DHT Technical Specification Milestones 1-3/5

We are happy to announce the completion of the following milestones for the DHT specification. The objective is to provide a detailed and comprehensive guide for implementors of the GNUnet DHT "R⁵N". The milestones consist of documenting the base data structures and processes of the protocol. This includes the specification of the DHT message wire and serialization formats.

Completed milestones overview:

1. Defined base data structures and processes that form the foundation of the protocol: Routing table, distance metrics, infrastructure messages, bootstrapping and base functions for block processing.
2. Defined the core data structures and processes that are specific to the R⁵N protocol: Block and peer filtering, routing table management and lookup algorithms.
3. The protocol was extended to support path signatures. This enables optional integrity protection of paths result messages have taken in a potentially rouge environment.

The current protocol is implemented as part of GNUnet 0.17.x and gnunet-go as previously announced on the mailing list.

We invite any interested party to read the document and provide critical review and feedback. This greatly helps us to improve the protocol and help future implementations. Contact us at the gnunet-developers mailing list. As part of the remaining milestones, the specification will be updated and interoperability testing will be conducted. Further, we aim to present the draft specification at IETF.

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This work is generously funded by NLnet as part of their NGI Assure fund.