indra

README

Indranet

Lightning powered distributed virtual private network for anonymising traffic on decentralised protocol networks.

White Paper

About

The ubiquitous use of encryption on the internet took some time to happen, there was a time when the US government defined them as munitions and claimed export restrictions, and famously the PGP project broke this via the First Amendment, by literally printing the source code on paper and then posting it, it became recognised that code, and encryption, are protected speech.

With ubiquitous 128 and 256-bit AES encryption now in use by default, the content of messages is secure. However, the volume of messages and endpoints of signals are still useful intelligence data, enabling state level actors to attack internet users and violate their privacy and threaten their safety.

Protecting against this high level attack the main network currently doing this work is the Tor network. However, this system has many flaws, and in recent times its centralised relay registry has come under sustained attack by DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.

More specifically, the protocol has a severe bottleneck in its rendezvous model for linking two outbound 3 hop connections, attackers flood these with requests, and legitimate users cannot get a word in edgewise. Ironically they built a proof of work protocol to give users a way to get ahead of the spammers.

Indra eliminates this problem by using a constantly changing set of introducers and the actual bidirectional anonymity is done by the parties themselves via the source routing headers plus pairs of hops added in front of the recipient's routing header.

One of the big problems of the Tor network is its weak network effect. There is no incentive for anyone to run nodes on the network, and worse, the most common use case is tunneling back out of the network to anonymize location, is largely abused and led to a lot of automated block systems arising on many internet services to prevent this abuse.

Indra makes it possible for anyone to offer this kind of outbound relaying service if they want to, but with compensation for doing so, which covers the risk they take as being the visible origin point of shady traffic from time to time.

Indra uses source routing, similar to the Lightning Network and an early but not really quite viable mixnet design called HORNET. The problem with source routed mixnets is that they are very vulnerable to spam. Indra eliminates this problem by no traffic being relayed without first paying a small forward payment to relays for this traffic, thus creating an economic disincentive for spam if the profit is below the routing fees.

fin

notes:

([a-zA-z0-9\_\-\.][a-zA-z0-9\/\_\-\.]+)\:([0-9]+) is a regex that matches the relative file paths in the log output. $1 and $2 from this are the relative path and the line number.

Documentation

Overview

Package indra is the root of the repository for the Indra distributed VPN, containing mainly the version information for included executables to use for information and identification on the network.

See pkg/github.com/indra-labs/indra/cmd/indra for the main server executable.

Put invocations to run all the generators in here check pkg/github.com/indra-labs/indra/cmd/bumper to add them, and they will automatically run with:

$ go generate .

which will run all these generators below and finish with a go install.

Index

• Constants
• Variables
• func Version() string

Constants

const (
	// URL is the git URL for the repository.
	URL = "github.com/indra-labs/indra"
	// GitRef is the gitref, as in refs/heads/branchname.
	GitRef = "refs/heads/master"
	// ParentGitCommit is the commit hash of the parent HEAD.
	ParentGitCommit = "88d5987612e40fe889fa0f8ac553a9b3a22c01ff"
	// BuildTime stores the time when the current binary was built.
	BuildTime = "2023-07-01T20:50:47+01:00"
	// SemVer lists the (latest) git tag on the release.
	SemVer = "v0.1.16"
	// Major is the major number from the tag.
	Major = 0
	// Minor is the minor number from the tag.
	Minor = 1
	// Patch is the patch version number from the tag.
	Patch = 16
)

Variables

var CI = "false"

Functions

func Version

func Version() string

Version returns a pretty printed version information string.