Dear Reader,
I suppose you are here because you are interested in alternative networks, perhaps for censorship resistance, perhaps network security and I have no doubt you are wondering what the hell this thing is supposed to do.
We can all find common ground in the statement that The Internet is painfully insecure. Free speech and privacy advocates find it insecure against government listening and blocking, governments find it insecure against hackers taking systems over and leaking secrets, and internet service providers find it insecure against DDoS kiddies who use large swarms of zombie machines to send enough traffic to overload a network link. These are, however, all different views of the same problem.
We have a number of somewhat competing offerings to solve this problem from ISPs and government. We have IPSEC, DNSSEC, numerous proposals from the mundane to the wild and whacky such as "internet drivers licenses".
The people who have developed these proposals are unfortunately limited in their thinking. ISPs are unable to see past the now almost 30 year old routing protocols which glue together the internet of today. Government actors are conditioned to think of something as secure when they have control over it. A quick look at x509 (the authentication system behind SSL) shows us that central points of failure inevitably live up to their name. In order to have a central authority, the people must not only be able to trust his motives but they must be able to trust his system's integrity as well. Recently people's e-mail was compromised when DigiNotar certificate authority was hacked and used to forge gmail certificates.
It is worthy of note that the vulnerability in DNS which ICE exploited to take down websites they deemed "dedicated to copyright infringement" was also used by Anonymous to replace a movie industry website with a manifesto.
A System Is Only Secure When Nobody Has Total Control
It is a routing engine designed for security, scalability, speed and ease of
use. The dream: You type ./cjdns and give it an interface which connects
another node and it gives you an ipv6 address generated from a public
encryption key and a virtual network card (TUN device) which you can use to
send packets to anyone in the cjdns network to which you are connected.
In order to understand how cjdns works, it is important to understand how the existing internet works when you send a packet, at each "intersection in the road" the router reads the address on the packet and decides which turn it should take. In the cjdns net, a packet goes to a router and the router labels the packet with directions to a router which will be able to best handle it. That is, a router which is near by in physical space and has an address which is numerically close to the destination address of the packet. The directions which are added to the packet allow it to go through a number of routers without much handling, they just read the label and bounce the packet wherever the next bits in the label tell them to. Routers have a responsibility to "keep in touch" with other routers that are numerically close to their address and also routers which are physically close to them.
The router engine is a modified implementation of the Kademlia DHT design.
A live testing network exists with at least 15 active nodes.
DNS is a complex system to implement and highly complex to implement without central authority, if you would like to offer help with this part, I invite you to come join.
Please read the Whitepaper, or at least skim it:
If you are still interested in this project and want to follow it, get in the channel on IRC:
- irc://irc.EFNet.org/#cjdns
- http://chat.efnet.org:9090/?channels=%23cjdns&Login=Login
Some raw pastes for the curious:
Thank you for your time and interest,
Caleb James DeLisle == cjdelisle == cjd
Possibly outdated below.
Please check IRC for the latest info.
How to compile cjdns on Debian 6 (Squeeze):
- Hint 1: You did a backup recently. ;)
- Hint 2: Might work same under Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
Be sure libevent is gone and remove if found. It will cause problems during the build.
Check to see which libevent is installed:
# dpkg -l | grep ^ii| grep libevent
ii libevent-dev 1.3e-3 Development libraries, header files and docs
ii libevent1 1.3e-3 An asynchronous event notification library
# apt-get remove libevent-dev
Note: You may need to (re)compile TOR if you use it.
# apt-get install build-essential cmake git
CHECK https://github.com/libevent/libevent for LATEST version. (This document assumes 2.0.16.)
Grab the stable tarball from libevent and untar:
# wget https://github.com/downloads/libevent/libevent/libevent-2.0.16-stable.tar.gz
# tar -xzf libevent-2.0.16-stable.tar.gz
Enter directory and compile libevent:
# cd libevent-2.0.16-stable
# ./configure
Resolve missing dependencies if needed and run again until all errors gone:
# make
# make install
Grab it from GitHub and change to the source directory:
# git clone https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns.git cjdns
# cd cjdns
Setup build directory and change to it:
# mkdir build
# cd build
You Likely want DEBUG logs (this is VERY ALPHA after all), so set the
Log_LEVEL environment variable:
# export Log_LEVEL=DEBUG
Pre-build step with cmake:
# cmake ..
Build cjbdns:
# make
Look for:
Linking C executable DNSTools_test
[100%] Built target DNSTools_test
ALL DONE! Wanna test? Sure.
Use screen or such to get a few ttys, Xterms, pipe to log and bg, whatever.
Change to the cjdns/build directory if you need to.
Run cjdroute without options for HELP:
# ./cjdroute
# ./cjdroute --genconf > cjdroute.conf
From a root shell or using sudo, run the following commands.
Create a cjdns user so it can run unprivileged:
# useradd cjdns
Create a new TUN device and give the cjdns user authority to access it:
# /sbin/ip tuntap add mode tun user cjdns
# /sbin/ip tuntap list | grep `id -u cjdns`
The output of the last command will tell you the name of the new device.
This is needed to edit the configuration file.
Edit the configuration file, fill in the key from the node to connect to and your password as well as the bind address to listen for UDP packets on and the passwords of other nodes who are allowed to connect to this node.
Also replace "tunDevice": "tun0" with the name of the TUN device gotten
in step 2.
Note: While cjdns is a mesh-network, there isn't auto-discovery of nodes to peer with. You will need the key from a friend's node to add your own node to their network.
Get the commands to run in order to prepare your TUN device by running:
# ./cjdroute --getcmds < cjdroute.conf
These commands should be executed as root now every time the system restarts.
# sudo -u cjdns ./cjdroute < cjdroute.conf
To delete a tunnel, use this command:
# /sbin/ip tuntap del mode tun <name of tunnel>
# ip -V
ip utility, iproute2-ss080725
# /sbin/ip tuntap add mode tun user cjdns
Object "tuntap" is unknown, try "ip help".
# /sbin/ip tuntap list
Object "tuntap" is unknown, try "ip help".
# ip -V
ip utility, iproute2-ss100519
# /sbin/ip tuntap list
tun0: tun user 1001
The fix: for now grab a copy of a newer ip binary and copy it to your home
directory. Replacing the system binaries is not likely a good idea.
If you want to help out, load up a few VMs or physical boxen, link them, see what happens, tell us! :)
Lots of bugs to fix yet, but hey, it's talking now!
Once your node is running, you're now a newly minted IPv6 host. Your operating system may automatically reconfigure network services to use this new address. If this is not what you intend, you should check to see that you are not offering more services then you intended to. ;)
Use ifconfig -a to find your TUN device's IPv6 address. (Same as above.)
Run nmap to discover which services are accessible from this address.
For example, to scan the address fcf7:75f0:82e3:327c:7112:b9ab:d1f9:bbbe:
# nmap -6 -n -r -v -p1-65535 -sT fcf7:75f0:82e3:327c:7112:b9ab:d1f9:bbbe
Starting Nmap 5.61TEST2 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2011-12-29 20:40 EST
Initiating Connect Scan at 20:40
Scanning fcf7:75f0:82e3:327c:7112:b9ab:d1f9:bbbe [65535 ports]
Completed Connect Scan at 20:40, 4.38s elapsed (65535 total ports)
Nmap scan report for fcf7:75f0:82e3:327c:7112:b9ab:d1f9:bbbe
Host is up (0.00073s latency).
All 65535 scanned ports on fcf7:75f0:82e3:327c:7112:b9ab:d1f9:bbbe are closed
Read data files from: /usr/local/bin/../share/nmap
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 4.60 seconds
Raw packets sent: 0 (0B) | Rcvd: 0 (0B)
Examples for SSH and Samba are below.
Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config:
ListenAddress 192.168.1.1
^ Replace 192.168.1.1 in the example above
with your STATIC IP (or map DHCP via MAC).
Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf:
[global]
interfaces = eth0
bind interfaces only = Yes
^ This will cause Samba to not bind to tun0
(or whichever TUN device you are using).
Thats it for now! Got More? Tell us on IRC.
Created on 2011-02-16.
Last modified on 2011-12-23.