hashmatter is a research and development lab focused on improving distributed and P2P protocols towards better privacy and metadata resistance. Our mission is to build software that enables developers to build a privacy preserving and metadata resistant decentralized web.
The ethos of the P2P community and the decentralized web is characterized by allowing people and communities to interoperate and collaborate without the need for external stewardship. This new paradigm opens doors for user self-sovereignty, personal data ownership and freedom from central authorities which incentives tend to lock-in their users and to use and monetize private data in order to maximize their profits. However, P2P and decentralized protocols are complex and collaboration between multiple untrusted parties often leaks metadata that can be used to target individuals and communities. While centralized client-server designs disclose user’s behavior and social graph to one centralized entity (the service owner), naive decentralized systems potentially disclose that information to everyone in the network. Current P2P and dweb projects are not focusing on privacy. Failing to deliver on privacy and security will render decentralized application unusable and unattractive for mass adoption or as a viable alternative to centralized services.
It is hard to design and implement collaboration networks (read P2P and decentralized) without leaking considerable amount of informations about user behavior, her interests and social graph. In addition, the community lacks the mental models, concepts and primitives necessary to build privacy preserving decentralized and P2P systems. There is a large gap between academic research on privacy and production systems. At hashmatter we are committed to:
Currently, we are focusing on three fronts: research, development and community outreach.
The high level research goals are to define and articulate the problem space of privacy leaks of DHTs, both abstractly and in current projects in the space.
The high level development goal for 2019 is to develop the first iteration (v0.1) building blocks that enable decentralized application developers to use with libp2p.
0) Documentations and specs
1) Onion routing for enhancing privacy of DHT lookups
[ ] study and measure entropy and performance of DHT lookups using p3lib-sphinx
3) Sinkhole protocol
The high level community outreach goal consists on documenting and raise awareness about the privacy leaks of DHTs and P2P network protocols. In addition, we aims at reaching out to project owners and community to discuss and understand which problems need to be prioritized.
Understanding the current community needs
Talks, workshops, demos
[ ] Privacy Preserving P2P networks screencast sessions
[x] Talk at DTN 2019
[ ] Developer workshop at Web3Summit
note if you are interested in hosting a talk/workshop about p3lib or privacy preserving P2P networks, let us know!
There are several way you can help: