gpestana
commented
5 years ago Done (keeping this in ./applications/ directory)
Closed gpestana closed 5 years ago
gpestana
commented
5 years ago Done (keeping this in ./applications/ directory)
NLnet fund application https://nlnet.nl/PET/
Abstract: Can you explain the whole project and its expected outcome(s).
The long term vision is to create a research and development working group focused on the open challenges of privacy and Internet censorship at a network level. The main goals of the working group are to formulate research problems based on real-world needs, to conduct high-quality research and to bridge the gap between academia and industry. Based on the results of the research, we want to provide practical implementations that can be used by everyone. By design, all the work is done open source and tightly connected to both academia and industry.
Currently, we are focusing on r&d of primitives that improve privacy and metadata resistance of P2P networks. The current open research and engineering questions are 1) how to build practical and scalable privacy preserving distributed hash tables and 2) how to design and build privacy preserving peer assisted CDNs.
The outcomes are 1) p3lib: a library of privacy preserving primitives for anyone to use in P2P systems (https://github.com/hashmatter/p3lib) 2) implementation and papers published on practical solutions for enhancing privacy in DHTs (IPFS, Dat, bittorrent) 3) design and implementing a privacy preserving peer CDN.
Have you been involved with projects or organisations relevant to this project before? And if so, can you tell us a bit about your contributions?
I've been a contributor for libp2p and IPFS community in work around CRDTs and privacy preserving DHTs. I started hashmatter (https://hashmatter.com) where we've been working towards the outcomes described above, specially on the research work on privacy preserving DHTs in loose collaboration with friends form academia.
Explain what the requested budget will be used for?
The project does not have any funding yet. The main goal for the funding is to create a research and development bounty program to bring researchers, engineers or anyone interested in privacy preserving P2P networks to contribute on what we have been working on. At this point we don't have any running costs (hardware, websites, etc), so the money will be mostly used to bring people to the community to research on privacy preserving DHTs and help designing and building private, scalable and fast peer assisted CDN technology that can be used by anyone in the industry and new comers.
Compare your own project with existing or historical efforts.
We are trying to bring the academia and industry together around efforts to improve privacy of P2P networks and services. Historically, academia has been trying to solve some of the challenges we are focusing without engaging enough with the industry, while industry tends not to focus enough on privacy (maybe for lacking the right incentives and knowledge). We would like to close the academia-industry gap by creating an open source r&d community that solve real problems and contribute for the research efforts towards a better and more private Internet.
Protocol Labs are a great example of a r&d company with huge impact through libp2p, IPFS and Filecoin. We are highly influenced by the modus operandi of Protocol Labs and would like to replicate it, while focusing on privacy preserving technologies.
What are significant technical challenges you expect to solve during the project, if any?
1) It has been hard to fund the research and development efforts which makes it hard to get the right people to contribute - this is due to the fact we have no business model around our technology. This could probably change with the private peer assisted CDN project although we want to keep everything open source regardless.
2) Research and open questions: validating ideas in both industry and research community is hard (but doable) This requires time and effort and a good technical overview of the problem at hand. Another factor on research is that it sometimes is open ended and efforts might not produce a very tangible result that can be applied to the problem at hand.
3) Community: since there is no enough time and bandwidth, it has been hard to engage more with researchers and developers and to create a community which would collaborate with us.
Describe the ecosystem of the project, and how you will engage with relevant actors and promote the outcomes?
The ecosystem we've been focusing on is the research community on privacy enhancing technologies, blockchain industry and research community and P2P and decentralized companies and projects (e.g. Dat, IPFS, Tor). We have started and want to keep engaging with the ecosystem players in the following ways:
1) Give technical talks at conferences (e.g. upcoming Data Terra Nemo)
2) Collaborate with PhD candidates and professors working on the research work.
3) Conduct audits of privacy on current P2P networks (e.g peer5, lightning network, Dat, IPFS, ...), present the results to the project owners, distill research questions from the result of the audits and propose solutions for them.
4) Design and build primitives for privacy in P2P networks (e.g. p3lib https://github.com/hashmatter/p3lib) that can be used by the ecosystem in general. The same libp2p is doing for P2P networking, we want to create p3lib for privacy.
5) Design and build mechanisms that improve privacy of current companies (e.g. privacy preserving peer assisted CDNs.)