DEF CON Infosec super-band the Cult of the Dead Cow has released Veilid (pronounced vay-lid), an open source project applications can use to connect up clients and transfer information in a peer-to-peer decentralized manner.
The idea being here that apps – mobile, desktop, web, and headless – can find and talk to each other across the internet privately and securely without having to go through centralized and often corporate-owned systems. Veilid provides code for app developers to drop into their software so that their clients can join and communicate in a peer-to-peer community.
In a DEF CON presentation today, Katelyn “medus4” Bowden and Christien “DilDog” Rioux ran through the technical details of the project, which has apparently taken three years to develop.
The system, written primarily in Rust with some Dart and Python, takes aspects of the Tor anonymizing service and the peer-to-peer InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). If an app on one device connects to an app on another via Veilid, it shouldn’t be possible for either client to know the other’s IP address or location from that connectivity, which is good for privacy, for instance. The app makers can’t get that info, either.
Veilid’s design is documented here, and its source code is here, available under the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0.
“IPFS was not designed with privacy in mind,” Rioux told the DEF CON crowd. “Tor was, but it wasn’t built with performance in mind. And when the NSA runs 100 [Tor] exit nodes, it can fail.”
Unlike Tor, Veilid doesn’t run exit nodes. Each node in the Veilid network is equal, and if the NSA wanted to snoop on Veilid users like it does on Tor users, the Feds would have to monitor the entire network, which hopefully won’t be feasible, even for the No Such Agency. Rioux described it as “like Tor and IPFS had sex and produced this thing.”
“The possibilities here are endless,” added Bowden. “All apps are equal, we’re only as strong as the weakest node and every node is equal. We hope everyone will build on it.”
Each copy of an app using the core Veilid library acts as a network node, it can communicate with other nodes, and uses a 256-bit public key as an ID number. There are no special nodes, and there’s no single point of failure. The project supports Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and web apps.
Veilid can talk over UDP and TCP, and connections are authenticated, timestamped, strongly end-to-end encrypted, and digitally signed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, and impersonation. The cryptography involved has been dubbed VLD0, and uses established algorithms since the project didn’t want to risk introducing weaknesses from “rolling its own,” Rioux said.
This means XChaCha20-Poly1305 for encryption, Elliptic curve25519 for public-private-key authentication and signing, x25519 for DH key exchange, BLAKE3 for cryptographic hashing, and Argon2 for password hash generation. These could be switched out for stronger mechanisms if necessary in future.
Files written to local storage by Veilid are fully encrypted, and encrypted table store APIs are available for developers. Keys for encrypting device data can be password protected.
“The system means there’s no IP address, no tracking, no data collection, and no tracking – that’s the biggest way that people are monetizing your internet use,” Bowden said.
“Billionaires are trying to monetize those connections, and a lot of people are falling for that. We have to make sure this is available,” Bowden continued. The hope is that applications will include Veilid and use it to communicate, so that users can benefit from the network without knowing all the above technical stuff: it should just work for them.
To demonstrate the capabilities of the system, the team built a Veilid-based secure instant-messaging app along the lines of Signal called VeilidChat, using the Flutter framework. Many more apps are needed.
If it takes off in a big way, Veilid could put a big hole in the surveillance capitalism economy. It’s been tried before with mixed or poor results, though the Cult has a reputation for getting stuff done right. ®
I’m hyped AF, can’t wait till the documentation is a little more mature
Holy cow, haven’t been to that bbs in like 30 years, awesome to see 👍🏽
I used to collect the Cult of The Dead Cow text files. Hacking, phreaking, and weird stories. Looks like someone gathered bunch of them here.
So, if I get it right, it’s basically a TOR network where every user is both an entry node, exit node and middle nodes, so the more users you get, the more private it is.
However, wouldn’t this also mean that just by using any of the apps, you are basically running an exit node - and now have to deal with everything that makes running a TOR exit node really dangerous and can get you into serious trouble, swatted or even ending up in jail?
From a quick google search, jail sentences for people operating TOR exit nodes are not as common as I though, but it still can mean that you will have to explain at a court why was your computer trasmitting highly illegal data to someone they caught. And courts are expensive, they will take all of your electronics and it’s generally a really risky endeavor.
what you are missing here is that they have to be able to prove that there’s illegal data going through your computer in the first place
If it’s the exit node for the illegal stuff, then would that point to you?
Veilid doesn’t have exit nodes
That’s how I read it too. More like a fully encrypted anonymized trackerless BitTorrent client (or even more like Hotline (a pair of sort of FTP/chat/bbs client and server apps) for the older pirates in the audience.
From how I understand it, in Veilid everyone is both and entry, relay and an exit node - there’s no distinction. Because you have to have exit nodes - the communication has to go though somewhere, so the receiving server will always know the IP of the last node (the exit one). It just has to go through somewhere. The whole main point of TOR (and Veiled, which seems based on the same thing) is that since you go through three nodes, each node can tell where is the request coming from, and where to send it. So the server doesn’t know where did the request came from, but knows the IP of the exit node.
The issue is that if they bust someone for doing illegal shit, your IP may be investigated. They don’t know what communication came from you, but something may have, since just by using veiled, you become an exit node. Or I’m misunderstanding it, but that’s what I understood from the description.
An exit node lets people inside the netwrok accesss clearweb website outside the netwrok. Veilid can’t do that. It’s for communicating inside the network only.
So far (to me) it looks like it doesn’t have the risks and compromises of TOR, and used right it can make the internet impossible to censor.
