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What Is libunison?

libunison is an end-to-end (E2E)/peer-to-peer (P2P) networking library for any application that needs to self-organize an emerging network of nodes. Unison is built upon existing standardized technologies wherever applicable, in order to leverage decades-long research, development, and deployment insights of the Internet.

We at Harmony are developing and using Unison as one of the foundational layers of our highly scalable and performant blockchain network. We are releasing Unison in open source because we believe that E2E/P2P networking can enable not only blockchains but a much wider spectrum of applications.

What Does libunison Provide?

Note: Since libunison is under active development, the list of features in this section serves as the development roadmap. We will release these features in the order we see fit. Please join the libunison-announce@harmony.one mailing list for feature announcements.

Identity-based Networking

libunison provides an end-to-end networking layer where hosts are located by their IP addresses but identified logically by a cryptographic public key. A node proves its identity using the private key which matches its public-key identifier.

A real-life analogue of identity-based addressing would be to send a letter envelope-addressed to “Tim Cook” (identifier) without having to know his postal address, and letting the post office figure out the address for you and deliver the letter to him. In contrast, in the traditional locator (IP address)-based networking, a letter would be addressed to “One Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA, USA” (locator) without specifying the recipient name (identifier), and it would be your responsibility to keep your address book up to date across your correspondents' moving to new addresses.

Using libunison, a networking application on a host initiates connections to other hosts not using their IP address (locator), but their public key (identifier). libunison implements mechanisms to transparently handle the identifier/locator mapping.

Multicast Networking

Sometimes an application needs to send messages or objects to not just one other node (termed unicast), but to a group of nodes on the network. Furthermore, your application may need to send messages/objects to every member (termed multicast), or just one member (termed anycast), in such a group. (One special case of multicast is broadcast, where the target group is the entire network itself.)

Unicast messaging is well supported on the global Internet, but neither multicast nor broadcast can be easily used by end applications. Applications wishing to use either service needs to form and operate an overlay network, which is a virtual network formed on top of the Internet.

Creating a software infrastructure for an overlay network is not an easy task for non-networking-minded software developers. Unison lowers this bar by providing a robust infrastructure for overlay networks and implementing multicast and anycast services that high-level applications can use with ease.

One interesting property of Unison's group-based networking is that such groups are ad-hoc by default, and group identifier is in a large number space. Anyone may form and join any group, and because of the wide group identifier space, any cryptographic random number generator or hash function can be used to form a group identifier which is highly likely to be unique across the entire network, without having to first register such an identifier with a central authority.

NAT Traversal

The 30+-year history of the Internet and its unexpected wild success has resulted in one major problem: It has run out of IP addresses (locators) that computers can use. In the early days, each computer had exactly one IP address that anyone else on the Internet can use to reach the computer. This is no longer the case: Multiple computers, such as on the same residental home network, routinely share one public IP address, and the home Internet router acts as a smart middlebox to disambiguate traffic flows that belong to different computers behind the router. This is called Network Address Translation (NAT).

One major downside of NAT is that it hinders end-to-end networking: There is no clear way for one computer outside a home network to reach another inside the home network, especially when the one inside has not talked to the one outside to begin with. Since the NAT mechanisms have evolved over the last 20 years or so, different ways of working around this problem have surfaced. These are called NAT traversal mechanisms. The problem is that none of these mechanisms is a universal, one-size-fits-all approach: The application needs to dynamically detect the situation and employ the right mechanism.

libunison automates this, so that your application would not have to concern itself with individual NAT traversal mechanisms and their inner workings.

End-to-end Data Integrity And Security

Modern applications require data protection services these days, including:

  • Integrity protection: If data sent from one node becomes corrupted—maliciously or accidentally—before reaching its destination node, such as by a man in the middle (MitM) or hardware malfunction, the destination node should be able to detect and discard the data.
  • Encryption: Data sent from one node to another node should be protected from prying eyes, e.g. a man in the middle should be able to glean only the fact that some data has been sent and its size, but not its content.

libunison provides these services in end-to-end manner, similar to the guarantees provided by TLS. However, unlike TLS, libunison protects multiple logical flows of data between two nodes in one shot, without having to perform expensive security association establishment once for each logical data flow.

Mobility

Early computers had their IP address fixed, but that is no longer the case. In particular, mobile nodes constantly hop between different networks—home network, coffee shop public WiFi, cellular connection—and each time they hop, their IP address changes.

Long-running, background applications often need to continue their network communication over such changes. Unison provides a mobility mechanism that can solve this problem for your application.

Multihoming

Sometimes a networking site (a company, or more rarely, a household), for redundancy, connects to the Internet using two or more ISPs (Internet service providers), each of which assigns its own IP address or network to the site. Such a site is said to be multihomed, where a computer consequently obtains two or more IP addresses—one from each provider—that it can use to communicate with the Internet. If the Internet connectivity provided by one ISP is down, the computer can still use the other ISP(s) to continue communication. This kind of communication handovers, while being possible, is typically quite complex to set up and manage for end applications.

Unison handles such connection handovers transparently for the application so that application communication is not disrupted as long as the Internet connectivity is available via at least one ISP.

Cryptographic Key Lifetime Management

All cryptographic key materials should be cycled periodically, in terms of time duration (“use this key only for 24 hours”) and/or amount of data protected by the key (“use this key for encrypting up to 1GiB of data”), as a form of defense against cryptanalysis. This applies both to public/private key pairs used as node identifiers and to symmetric keys used for data protection services.

libunison provides transparent key cycling services, so that applications do not have to manually deal with them, and that application-level communication persists without interruption across key cycling events.

Adversary-resistant Multicast

In contrast to the Internet where directly interfacing networking entities are routinely bound by real-life contractual obligations, ad-hoc P2P overlay networks often include nodes that are not necessarily fully cooperative. This non-cooperativeness may arise out of rational, selfish, or even downright malicious motivations. As such, reliable communication over such P2P network often needs to be implemented with a lower-than-Internet security assumptions, and many P2P application protocols aim to serve, if not all nodes on the network, at least all of the fully cooperative, “honest” nodes that conform to the protocol, and assume the availability of a multicast mechanism that enables a sender to send data to at least all of such honest nodes.

libunison provides such a mechanism, using which a node can multicast a message to all honest nodes, provided that the ratio of honest nodes to all nodes on the network exceeds a minimum threshold, e.g. at least two thirds.

Cooperative, Fair-share Multicast

When multicasting a large message to a large number of recipients, the distribution of bandwidth load placed on different nodes involved becomes an issue. A degenerate case of this is a technique called manycast, where the sender simply transmits the same data over and over to each recipient, where all transmission burden is placed solely on the sender.

libunison provides a cooperative multicast mechanism, where the amount of data sent and received by each node is linear to only the size of the message and remains constant—*O*(1)–with regard to the size of the multicast group.

Stable Latency Jitters

The Internet consists of data links that do not necessarily provide reliable transmission of data: Packets (units of transmitted data) can become corrupt, or even disappear during transit. As such, traditional protocols aiming to achieve reliable transmission of data, such as TCP, needed to incorporate mechanisms to recover from packet losses.

Although TCP is quite robust against transient data losses, it poses one major performance problem: Its latency—the amount of time a piece of data spends in the network before being successfully delivered to the recipient—is not stable. It fluctuates substantially around packet losses, and the magnitude of such fluctuations, called latency jitters, is proportional to the nominal latency from the sender to the recipient. The nominal latency is quite large over long-haul connections or over certain cellular data links (such as pre-4G), and a proportionally large latency jitter makes it hard for real-time applications to adopt or provide time-tight service level agreements (SLAs) or guarantees.

Unison provides a reliable data transport whose latency degrades gradually in presence of packet losses, with much smaller latency jitters, at the expense of a slight communication bandwidth overhead. This applies to both unicast and multicast.

Under The Hood

This section talks about how libunison implements each of the services mentioned above. Note: Since libunison is still under active development, these details are subject to change over time. We plan to freeze these by the time libunison reaches version 1.0.

Host Identity Protocol Version 2

Standardized in IETF RFC 7401 and various companion documents, the Host Identity Protocol Version 2 (HIPv2) suite serves as the groundwork for many of the features provided by libunison:

  • Identifier–locator separation
  • Cryptographic (public-key) node identifier
  • End-to-end data protection services
  • NAT traversal
  • Mobility
  • Multihoming
  • Key cycling

Using HIPv2, each of the two end nodes identifying themselves with their own public key and wishing to communicate to each other, first proves to the other node that it indeed possesses the private key matching its own public-key identifier, and jointly establishes a secret key using Diffie–Hellman (DH) exchange. Use of DH exchange ensures that the secret key is known only to the two nodes but not to anyone else, including eavesdroppers. This process is known as base exchange in HIPv2.

The nodes then use the secret key derived from the base exchange round to guard real application traffic, using another protocol named Encryption Security Payload (ESP; RFC 4303). ESP provides both data integrity service using HMAC (RFC 2104) and encryption services using AES (RFC 3602).

RaptorQ

RaptorQ (RFC 6330) is a binary object encoding/decoding scheme:

  • A binary object can be encoded into a practically infinite number (2**24) of chunks;
  • The original binary object can then be decoded from any K number of such encoded chunks with high probability, regardless their combination. K is a constant chosen by the encoder, in the range [10..56403].
  • The probability of the object recovery is: 99% with K chunks, 99.99% with K + 1 chunks

Insurance Against Packet Loss

A commonly used packet recovery mechanism employed by TCP and other protocols involves acknowledgements and timeout-based retransmissions: After sending data to a recipient, the sender expects a confirmation back from the recipient that it has successfully received the data; in absence of such a confirmation within some time, the sender assumes that the data has been lost during transit and re-sends the same data again, hoping that the data would be delivered this time.

Using RaptorQ, repair information can be sent proactively if the sender expects a baseline packet loss.

Cooperative Fair-Share Multicast

RapidChain proposes an information dispersal algorithm (IDA) which uses Reed–Solomon code to achieve redundancy against non-cooperative nodes. Because Reed–Solomon code has a fixed code rate, the RapidChain IDA has a downside: It has a fixed repair information overhead of 50% (assuming 2/3 honesty), even when most nodes on the network are honest and little repair information is necessary.

libunison uses RaptorQ instead of Reed–Solomon code, and can bring the code rate close to the optimal rate required for actual honesty ratio observed. Plus, the sender can generate additional repair symbols pessimistically to recover gracefully when the honesty ratio suddenly drops below the currently assumed rate, obviating the need to adjust the code rate and restart the round (which would be required if a fixed-rate code such as Reed–Solomon were used).

Licensing

Copyright © 2018, Simple Rules Company. All rights reserved.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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An opinionated, curated Golang networking library for real-world E2E/P2P applications

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