News

GNUnet 0.11.0pre66

We are pleased to announce the release of GNUnet 0.11.0pre66.
This is a pre-release to assist developers and downstream packagers to test the package before the final release after four years of development.

In terms of usability, users should be aware that there are still a very large number of known open issues in particular with respect to ease of use, but also some critical privacy issues especially for mobile users. Also, the nascent network is tiny (~200 peers) and thus unlikely to provide good anonymity or extensive amounts of interesting information. As a result, the 0.11.0 release and especially this pre-release are only suitable for early adopters with some reasonable pain tolerance.

License change

GNUnet 0.11.0pre66 is the first release that will be made under the GNU Affero General Public License v3+. After a significant amount of internal discussion lead constructively by lynX (thanks!), the conclusion has been that the IPC and REST APIs should be extended with support for an GNUNET_MESSAGE_TYPE_AGPL or /agpl request that enables users of these client/service-style APIs to download the source code.

Naturally, the discussion on licensing may not necessarily end here, but at this point we are not aware of any dissent in the community and this release seems to be the right time to make such a change. While the final decision was not subjected to a broad feedback round, this was done simply on the grounds that this placement of the AGPL API seems to addresses all concerns that were raised. Finally, thanks to the copyright assignment all developers are participating in, the community will be able to revise this decision later if necessary.

It should also be noted that this change does not impose additional restrictions on the licensing models of GNU Taler or pEp: both projects have agreements with GNUnet e.V. that ensure that they can make decisions that fit these applications (not to mention significant parts of GNU Taler are already AGPLv3+ already).

About GNUnet

GNUnet is a framework for secure peer-to-peer networking. GNUnet's primary design goals are to protect the privacy of its users and to guard itself against attacks or abuse. At this point, GNUnet offers four primary applications on top of the framework:

The file-sharing service allows anonymous censorship-resistant file-sharing. Files, searches and search results are encrypted to make it hard to control, track or censor users. GNUnet's anonymity protocol (gap) is designed to make it difficult to link users to their file-sharing activities. Users can also individually trade-off between performance and anonymity. Despite providing anonymity, GNUnet's excess-based economy rewards contributing users with better performance.

The VPN service allows offering of services within GNUnet (using the .gnu TLD) and can be used to tunnel IPv4 and IPv6 traffic over the P2P network. The VPN can also be used for IP protocol translation (6-to-4, 4-to-6) and it is possible to tunnel IP traffic over GNUnet (6-over-4, 4-over-6). Note that at this stage, it is possible for peers to determine the IP address at which services are hosted, so the VPN does not offer anonymity.

The GNU Name System (GNS) provides a fully-decentralized and censorship resistant replacement for DNS. GNS can be used alongside DNS and can be integrated with legacy applications (such as traditional browsers) with moderate effort. GNS provides censorship-resistance, memorable names and cryptographic integrity protection for the records. Note that at this stage, it is possible for a strong adversary to determine which peer is responsible for a particular zone, GNS does not offer strong anonymity. However, GNS offers query privacy, that is other participants can typically not decrypt queries or replies.

Conversation allows voice calls to be made over GNUnet. Users are identified using GNS and voice data is encrypted. However, Conversation does not provide anonymity at this stage --- other peers may observe a connection between the two endpoints and it is possible to determine the IP address associated with a phone.

Other applications, including in particular the SecuShare social networking application, are still strictly experimental.

For developers, GNUnet offers:

  • Access to all subsystems via clean C APIs
  • Mostly written in C, but extensions possible in other languages
  • Multi-process architecture for fault-isolation between components
  • Use of event loop and processes instead of threads for ease of development
  • Extensive logging and statistics facilities
  • Integrated testing library for automatic deployment of large-scale experiments with tens of thousands of peers

Noteworthy improvements in 0.11.0pre66

  • Improved documentation, converting Drupal handbook to Texinfo (thanks ng0!)
  • GNU Name System now can take over arbitrary TLDs, and support for conversion from DNS zones to GNS exists
  • Critical bugfixes in CORE, DHT and CADET subsystems

The above is just the short list, our bugtracker lists over 350 individual issues that were resolved (see Changelog)

Known Issues

We have a few issues that are most likely not resolved in the final release. Users should be aware of these issues, which we hope to address shortly.

  • There are known major design issues in TRANSPORT, ATS and CORE which will need to be addressed for usability, performance and security.
  • There are known moderate implementation limitations in CADET that impact performance.
  • There are known moderate design issues in FS that also impact usability and performance.
  • There are minor implementation limitations in SET that create unnecessary attack surface for availability.
  • The Web site and manuals still need significant rework.
  • Subsystems related to SecuShare and RPS remain experimental.

In addition to this list, you may also want to consult our bug tracker at https://gnunet.org/bugs/ which lists about 200 more specific issues.

Availability

The GNUnet 0.11.0pre66 source code is available from all GNU FTP mirrors. The GTK frontends (which includes the gnunet-setup tool) are a separate download. Please note that some mirrors might still be synchronizing.

  • GNUnet on a FTP mirror near you http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnunet/gnunet-0.11.0pre66.tar.gz
  • GNUnet GTK on an FTP mirror near you http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnunet/gnunet-gtk-0.11.0pre66.tar.gz
  • GNUnet FUSE on an FTP mirror near you http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnunet/gnunet-fuse-0.11.0pre66.tar.gz
  • GNUnet on the primary GNU FTP server ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gnunet/gnunet-0.11.0pre66.tar.gz
  • GNUnet GTK on the primary GNU FTP server ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gnunet/gnunet-gtk-0.11.0pre66.tar.gz
  • GNUnet FUSE on the primary GNU FTP server ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gnunet/gnunet-fuse-0.11.0pre66.tar.gz

Note that GNUnet is now started using "gnunet-arm -s". GNUnet should be stopped using "gnunet-arm -e".

Thanks

This release was the work of many people. The following people contributed code and were thus easily identified: Christian Grothoff, Matthias Wachs, Bart Polot, Sree Harsha Totakura, Nathan S. Evans, Martin Schanzenbach, Julius Bünger, Nils Gillmann, Philipp Tölke, Florian Dold, Руслан Ижбулатов, tg(x), David Barksdale, Christian Fuchs, Nils Durner, Omar Tarabai, Maximilian Szengel, Supriti Singh, lurchi, David Brodski, xrs, Fabian Oehlmann, Carlo von lynX, Christophe Genevey Metat, Jeffrey Burdges, Safey A.Halim, Daniel Golle, Phil, Bruno Cabral, Ji Lu, Heikki Lindholm, Markus Teich, t3sserakt, Claudiu Olteanu, Marcello Stanisci, Moon, anryko, Arthur Dewarumez, Julien Morvan, Adnan H, Lin Tong, Andreas Fuchs, Christian Rupp, jah, Alejandra Morales, Matthias Kolja Miehl, Andrew Cann, Antonio Ojea, Pascal Mainini, amirouche and hark.