NNCP: Encrypted, authenticated, onion-routed version of UUCP
31 points by gioele
31 points by gioele
I connected a machine to quux(the public network) today and it worked as advertised. Five years ago, I would have had a huge use-case for this, especially since it’s likely to get through firewalls OK if you used port 80 or 443. These days, not so much.
These days with Yggdrasil/Tailscale/Nebula and our constantly connected selves, it’s hard to come up with a great use case. I’m guessing it won’t do a good job of replacing what torrents are usually used for though.
If we could get enough people to use it for email, that seems like it’s best wide-spread use-case. That seems very unlikely though.
I am confused by the use of the word “onion-routed” in the post. Isn’t “onion-routed” when the traffic goes through one or more TOR nodes? There is nothing in NNCP that requires TOR. It is encrypted and authenticated, yes, and it is also peer-to-peer. But TOR is completely optional (and, I would say, unnecessary).
Wikipedia says:
The core principle of Tor, known as onion routing, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, to protect American intelligence communications online.
So onion routing is apparently not considered a Tor thing. I was ignorant that onion routing is all about layers of encryption so intermediate hops that a message goes through cannot view the data being transferred, but it seems that NNCP does that, so I think it’s fair to call NNCP onion-routed.
More than “the hops cannot view the data”: the hops don’t know who the sender and the recipient are, and because each hop gets the data with one layer removed, and therefore has something that looks entirely different from what any other hop sees, it’s hard to correlate if the data travelling from A to B via C is the same as the data travelling from D to E via F (even if C and F happen to be the same node)