This article will show how Ethereum, rather than being just a cryptocurrency or smart contracts platform, is actually developing into a whole ecosystem.
There are four components to the post-Snowden Web: static content publication, dynamic messages, trustless transactions and an integrated user-interface. — Gavin Wood
In the 1990s, the Internet sprang into existence and, year by year, it has revolutionized the way we communicate, the way we do business, the way we consume news and TV. In many ways, it has democratized access to information, and drastically lowered global communications costs, but it has also raised the average citizen’s expectations in regards to access to communications, news, and privacy.
Websites like Wikileaks, Facebook, Twitter, in the second wave — dubbed Web 2.0 — have, along with other websites, like Youtube, Linkedin, and many personal publishing platforms like WordPress, changed the publishing of information, and made it hard to hide. Whatever news is out there is bound to be revealed, sooner or later.
Governments and officials have gone down because of this. For good and for bad, what began as leaked cables published by Wikileaks in 2010, fomented public revolt in countries like Tunisia, Libya, and sparks later turned to fires that changed the face of the Middle East. At that time, sparked by leaks of governments cables, western countries saw a series of protests as well.
In his book When Google Met Wikileaks, Julian Assange outlined often unholy links between politics, tech giants and the intelligence community. Commenting on Eric Schmidt’s and Jared Cohen’s book The New Digital Age, he rightly notes:
while Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen tell us that the death of privacy will aid governments in “repressive autocracies” in “targeting their citizens,” they also say governments in “open” democracies will see it as “a gift” enabling them to “better respond to citizen and customer concerns".
The crackdown of financial institutions on Wikileaks then showed us how vulnerable to censorship we are — even in the age of the Internet.
Then came the Snowden revelations, and the public’s illusion about the actual extent to which our privacy is breached on an everyday basis was flushed down the toilet.
It was in this environment that Ethereum was created. Some months after the Snowden revelations, Gavin Wood, co-creator of Ethereum, wrote an article outlining his vision of Web 3.0 — a web which utilizes the internet infrastructure we already have, and cryptography that’s available, along with the blockchain, to build a better internet. This is to include content publishing, messaging, and value transactions — in a decentralized, censorship-proof way, with privacy guaranteed.
Whisper
In the article, Wood outlines an identity-based pseudonymous low-level messaging system, a system that will give its users — both people and ĐApps — hash-based identities, privacy assurances, encrypted messages, cryptographic guarantees about senders, and messages with a defined time-to-live. This system has, for lack of a better word, modular privacy and anonymity, and guarantees of “darkness” — allowing users to opt-in or out of different privacy features. It uses the infrastructure of the Ethereum network.
Whisper is being built as a protocol, meaning that it lays the foundation for higher-level implementations, ĐApps, built on it, with different variations, using different features of the protocol, and different settings. It’s currently at POC 2 stage, being usable in current versions of geth and Parity. The usage on the mainnet is restricted by the number of running, production Ethereum nodes that have the Whisper protocol enabled. The protocol is, we can say, in alpha stage. Many specs will change.
Both Ethereum and Whisper client nodes use the ÐΞVp2p Wire Protocol for their P2P communication. In particular, the RPLx protocol is used, which is described as —
a cryptographic peer-to-peer network and protocol suite which provides a general-purpose transport and interface for applications to communicate via a P2P network.
The Node-discovery algorithm of a decentralized, censorship resistant network is its major part. Ethereum uses adapted Kademlia UDP for this, similar to Bittorrent network’s peer discovery.
Because of the evolving specs, the best place for the current definition of the protocol is Ethereum’s wiki — currently Whisper POC 2 Spec page.
Whisper combines aspects of both DHTs and datagram messaging systems (e.g. UDP).
When designing a system that aims for complete darkness — meaning guaranteed privacy and anonymity — there are performance tradeoffs. This is, we presume, the reason for the choice of UDP, which is lower level, but at the same time faster then TCP, and gives greater control.
This line from the spec that may explain many of the design decisions:
It is designed to be a building block in next generation ÐApps which require large-scale many-to-many data-discovery, signal negotiation and modest transmissions with an absolute minimum of fuss and the expectation that one has a very reasonable assurance of complete privacy.
As the spec says, there’s an important distinction between encryption of messages and pitch-black darkness, which is what the designers of Ethereum are trying to achieve. Today we know that well-funded actors are able to break privacy guarantees even of networks like Tor. For many purposes, merely knowing the destination of someone’s communication can end the needed privacy guarantees, without ever breaking the encryption of the content. (A political party insider communicating to Wikileaks would be one example.) Metadata about our communication, analyzed in sufficient, bulk amounts, can give a lot of data, and sometimes annul the effect of encrypted content.
Recent GDPR legislation in Europe somewhat reflects this.
This is why there’s a need to reach deep — to code a new system starting at a very low level.
Whisper’s POC2 promises a “100% dark operation” — which is a bold claim.
They continue:
This applies not only for metadata collection from inter-peer conduits (i.e. backbone dragnet devices), but even against a much more arduous "100% - 2" attack; i.e. where every node in the network were compromised (though functional) save a pair running ÐApps for people that wanted to communicate without anybody else knowing.
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by Tonino Jankov via SitePoint
