago

I think I see the value prop here. Beyond its intended use, what about creating a full VPN out of it? This takes care of the hard part for a lot of home users, opening your vpn up in a safe way. I know this is solved by many other tools so this isn't a new thing but it may increase adoption. Is there already something like that? I imagine you have considered this and if it doesn't already exist have a good reason for not including it. If so, what is that reason?

MoonWalk2• 1 month ago

Is what?

w10-1• 1 month ago

I definitely see the value! But I'm not confident I can tell whether there are e.g., security implications, and I couldn't find anything on point in the docs or on github (other than one discussion on authentication that mentions the information disclosed). Would love a whitepaper on that and any other issues adopters should consider.

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

We should definitely do a better job explaining this.

Regarding security, one thing to be aware of is that iroh connections are just standard QUIC connections secured using standard TLS with the (also standard) raw public keys in TLS extension.

We don't roll our own crypto. What little non-standard crypto we had previously was removed on the path to iroh 1.0.

So iroh connections are just as secure as the QUIC/TLS connections your browser makes to your banking app. Whenever there are some new concerns like for example post quantum security, we can benefit from industry standards.

E.g. we do already support optional post quantum key exchange to secure connections.

https://www.iroh.computer/blog/iroh-post-quantum-handshakes

overgard• 1 month ago

This sounds useful, but isn't this the problem that ipv6 is supposed to solve with 128bit addresses? (I'm not really familiar with why IPv6 never really seemed to take off -- does NAT block incoming IPv6 traffic? (I guess that's the other thing -- even though my devices all seem to have IPv6 addresses I can't recall ever using them))

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

IPV6 addresses are still addresses. They get assigned to your device, and change as you change networks.

Iroh addresses are (currently Ed25519) keys. They are not scarce, so you can create them on demand and keep them as you move from one network to another.

If IPv6 was everywhere I guess the hole punching feature of iroh would become less important, but the dial by key feature would remain just as important.

apitman7• 1 month ago

IPv6 solves a lot of it, and maybe in another 20 years we can rely on it.

janandonly• 1 month ago

This is big > We built & continually check that iroh can compile to WASM & run in the browser

wiremine• 1 month ago

This looks really interesting... I think I grok the basic value prop.

However, I'm confused on the open source vs. commercial offerings. How do they differ? How do they work together?

flub3• 1 month ago

iroh is an open source library. The relay servers are open source too but number0 runs public, rate limited, relay servers that can be used by everyone. The commercial offerings are for dedicated relay servers and more insight into your network.

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

The core is open source and always will be. Crates are licensed the usual for rust: Apache2 and MIT. This also includes the relay servers.

In addition we provide services that any commercial deployment using iroh will probably find essential: observability and a custom non rate limited relay network, as well as priority access to the engineering team.

himata41132• 1 month ago

Hmm, this really looks more of a relay network for sale, kinda like steam p2p. The only real use-case I see for this is for exactly that, connecting two or more players where one of the players is the host.

Seems like it'll be a hard sell since steam is already so dominant and enterprise is dominated by tailscale... I see the proposal for being able to work with many different networks from different companies at the same time, but it's a pretty rare usecase and nothing some iptables can't solve.

I can see the argument for chat in heavily censored regions of the world, but not sure if there's any advantages that iroh can offer over other solutions.

Market fit will be hard to find, but best of luck.

int0x29• 1 month ago

Steam sockets and CloudFlare's UDP forwarding really are different though. They provide ddos protection as well as route optimization due to lots of points of presence.

Here there seems to be no mention of ddos mitigation or shorter routes due to infrastructure. Yes you need a key to connect but your iroh relay server can still be attacked. I suppose you could roll your own distributed anycast system for this.

himata41132• 1 month ago

I assume that the 'enterprise' relays have ddos protection. DDoS protection also comes standard these days, but we've seen attacks go from 20gbps to 20tbps so if uptime is required then tough luck.

openscript• 1 month ago

What about censorship circumvention? Is there specialized DERP to DERP communication, that bridge over internet edge nodes doing DPI on QUIC?

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

We do not use DERP. But yes, relay to relay communication is something we want to look into in the future for some use cases.

As of now relays are completely self contained and pretty dumb. The protocol does not require relay to relay communication, which means that the relay code can be relatively simple.

coldblues2• 1 month ago

The future of networking is decentralization. I'm a huge fan of Yggdrasil and I2P. We should just be able to buy a mini PC to run 24/7 and host whatever it is that we need on it and seamlessly connect to others. A lot of techies already have older spare machines laying around collecting dust that can become servers. It is far cheaper in the long run and easier to maintain than having to deal with domains and server hosting. I truly appreciate the work that the Iroh team puts out.

tootie• 1 month ago

It's been the future for at least 20 years now.

coldblues2• 1 month ago

This post may be sarcastic, but some of us really have been living in the future so to speak, more than others. It's the nature of novel, groundbreaking tech. Adoption is not immediate.

edbaskerville• 1 month ago

Hoping to use this to reboot an ancient abandoned project. At the time there wasn't a mature P2P connection layer that took care of all the realities of the modern Internet out of the box. Now there is, and it's great to see.

This isn't Tailscale because it does secure P2P connections between any pair of devices, whether or not they have Tailscale. This enables real end-user P2P for, e.g., local-first apps with no server infrastructure except relays for resilience. And even if you lose the relay servers, things keep on working the same for any hosts that don't need them.

miki123211• 1 month ago

I like the idea. A couple of questions:

1. How does Iroh handle key rotation / leakage? Could you build some kind of hot/cold system on top of it, where you'd have a cold "identity key" in airgapped, secure storage, used only to issue certificates for your hot "traffic acceptance" key?

2. Is there any kind of peer discovery / DHT, either built-in directly or through some semi-official higher-level protocol, like DNS for IP?

3. What about human-friendly peer names? Those are almost required for end-user friendly applications. Most solutions of that problem either assume that every single user is willing to dedicate their life to configuring DNS, rely on a trusted third party, or delegate the responsibility to a blockchain.

4. What are the channel reliability properties, and are they configurable? Can you decide how to handle out-of-order or lost packets, or does the protocol enforce a decision? If you're willing to tolerate loss, duplication and reordering, can you avoid head-of-line blocking?

5. Is peer anonymity a goal?

6. What about two mostly-offline peers who wish to communicate (think smartphone apps that can't be connected 24/7 due to battery concerns)?

Overall, cool project.

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

1. Currently we are using Ed25519 keys. You could use our existing discovery services to add a level of indirection from a root key to the currently active key. It wouldn't be that much code, since the discovery services are pretty generic. But we haven't done so yet.

2. We have a centralized DNS based discovery mechanism enabled by default, and an optional bittorrent mainline DHT based discovery mechanism. We also have mDNS for local networks, and you can plug in your own.

3. Our current keys are non scarce but also not human readable. You can use another level of indirection via DNS or some blockchain based naming system like ENS to assign a human readable alias, but that is not built in.

4. Iroh streams are just QUIC streams, and reliable and ordered by default. There are APIs to receive data as it arrives, but this for really advanced users. Most users are best served by just using the streams as-is.

https://docs.rs/noq/latest/noq/struct.RecvStream.html#method...

There is also an escape hatch if you don't want streams at all, e.g. if you have a consumer like a video codec that can deal with data loss themselves. We support QUIC unreliable datagrams ( https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9221 ).

https://docs.rs/noq/latest/noq/struct.Connection.html#method...

5. Peer anonymity as in hiding the ip addr of a endpoint id can be achieved, but not with the default config. The default config is tuned for performance. You can hide your ip address by using one of the mixnet custom transports and disabling the ip transport.

6. Iroh is just connections. If a and b are never online at the same time they won't be able to communicate. You would have to write an iroh protocol that talks to some always online node. We do have some protocols that can be used to implement this, such as iroh docs, but that is not the main product.

mrbluecoat• 1 month ago

Surprising you don't support golang

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

We did have golang bindings in the past, but had to pause all bindings because keeping them up to date was not viable. Now that we have a stable API, we will revisit this.

If there is enough serious demand we could publish go bindings. Iroh is a rust library that is very easy and efficient to embed into golang binaries.

andrewflnr3• 1 month ago

Dial keys

Maybe it's in the video I didn't watch, but I really think paragraph one should make clear what kind of keys and why. Cryptographic? Asymmetric? How do they do the job, at even the most basic level? It never explains, just dives into abstract claims of superiority and usage stats. I gather relays are involved; this would be a good thing to mention right away instead of making me sift it from the HN discussion.

taf2• 1 month ago

when i read "keys" i figured "names" like in my .ssh/config a named host that i access with a key... but listening more it sounds like a new way to do networking over QUIC...

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

At the lowest level it is a creative way to leverage all the work the major cloud vendors have poured into QUIC for p2p connections.

If you look at an iroh connection in wireshark it is just a QUIC connection. If you configure a SSLKEYLOGFILE so wireshark can actually look into the packets, you will see a few TLS extensions and somewhat unusual packets flying by during the handshake, but once established it is a completely normal QUIC connection.

That is also why we are relatively confident regarding encryption security. It is just TLS. And we can also leverage new encryption like post quantum key exchange with just a few config changes, without any code changes.

See https://www.iroh.computer/blog/iroh-post-quantum-handshakes

One thing that is genuinely novel is that we use QUIC multipath to keep the different paths (relay, various direct IP paths) separate. This has some technical benefits because the congestion controller does not get irritated when the underlying transport changes. Each transport has its own congestion controller.

morphism2• 1 month ago

While the frontpage doesn't go in depth, the docs quickly do: First with https://docs.iroh.computer/what-is-iroh and then following up with the how it works section. The docs are actually good from what I can see so far. From what questions you brought up so for it seems to answer them pretty quickly.

sva_• 1 month ago

The doc still doesn't show what such a 'key' looks like? Why can't there be a simple infographic that goes like

    127.0.0.1 -> 'key'

andrewflnr3• 1 month ago

I'd quibble with "quickly", but sure, this seems like the starting point for figuring out how it works: https://docs.iroh.computer/concepts/endpoints From a marketing standpoint, for a technical audience, I think it should be quicker.

isodev• 1 month ago

I saw the video and still have no idea what they are. Also, “never locked in” but then “pricing” and why is one paying for “apps” but self hosting relays?

spencerflem2• 1 month ago

As I understand it- you can use free community provided relays, self-host your own, or pay for their managed services with an SLA and monitoring built in

spencerflem2• 1 month ago

Having spent a while trying to understand it, I believe the keys are serving a dual purpose as an encryption key and as a stable identifier along the lines of a session cookie that might be used for a WebRTC video call.

Here's my summary from Lobste.rs, keeping in mind I'm not an expert and only found this project today:

[..] this is closer to an opinionated WebRTC setup that handles assigning a persistent ID to clients. All the work of making a signaling server is taken care of and the solution is generic enough and cheap enough to run that you can get away with using a community hosted one. Kinda similar to what you get with Steam’s proprietary p2p gamenetworkingsocket infrastructure

https://lobste.rs/s/cslljn/iroh_1_0_dial_keys_not_ips#c_s3na...

dotancohen3• 1 month ago

  > Dial keys. Not IPs.
  > It's a simple idea really, and it's the right abstraction for the future of the internet. IP addresses can break, without warning, and it's outside of your device's control. Keys, however, are created & controlled by you. They stay the same as your device moves, and are yours to throw away, or not. IP addresses can be private and inaccessible behind firewalls, but with iroh your device can be securely addressable no matter where it is.

To me that just sounds like a reimplementation of DNS. Maybe decentralised and maybe free and maybe not monomeric, but broadly the same.

Folcon2• 1 month ago

The biggest difference that I can see is that keys are not making any claims about ownership, there's no global registry and it's p2p, which is a big upside

bellowsgulch2• 1 month ago

No idea why this is downvoted, it's exactly the pitch for DNS. Others and I are asking the same question. There's no value proposition here.

ben-schaaf8• 1 month ago

DNS doesn't work with constantly changing IPs, like you have on mobile networks. DNS also doesn't help when the IP is behind a NAT. So I really don't see how the two are similar at all.

Kazik24• 1 month ago

I've been using iroh for a while now for personal projects. I wrote an utility for sharing locally running services with others: https://github.com/Kazik24/server_share Glad I can finally update to 1.0. It's a great library.

born-jre• 1 month ago

As a person which tried to love libp2p so much this look. Great will definitely take deeper look

infogulch2• 1 month ago

How does Iroh's performance compare to wireguard?

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

I think we do very well with devices devices with limited bandwidth and changing connections. We are able to saturate a 1 GiB link from a normal desktop PC or good phone, but have some work to do to saturate a 10 GiB link with a single process.

We don't have a comparison benchmark, but we are fast enough that we are not the limiting factor for many use cases.

In many cases the performance bottleneck is the interface to the kernel to send and receive UDP packets. Our QUIC implementation is using all available tricks to make this as fast as possible. For example on OSX we use the sendmsg_x syscall to send multiple UDP packets in one syscall. On Linux we use GRO/GSO and recvmmsg to send/receive as many packets as possible.

But to be completely honest, in some cases TCP is still faster for raw throughput on server class hardware. Decades of optimisation have gone into TCP. But QUIC/UDP is quickly catching up. All the major cloud vendors bet heavily on QUIC/UDP and are optimizing it.

Since we just do p2p QUIC we benefit directly from all improvements in this area.

infogulch2• 1 month ago

I'm happy to hear you really care about perf.

I might have assumed io_uring would be the high throughput kernel interface for Linux.

Can iroh run on a proxy server which forwards requests to backends that don't integrate with iroh directly?

What is the CPU overhead at link saturating speeds?

Veserv• 1 month ago

Just to clarify are you saying a 1 gigabyte/s link or a 1 gigabit/s link? And you are seeking to saturate a 10 gigabyte/s link or a 10 gigabit/s link?

akavel2• 1 month ago

Huge congrats on the release!

I'm slowly trying to build an app on Iroh; it's progressing tiny bit by tiny bit, but I must admit I'm struggling a lot all the time, both with various low-level details, as well as with understanding many high-level aspects, concepts, and approaches. Oftentimes I have to resort to some LLM-generated "wiki" websites to help me progress. I really hope you'll manage one day to allocate some more resources to improve the docs. That said, when I manage to muster enough strength, I do manage to grind some progress, and also it's good to know the underlying tech seems robust, given how many real-world solutions you've built on it!

At this moment, if I can try to ask one question: AFAIU Iroh emerged from an attempt at fixing IPFS. I also understand you've since focused more on providing the lower-level building blocks that would allow this and other solutions. Understanding some basics, but still having hard time to get a really solid grasp of the whole of Iroh, I wonder: between Iroh, p2panda, and Willow, what's available and what's missing / needs to be added if one wanted to try and build an "IPFS-like" with those technologies? I'm especially interested in an idea of a "new web" that would defuse DDoS of static websites in a Torrent-like way, forcing the downloading peers to also share their upstream bandwidth while doing this. I'm also thinking of e.g. a "globally-distributed Internet Archive", where I can easily download part of the Archive to my computer, and this automatically improves its availability on such "new web" for subsequent downloaders and browsers. Would you care to give a newbie something of a high-level overview of how one could try to do it over maybe some appropriate combination of Iroh+p2panda+Willow+DHT?

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

We started as an IPFS implementation, but since then the scope of iroh has been reduced. Iroh is not IPFS, but more like libp2p.

If you want something like a globally distributed internet archive you would have to use protocols on top of iroh. For example iroh-blobs provides verified streaming of content-addressed data using the BLAKE3 tree hash function. It is very close to itself being 1.0 (probably Q3), but for now it requires you to know from where to stream the data.

What is missing to fully replace IPFS is a global distributed content discovery system. This is a really hard problem that IPFS itself never solved reliably in my opinion.

I also still want this to happen eventually, but the first step is to get the connection layer super reliable and fast, which we have done.

I wish you could also delegate this problem to the mainline DHT, but alas that is not possible because of some mainline limitiations. So I am working on the side on a new DHT, see https://www.iroh.computer/blog/lets-write-a-dht-1

CommanderData3• 1 month ago

Is content discovery on the official roadmap? If the original peer say peer A goes offline but B downloaded $X, can see find B and download, validate the content today?

Sorry if this has been answered or covered on the web I'm currently travelling.

Edit: I managed to read the linked page, thank you for working on such an amazing project!

akavel2• 1 month ago

Thank you very much for the response! I'm definitely going to read the blogpost, thanks as well for sharing it!

teohhanhui• 1 month ago

I wish you could also delegate this problem to the mainline DHT, but alas that is not possible because of some mainline limitiations.

Have you seen https://github.com/bittorrent/bittorrent.org/pull/174 - does that address the main issue?

mcdermott• 1 month ago

"If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea." --Zen of Python

virtualbluesky3• 1 month ago

This might sound pointed, but it truly isn't - why is this approach not already commonplace? As a concept, looking up a verifiable identity makes sense, but often ideas that made sense were looked into and discarded for valid reasons. Would be good to understand those to better understand when/when not to use the project?

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

Previous similar attempts were often not pragmatic or frugal enough. They cared about peer to peer purity more than about it working under all circumstances. They also frequently overabstracted things.

So we got into the sad situation that people associate peer to peer connectivity systems with having to frequently debug the entire stack and having recurrent performance or connectivity issues.

A part of the motivation for the iroh team is to change this notion by being very pragmatic and minimalistic. E.g. the use of relays vs. enlisting other peers to help with hole punching.

virtualbluesky3• 1 month ago

What's the minimum viable number of relays if the entire internet was running on Iroh today?

virtualbluesky3• 1 month ago

And thanks for the reply, I like the philosophy of the bits I understand so far. Rare project in that sense, fwiw.

lsp• 1 month ago

You're right, it does make sense. This is how the internet was designed but not how it was implemented.

Originally, every machine was a directly reachable peer, but a finite supply of addresses (IPv4) forced most devices behind translation boxes (NAT) that let them dial out without ever being dialable. Once traffic had to route through the few hosts that stayed reachable, those hosts became toll booths, which is partially where the more centralized internet we actually got came from.

iroh basically patches the internet

yapancha• 1 month ago

Maybe it's just me but it's not clear immediately what this is about. I did get a sense after spending enough time. Just feedback.

arianvanp• 1 month ago

Are you able to do any form of highly available loadbalancing with this?

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

We have not implemented this yet, and there are some things to consider. But there is an open standard for load balancing QUIC connections, and we have hooks in our QUIC implementation noq to generate connection ids that should allow us to work with this open standard.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-quic-load-balanc...

Get in touch if you have a demanding use case and want us to help.

apitman7• 1 month ago

If you're new to Iroh, my mental model is roughly "Tailscale at the application layer instead of the network layer".

If your question is, "why not just use Tailscale?", look at it from an app developer's perspective. If you want to release an app and have instances of your app be able to easily connect to each other, you could theoretically embeded Tailscale functionality into your app, but then the users of your app need Tailscale accounts, and your app is dependent on Tailscale.

Iroh lets you embed this functionality directly, and provides public fallback relays. If your app gets too big for the public relays, using your own relays is the flip of a switch.

bicepjai3• 1 month ago

I understood more about what iroh does with this post then the video :) thanks for the mental model. Now how does iroh accomplish this. Great idea by the way.

thejazzman2• 1 month ago

this is how: https://docs.iroh.computer/concepts/relays

gz52• 1 month ago

the closest comparison is openziti:

+ iroh and openziti can both be app-embedded

+ so the app developer embedding in their service is a good use case for both

+ openziti is used for services in which scale and security are critical

+ whereas iroh allows participation from parties which don't have any prior relationships - which can be very convenient

embedding-shape9• 1 month ago

the closest comparison is openziti:

Except without all the ceremony about setting up daemons, servers, controllers, "networks" and what not that openziti seems to have. Iroh is more "define protocol and hook two clients together" with everything in one binary.

Unless I understand https://github.com/openziti/sdk-golang/blob/a6e5f1697a9dc34a... wrong, it seems to require a "controller-url", is that controller embeddable as well?

michaelsalim• 1 month ago

This is exactly it. I'm pretty sure I found Iroh after thinking: can we ship Tailscale with our app?

For environments where you want people to access your local instance, I believe Iroh will be a game changer. For us, it's to allow control over our software through phones and other devices easily.

Previously, you might have to make sure they're in the same LAN network. But with Iroh, anything works.

evnc• 1 month ago

Oh, okay, I get the value prop now. Thank you. They should hire you to write their marketing copy, you did a better job than the landing page.

thejazzman2• 1 month ago

also to follow on the "why not use tailscale" should be because they're a business who seeks to make money and we are fools to keep concentrating distributed technology to a handful of centralized owners (!)

especially when iroh makes it so easy and awesome to do it right.

rmunn• 1 month ago

So instead of paying a subscription fee to Tailscale to support your distributed application, you pay a subscription fee to Iroh to support your distributed application. (https://www.iroh.computer/pricing says $19/month for what most people will want to use it for).

Either one will allow you to stop "concentrating distributed technology to a handful of centralized owners", but the "why not use tailscale" part of what you're trying to say is not at all evident from your comment.

sethops1• 1 month ago

that landing page is confusing, they should delete their text and replace it with yours

Bnjoroge• 1 month ago

They should basically replace any Why Iroh vs Tailscale with this. Thank you

evilturnip• 1 month ago

Ok, stupid question, but what applications is something like tailscale/iroh used for? I've never worked with this type of tech so curious where it is valuable.

inapis• 1 month ago

With tailscale, you can establish a private LAN over the internet. Iroh embeds this directly into the app itself.

brudlekukk• 1 month ago

Not a stupid question - I was wondering about the same thing, and this gave me easy access to the answer because someone replied to your comment. Thank you for asking :)

embedding-shape9• 1 month ago

Say you want to build a Peer to Peer application; chat, file sharing, music sync or whatever, then something needs to be built to communicate between this application running in two different places. While you still need to build the actual protocol yourself ("Users can send messages" etc), how the two instances are connected is handled by Iroh mostly.

waynesonfire2• 1 month ago

why isn't your mental model to use DNS?

cwillu• 1 month ago

DNS is piece of the required kit, and not the only hard part of the task.

mkl4• 1 month ago

How will that help your computer behind your NAT communicate with my computer behind my NAT? (I think you're still stuck on the blog post's very confusing opening, which does indeed make it sound like a terrible alternative to DNS, but it's actually something entirely different, for a very different purpose.)

samrus4• 1 month ago

Its amazing to me how people can make a great a product. And then completely bury the lead because they are so deep into the guts of the system

You explained the value proposition so well. The website just didnt get to the "why?" At all

waynesonfire2• 1 month ago

Why? Because if you need to serve ads that are being blacklisted by DNS, you need something like this.

colinmarc4• 1 month ago

It's primarily an open source library, not a product.

I don't understand why HN seems so concerned about nailing down its "value proposition".

nicce• 1 month ago

On the other hand, parent commenter's comparison is based on another product. How good it is if people don't know what Tailscale is? There was a time I did not understand Tailscale and its value.

bsenftner4• 1 month ago

That amazement is due to one of our largest and least realized critical mistakes as a civilization: no where are people taught how to effectively communicate. We have entire Colleges of Communications at every university, and what do they teach? How to execute mass manipulation, not how to convey understanding, not how to manage disagreements. These are not "mistakes" either, this distinct lack of teaching real communications is how society is maintained manipulative. And the worst part, many of you will read this and not understand, because you've not been taught the communications insights to grasp this message.

rapnie• 1 month ago

You explained the value proposition so well.

No, it didn't. It shifted the burden of learning the value proposition to first knowing what Tailscale is exactly. And a response of "Duh, that's obvious", perhaps indicates being too deep in the guts of tailscale systems.

hasteg• 1 month ago

Agreed, I went through the blog post and a few other pages trying to figure out what the benefit of Iroh is since I have never heard of it... was struggling lol.

metaketa2• 1 month ago

I think it's more similar to the idea of IPFS than Tailscale. It's excellent for example for decentralized networks where there is missing trust; file sharing, bittorrent, blockchain networks etc, where you don't want to manage the complexity of dropping IP addresses at the application layer. I initially found it for parture.org for example.

grumbel• 1 month ago

That explanation still seems overly complicated. Iroh isn't a VPN. Iroh just lets apps connect to each other, just like plain old TCP, but without the shackles of NAT, DNS and dynamic IP addresses that made that impossible. It's restoring simple P2P connectivity to the Internet.

worldsayshi• 1 month ago

Also, all connections in iroh are end-to-end encrypted.

Perepiska• 1 month ago

And bypass all the firewalls if secret key of target machine is known?

piokoch• 1 month ago

Still I am not sure why I should use their paid service instead of using publicly available infrastructure. If they go out of business, get sold what's then? DNS and friends are not going to disappear and send me "it was great journey" e-mail. Maybe for some specific applications, like P2P chats, this makes sens, but how many of such applications are needed?

I've looked at the usecases page, obviously there is an AI stunt (which I don't buy at all), for POS applications, well, there are better and less risky (see above) ways to do this, so the only thing that seems to make sense is this real-time sync, if someone is in the restricted environment (but, the point is, that in the restricted environment iroh is going to be blocked anyway by firewalls, z-scaler, etc.).

gf000• 1 month ago

They host a relay server that is available to everyone, but you are expected/recommended to use your own for most use cases, so you will have only depend on open-source code and your own infra.

angry_octet2• 1 month ago

How do I add firewalls and proxies and logging to iroh connections? How do I revoke and re-issue iroh keys? Can I host iroh relays/gateways on my intranet?

Until these questions are answered iroh will remain blocked.

nvme0n1p12• 1 month ago

https://docs.iroh.computer/

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

You don't have to use it. But here are some answers:

Re-issuing keys is as simple as generating a new Ed25519 keypair.

let secret_key = SecretKey::generate(); // takes less than a millisecond

Iroh as of now has no fleet management. So the concept of revoking a key is something you would have to add yourself.

We have extensive logging for iroh. You can enable trace logging and even enable qlog for detailed connection logs. You can view the logs in any qlog viewer. We have written one, but there are others. It is an open standard for QUIC logs.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-quic-qlog-main-s... https://github.com/n0-computer/qlog-viewer

The iroh relay library and binary are open source just like everything else in the core. You can of course run a relay in your intranet, but the exact details depend on the use case. Get in touch if you have a demanding use case and want us to help.

jupin• 1 month ago

I found this interesting to learn how Tailscale works: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works

tecleandor2• 1 month ago

Well, Iroh is more P2P (direct connections) and less VPN (subnet routing).

If anyone really wants to use Tailscale (or I think Headscale should work too) at application layer, you can use tsnet [0]

  0: https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tsnet

vinceguidry• 1 month ago

A much better answer to the question "why not just use Tailscale?" is that critical functionality only is available with cloud hosting, self-hosted headscale just doesn't offer a usable solution.

If you want to release an app and have instances of your app be able to easily connect to each other, you could theoretically embeded Tailscale functionality into your app, but then the users of your app need Tailscale accounts, and your app is dependent on Tailscale.

Just use Wireguard directly like everyone else.

wartywhoa23• 1 month ago

How soon till govporations require that people dial their services by key, issue and treat the keys like passports, and block those who say something against the grain, acess a forbidden site, read a forbidden book, happen to be of wrong nation or otherwise violate ToSes of said govporations?

A wonderful chain to link to the CBDC shackle.

bicepjai3• 1 month ago

So each app can be its own tailnet, and let devices talk to each other on its network using api keys. Like home appliances in HomeKit network ?

mnot• 1 month ago

The site mentions preferring open standards in the IETF - where is it being discussed there?

iand• 1 month ago

The site is referring to Iroh's preference for using IETF standards rather than rolling their own.

salgorithm• 1 month ago

I setup a TypeScript SDK with some examples to test in the browser.

SDK https://github.com/SalvatoreT/iroh-ts

Examples

- https://salvatoret.github.io/iroh-ts/examples/chat/

- https://salvatoret.github.io/iroh-ts/examples/debug/

- https://salvatoret.github.io/iroh-ts/examples/poker/

I made this a while back because I want an easy way to throw together games for family game nights.

sunshine-o• 1 month ago

I am looking at the awesome page [0] and was surprise not to see a syncthing equivalent.

Wouldn't that an obvious use case? or am I missing a technical limitation?

- [0] https://github.com/n0-computer/awesome-iroh#file-sharing

protocolture• 1 month ago

IP addresses can break, without warning, and it's outside of your device's control. Keys, however, are created & controlled by you.

This doesn't really make a lot of sense. Assuming this is true, its equally likely to be my gateway, or BGP peer IP that breaks. How Iroh offers anything in this scenario is beyond me.

The power of that key can't be overstated. We use it to secure the connection. And because all data that comes from the connection is secured by that key, we can build up from that same key into identity, permissions, and attribution. We can also use that same key as an address we can dial, no matter where it is in the world. It turns the internet into a secure localhost.

This is a way better use case. This should be the headline.

gorszon• 1 month ago

Yeah, I agree, I had a hard time understanding what it is, because they wanted to define it in relation to IP, but this is not an IP replacement, this is just a different thing. Like a secure by design quic, or something, if I understand it correctly.

bear330• 1 month ago

It's very cool! I am planning add Iroh into my daily used https P2P tool (https://github.com/nuwainfo/ffl) which currently using WebRTC. It's very cool to support both protocols, but it seems like Iroh python support is via FFI which can't be used in my APE (Actual Portable Executable) build...thinking...

superkuh• 1 month ago

I am happy to see that Iroh says they'll support the 1.0 protocol for the entire life of the project even if they make a new version. If they can stay true to this it'll be a useful alternative domain system. But using QUIC means it's CA TLS only. As we've seen with the US government pressure on Lets Encrypt recently this CA TLS requirement allows the US (or other nation's) feds to shut down your 'key' no matter where you are. If they allowed self signed or even plain text this would not be a serious issue. But QUIC libs generally can't do this or at best offer a 'scary' build flag for self-signed that is never enabled on any dev's machine during compiling for distribution.

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

We are using QUIC, but using a QUIC/TLS extension called raw public keys in TLS. The DNS is not involved in any way, and there is no way anybody can shut down your usage of iroh.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7250

In the beginning of the project we did use self-signed certs, but due to raw public keys that is no longer necessary. And in any case scary build flags aren't an issue since we control our own rust QUIC implementation, noq.

_carbyau_• 1 month ago

So, is there an open source variant of Signal using Iroh?

IE could I get an app on my phone, to talk to anyone on the planet with that app directly without having to trust any middlemen like Apple, Google, WhatsApp etc?

Could people have something like original facebook, but without Meta because of actual p2p?

sgsvnk• 1 month ago

This is great work, but the blog is too esoteric, likely written by the developers. You should revamp the website to appeal to more general software engineers with more easy to understand terminology to get better traction.

Ingon• 1 month ago

Amazing, congrats on the release.

I've been drawing a lot of inspiration from Iroh, while working on my own https://github.com/connet-dev/connet. While peers in connet communicate peer to peer, I have a long way to cover peer discovery and transparent connection migration.

"Tailscale at the application layer, instead of the network layer" (as sibling comment describes it) is a great way of thinking about it. In my mind, with the right apps, Iroh (and connet) could really democratize secure self-hosting.

aag• 1 month ago

For a side project, I used Iroh to give my web server in the cloud the ability to print directly to my label printer at home. The API is simple and easy to use. It took no time to write a reliable system on top of Iroh.

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

Very cool project. I seriously wish one of the printer vendors would use iroh to come up with a network printing standard that just works.

We constantly have issues with our printer. I have fewer issues with my bambu 3d printer than with my (also very expensive) epson inkjet.

These people need to get their shit together, seriously. The way things are going we will have full AGI before we have working printers.

If somebody want to do this, please reach out to us. We are eager to help. But this is one of the most annoying things ever with computers.

comboy3• 1 month ago

I'm so disappointed in this comment thread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model

I've just learned about it, but my understanding is that Iroh is L7, compared to e.g. tailscale which is L3

rklaehn62• 1 month ago

That is correct. Iroh connections are at L6, individual protocols such as blobs or gossip are at L7.

From the OSI point of view, QUIC itself is a bit of a layering violation. It covers transport (L4, Reliable ordered delivery, stream multiplexing, congestion control, ...), session (L5, connection establishment and lifecycle, path migration, ...) and presentation (L6, encryption).

And of course below that we have the ability to provide custom transports.

This was done intentionally in QUIC to provide more control. The application layer doesn't have to care about what goes on below, but for some advanced use cases it can know what's going on and even influence which path is being used.

QUIC/TLS being such a comprehensive and well tested package allows us to delegate a lot of the work and just add a tiny bit of logic to make it peer to peer.

Although delegate is not exactly right, since we ended up having to write our own QUIC implementation, noq, to support QUIC multipath...

Pbhaskal• 1 month ago

but does not quic internally needs an IP address to route , who maintain device vs ip address map.

is it like torrent

andai• 1 month ago

Iroh 1.0

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