When I click through on one of the blog posts I see:
"Advanced users can also help to correct problems: we welcome contributions. We expect people to tell us what needs to be corrected, but they can also do it and submit their patches. This is the way it worked with SFLphone and it works pretty well."
So you have no idea IF there are any problems, or do you know that there ARE problems, but you assume they will be corrected soon? If any of the above then how can you state "Ring gives you a ... an unmatched level of privacy."?
I am sorry to be negative about something that seems like it has our privacy at heart, but promising privacy when it might not be there at all is reckless. We in the first world have issues like "I don't want my e-mails scanned by companies" or "I don't want companies to see what I write", but in other parts of the worlds you can be killed if the wrong piece of communication falls in certain hands. So it is pretty important to get it right. You (Ring) provide no information on the site about the state of the code, reviews being done, etc.
Savoir-Faire Linux are a local Montréal company with a lot of clout. I don't consider their promises empty, and I'm excited to see them working on this.
As of now we have no plan to support Tox. We initially evaluated this and decided against. Ring is based on open standards such as SIP (rfc3261), TLSv1.2 (rfc5246), SRTP (rfc3711), vCards (rfc6350) and many more.
We are also inter-operable with existing SIP infrastructure such as corporate phone system and classical phone provider with optional SIP accounts. We will continue to be as standard compliant as we can rather than create/support yet another custom communication protocol. What Ring bring to this existing mesh of technologies is the ability to connect people using a decentralized peer-to-peer network.
> This technology for peer-to-peer discovery is also not standardized, I assume.
DHT has been used in the wild for more than a decade now, it is very well understood. SIP over DHT idea has also been studied[1] academically for a long period of time, even if it was never really implemented in commercial products. Finally, our P2P "protocol" is still using the standards mentioned above for cryptographic identity and other negotiation details, so there is very little that isn't fully standard.
No server account are required, it is what DHT is for. However, if you do have a server SIP account, we also support them. This is all about interoperability with existing infrastructure.
That would duplicate most of our code and we chose not to do so. We currently have an unified architecture that handle both existing sip infrastructure and the distributed one. The distributed part is less or more done, it isn't a big part of the code (about 4% according to a quick rexgex) compared to SIP. We currently use an open network model, but will switch to a closed one based on the cryptographic chain of trust in the coming weeks. That about all there is to it, everything else is SIP/ICE/UPnP/TLS/RTP.
> You wouldn't have had to write that code if using Tox were chosen in the first place.
First of all, it is important to understand that Ring is based on SFLphone. Our team have over 10 years of experience (and code) working with the existing SIP infrastructure. Have an inter-operable SIP based decentralized network is really the whole point of doing what we do.
> Can you give more details on this?
(please note that this section talk about features in development, it can still change)
The classical phone network is an open system. Everybody call call everybody, some for emails. This can cause some issues, such as tele-marketing and scam (+ spam, called "SPIT" in the VoIP community). Some other IM networks (MSN messenger, Skype, in fact, most of them) use the opposite. You can only open communication with people who are whitelisted. Traditional SPAM methods are mostly useless on most VoIP media such as voice and images as there is no "ahead of time" processing (everything is RTC). A distributed server-less network also cannot ban accounts, there is none. With IPv6, an IP based blocklist is also impossible.
There is a bunch of ways to fix those issues. One is to build a validation network be asking the peers you currently trust to validate new persons. The downside of this is some serious anonymity issues. You basically tell the world who is calling you. The second option is to use a chain of trust. There is multiple ways this can be implemented. First, it can be done on the DHT itself. You only talk to nodes that are signed by a certificate authority you whitelisted and use TLS revocation and other protocol features to manage a pseudo-clean distributed closed-network from which intruders are banned. The second way is to use the full "global" DHT, but only allow calls signed by a trusted authority. For example, this allow a small startup to sign a bunch of certificates, place them on the DHT and let employees call each other. This network will be about as insulated from unwanted external calls as a private SIP server.
Obviously, those 3 strategies are complementary and can be combined to eliminate SPIT and to a certain extent third party meta-data collection.
I respect your effort to implement an open inter-operable SIP based network.
I only referred to the code that implements the p2p DHT part. That part was duplication of effort.
Now, you are talking about a serious and interesting problem in open systems: spam/spit/...
However, Tox faces the same problem. Their network was attacked at least once from the 4chan community. And they came up with a solution. Their solution doesn't force you to tell anybody your contacts and doesn't need certificate authorities.
How about talking with them about the problem to join efforts?
The Tox people are very open to other people using Tox just as a transportation core.
I'd just be unhappy to have another DHT-based communication platform that didn't talk to the other players first.
In all honesty, the decision was taken by the project sponsor and is final. We built this https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/opendht and it is already used by some other projects distributed outside of Savoir-faire Linux. So far things look well for OpenDHT so I don't think Savoir-faire Linux will change its mind of the decision at this point. I know you think this is a duplicated effort, but it might not be as true as you think. I respect and understand your frustration, but the decision is final.
However, do you have a link about the Tox 4chan DOS? A quick Google search failed to turn interesting results.
I think here is a misunderstanding. First, if you feel offended, then please note that I didn't mean to. Second, what decision are you talking about?
You stated that the technology used by Ring to combat unwanted communication is still not finalized. I asked you
How about talking with them about the problem to join efforts?
I'm not asking you to throw away all what you've done in the area of DHT-based p2p communication and to start to use Tox. However, how about talking to them, since they fought the same battle? Maybe they have valuable ideas or experiences. Or you might help them with your ideas.
However, do you have a link about the Tox 4chan DOS?
I have no interesting link available. I'd suggest to take a look at their nospam ID's or to ask them.
On a more general note, I think defining some decision as final to silence criticism is deeply harmful. You might want to consider that.
I am sorry if my message caused misunderstanding. In no way am I trying to silence criticism. You must understand, we had this discussion last year and choose to go our way willingly. We are aware Tox exist and everything. While you may see this as NiH syndrome (and you may be partially right), we chose to write a base DHT library, of which few exist open source one exist on the market right now, and go from there. We have been working for quite some time on this are are happy with the current state of affair. It is just that it is getting late and this discussion start to feel like "Microsoft should use WebKit". In no way I wish to sound offending or anything. It is simply that in the end, we are way too far down the path we willingly took to start re-architecturing everything. I agree that we share some objective with Tox. I also think that competition is a good thing. While communication network are sometime seen as natural monopolies, but it has been proved over and over again that they are not.
Federated: Provide a little better anonymity as many operations are done behind firewalls/NAT/VPNs rather than using public data and point to point sockets. However it has a single point of failure for each nodes and switching from one federated node to another is either problematic or impossible. The federated node can also fall and shut down at anytime.
Distributed: Doesn't required accounts. Base identity on cryptography rather than a web service. It use point to point or point to proxy to point communication. Some meta datas, such who talk to who, when and for how much time are available to anyone (cough...) who can tap on ISP connection metadatas. This service is more robust and cannot really be taken down in ways that cannot be fixed.
Ring support both federated SIP networks and the distributed DHT network (and a mix of both).
(the anonymity problem can be mitigated using tor like onion routing for the negotiation, but it is unrealistic to use real time communication over an onion network. [D]DOS attacks can be handled in a variety of ways, so are DHT trashing ones, bittorrent is still alive and well).
> The ZRTP encryption mechanism is no longer supported (please use TLS+SRTP)
I thought SRTP used certificates rather than the diffie-hellman handshake used by ZRTP -or to put it another way, doesn't this destroy forward secrecy?
ZRTP may be back at some point. We had to disable it because of dependency issues (we switched to LibAV from CCRTP due to a long string of stability problems and constant regressions, not what you want for a network facing library). While you are right that this open the door to MiM attacks, this can be mitigated by certificate pinning and should be mostly fixed once we switch to a closed network (see some comments below). As it is implemented now, it all depend on how you transmit the Ring hash. This hash is the public key id, so if, for example, you double click on a Google contact with a Ring "phone number", the problem doesn't exist. So, all in all, a mix of trusted hash distribution, certificate pining and chain of trust should eliminate the problem from all angles. Again, this is work in progress (remember, this is an alpha) and ZRTP may come back if we get the resources/contribution to implement it in LibAV.
Can I confirm that without ZRTP, or rather, with the current implementation, there's no forward secrecy; so should the keys get compromised either through technological or legal attack, all bets are off?
Well, if you lose your private key and it get into their hand, as of now, yes, you can be impersonalized. As for perfect forward secrecy, it will be enabled sooner or later.
We currently don't handle the case where your computer itself get compromised and the disk content is made available. Those scenario should be handled by encrypting your devices and sandboxing network facing applications. In Linux, we also use DBus as the main IPC between the client and the daemon. Anyone with root access could theoretically mess with it and do a local MiM attack. There is little any application can do about this kind of compromission so it is kind of pointless to try to tackle them. At best it would slow such an attack, at worst give a false sense of security.
Years ago the Christmas Island registry used to give away free domain registration for open source projects. it used to be really common for projects like this one.
There's a fair amount of criticism brought up here, but I'd like to say that there are bunch of things that looks very promising, at least in the OS X version. Lots of software like this sucks terribly from a usability perspective, but here you have a nice web page (yeah, you need screenshots), a beautiful icon and a usable GUI.
What I'd REALLY like to see is a way to share one or multiple folders of files with my private darknet. If that's possible or not with the technology you use, I don't know. I've been missing a WASTE[1] like communication tool for as long as I can remember.
I guess one of your "competitors" will be Tox. But going to https://tox.im/ I still can't just download a client without going to a messy wiki and get nightly binaries. How many casual users know what a binary is?
This comment just makes me sad. HN used to be such a respectful place a few years back. Now I keep seing comments like this.
@antocv do you really think that your comment added anything worthwile to the discussion? Do you sincerely believe that your comment helped to improve the HN community?
How many comments like yours does it take to drive away people that try to make thoughtful comments that benefit the community (I believe many have already left).
I used to come to HN to not only find interesting links, but to read well balanced critiques of software/processes/programming paradigms, and overall great insight from people that actually put care and effort into their comments. It seems these times are gone for good.
When you see a comment breaking the HN guidelines that egregiously, please flag it by clicking on its timestamp to go to its item page, then clicking 'flag'.
That comment was actually killed by user flags pretty quickly, but for some reason it didn't display as such. There must be a bug. We'll fix it.
59 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadWhen I click through on one of the blog posts I see:
"Advanced users can also help to correct problems: we welcome contributions. We expect people to tell us what needs to be corrected, but they can also do it and submit their patches. This is the way it worked with SFLphone and it works pretty well."
So you have no idea IF there are any problems, or do you know that there ARE problems, but you assume they will be corrected soon? If any of the above then how can you state "Ring gives you a ... an unmatched level of privacy."?
I am sorry to be negative about something that seems like it has our privacy at heart, but promising privacy when it might not be there at all is reckless. We in the first world have issues like "I don't want my e-mails scanned by companies" or "I don't want companies to see what I write", but in other parts of the worlds you can be killed if the wrong piece of communication falls in certain hands. So it is pretty important to get it right. You (Ring) provide no information on the site about the state of the code, reviews being done, etc.
GNOME client: https://github.com/max3903/SFLphone
KDE client: https://github.com/Elv13/sflphone-kde
Sounds like they recently relocated from their old homepage at http://sflphone.org to this new domain and just don't have everything in order yet.
https://projects.savoirfairelinux.com/projects/ring/wiki
According to this their code repos:
Daemon:
https://gerrit-ring.savoirfairelinux.com/ring-daemon
Client library:
git://anongit.kde.org/libringclient
Clients:
https://gerrit-ring.savoirfairelinux.com/ring-client-gnome
git://anongit.kde.org/ring-kde
https://gerrit-ring.savoirfairelinux.com/ring-client-macosx
Not really well organized.
(I am one of the developer, ask me anything)
EDIT: There is screenshots on that page
What are the advantages compared to Tox?
I see one advantage of Tox compared to Jitsi. Account management is decentralized on Tox and federated on the protocols Jitsi supports.
Are there plans to support Tox as a backend?
We are also inter-operable with existing SIP infrastructure such as corporate phone system and classical phone provider with optional SIP accounts. We will continue to be as standard compliant as we can rather than create/support yet another custom communication protocol. What Ring bring to this existing mesh of technologies is the ability to connect people using a decentralized peer-to-peer network.
However, I see a difference between the protocols you've given and Tox: Tox is not standardized.
This technology for peer-to-peer discovery is also not standardized, I assume.So, why creating your own protocol instead of using Tox for this?
DHT has been used in the wild for more than a decade now, it is very well understood. SIP over DHT idea has also been studied[1] academically for a long period of time, even if it was never really implemented in commercial products. Finally, our P2P "protocol" is still using the standards mentioned above for cryptographic identity and other negotiation details, so there is very little that isn't fully standard.
[1] Example: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.183... (not used for the current Ring implementation)
Does Ring support communication without having to register any type of account on any third-party server?
[1]: https://jenkins.libtoxcore.so/job/Technical_Report/lastSucce...
However, the DHT-based account-less p2p part seems to redoing work Tox has done.
Why not use their efforts and experience? They offer their core separately and Ring could be a client for it.
Anyway, I still think you should try to join efforts.
First of all, it is important to understand that Ring is based on SFLphone. Our team have over 10 years of experience (and code) working with the existing SIP infrastructure. Have an inter-operable SIP based decentralized network is really the whole point of doing what we do.
> Can you give more details on this? (please note that this section talk about features in development, it can still change)
The classical phone network is an open system. Everybody call call everybody, some for emails. This can cause some issues, such as tele-marketing and scam (+ spam, called "SPIT" in the VoIP community). Some other IM networks (MSN messenger, Skype, in fact, most of them) use the opposite. You can only open communication with people who are whitelisted. Traditional SPAM methods are mostly useless on most VoIP media such as voice and images as there is no "ahead of time" processing (everything is RTC). A distributed server-less network also cannot ban accounts, there is none. With IPv6, an IP based blocklist is also impossible.
There is a bunch of ways to fix those issues. One is to build a validation network be asking the peers you currently trust to validate new persons. The downside of this is some serious anonymity issues. You basically tell the world who is calling you. The second option is to use a chain of trust. There is multiple ways this can be implemented. First, it can be done on the DHT itself. You only talk to nodes that are signed by a certificate authority you whitelisted and use TLS revocation and other protocol features to manage a pseudo-clean distributed closed-network from which intruders are banned. The second way is to use the full "global" DHT, but only allow calls signed by a trusted authority. For example, this allow a small startup to sign a bunch of certificates, place them on the DHT and let employees call each other. This network will be about as insulated from unwanted external calls as a private SIP server.
Obviously, those 3 strategies are complementary and can be combined to eliminate SPIT and to a certain extent third party meta-data collection.
I only referred to the code that implements the p2p DHT part. That part was duplication of effort.
Now, you are talking about a serious and interesting problem in open systems: spam/spit/...
However, Tox faces the same problem. Their network was attacked at least once from the 4chan community. And they came up with a solution. Their solution doesn't force you to tell anybody your contacts and doesn't need certificate authorities.
How about talking with them about the problem to join efforts?
The Tox people are very open to other people using Tox just as a transportation core.
I'd just be unhappy to have another DHT-based communication platform that didn't talk to the other players first.
However, do you have a link about the Tox 4chan DOS? A quick Google search failed to turn interesting results.
You stated that the technology used by Ring to combat unwanted communication is still not finalized. I asked you
I'm not asking you to throw away all what you've done in the area of DHT-based p2p communication and to start to use Tox. However, how about talking to them, since they fought the same battle? Maybe they have valuable ideas or experiences. Or you might help them with your ideas. I have no interesting link available. I'd suggest to take a look at their nospam ID's or to ask them.On a more general note, I think defining some decision as final to silence criticism is deeply harmful. You might want to consider that.
Thank you for your information.
Yes, competition is a good thing. But you should also learn from your competition, right?
Thank you.
Federated: Provide a little better anonymity as many operations are done behind firewalls/NAT/VPNs rather than using public data and point to point sockets. However it has a single point of failure for each nodes and switching from one federated node to another is either problematic or impossible. The federated node can also fall and shut down at anytime.
Distributed: Doesn't required accounts. Base identity on cryptography rather than a web service. It use point to point or point to proxy to point communication. Some meta datas, such who talk to who, when and for how much time are available to anyone (cough...) who can tap on ISP connection metadatas. This service is more robust and cannot really be taken down in ways that cannot be fixed.
Ring support both federated SIP networks and the distributed DHT network (and a mix of both).
(the anonymity problem can be mitigated using tor like onion routing for the negotiation, but it is unrealistic to use real time communication over an onion network. [D]DOS attacks can be handled in a variety of ways, so are DHT trashing ones, bittorrent is still alive and well).
I thought SRTP used certificates rather than the diffie-hellman handshake used by ZRTP -or to put it another way, doesn't this destroy forward secrecy?
Can I confirm that without ZRTP, or rather, with the current implementation, there's no forward secrecy; so should the keys get compromised either through technological or legal attack, all bets are off?
We currently don't handle the case where your computer itself get compromised and the disk content is made available. Those scenario should be handled by encrypting your devices and sandboxing network facing applications. In Linux, we also use DBus as the main IPC between the client and the daemon. Anyone with root access could theoretically mess with it and do a local MiM attack. There is little any application can do about this kind of compromission so it is kind of pointless to try to tackle them. At best it would slow such an attack, at worst give a false sense of security.
Thanks for your input. We are in alpha release and the website is also a work in progress.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SFLphone
https://projects.savoirfairelinux.com/projects/ring/wiki
However the interesting part is the new decentralized "DHT calls". I wonder how well it works.
http://gpl.savoirfairelinux.net/ring-download/
Choose a directory from here.
What I'd REALLY like to see is a way to share one or multiple folders of files with my private darknet. If that's possible or not with the technology you use, I don't know. I've been missing a WASTE[1] like communication tool for as long as I can remember.
I guess one of your "competitors" will be Tox. But going to https://tox.im/ I still can't just download a client without going to a messy wiki and get nightly binaries. How many casual users know what a binary is?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE
I too can make a website, and say, "Shit, AES128, Encrypted, Peer2Peer communication, DHT, Hash Tables, MAC, safety concern".
@antocv do you really think that your comment added anything worthwile to the discussion? Do you sincerely believe that your comment helped to improve the HN community? How many comments like yours does it take to drive away people that try to make thoughtful comments that benefit the community (I believe many have already left).
I used to come to HN to not only find interesting links, but to read well balanced critiques of software/processes/programming paradigms, and overall great insight from people that actually put care and effort into their comments. It seems these times are gone for good.
That comment was actually killed by user flags pretty quickly, but for some reason it didn't display as such. There must be a bug. We'll fix it.
Edit: we fixed it.
However, I'm also worried about the state of the quality of comments on HN.
You see puns and non-serious comments on many places.
Downvotes are misused to block controversial but serious, respectful and constructive discussions.
HN feels too much like reddit.
Fix the real issue, why did OP submit the piece of shit website that it is, on HN?
Throw enough of crap on HN and downvote button will not be enough, when the selection to be done is among bad and worse?
In fact, the OP website is so bad, the best comment that could ever be is still "fuck your website" dressed in nicer words.
Lol
Care to elaborate on this insightful remark?
It looks like this is a real christmas tree of protocol implementations in C/C++ facing the network.