Summary

Here are some of the main things to highlight this week:

Marketing

Subscribers will have received the January edition of the SAFE Gossip newsletter (reminder: you can sign up in the footer at the bottom of the safenetwork.tech website). We’ve also published the video of the recent live Q&A on the SAFE Browser on YouTube for those of you who couldn’t join in on the day.

Part 2 of @dirvine and @viv’s SAFE Crossroads podcast with @fergish on the Fundamentals (reminder: you can hear Part 1 here). In addition, @dugcampbell was on BBC Radio Scotland this week talking about the Quadriga Exchange cryptocurrency issues whilst we were all watching the first SOLID World monthly online get-together earlier this week. Other team members were also out and about at FOSDEM over the weekend, we released a new post on the importance of open source software to the SAFE Network (all claps gratefully received as ever!) and we experimented with another tweak to a video update format (all suggestions to @sarahpentland and @Cgray!).

Finally, @dgeddes has a proposal which you can read all about here. Basically, we’re suggesting that it may be a good idea to wrap the Dev Forum (and its history) into this Forum. There are a number of reasons behind this which you can read about but, in essence, we believe that having everyone in the same place may help us to build on what we have. Please do join in the poll if you have a view.

User Experience

Work continues apace on the next iteration of the website: atomic design, enhanced layouts, improved typography, and more efficient code. All part of the bread and butter of web design. It never stands still does it?

We also continue User Research and testing on the SAFE Ecosystem; now part of our weekly routine. On top of learning the specifics of how people interact with our designs, it’s a great opportunity to be able to learn more about their needs, as well as having the pleasure of explaining what SAFE is all about, and what it will enable.

And on a similar note—as part of Safer Internet day—UX Designer @jimcollinson had the pleasure of presenting the SAFE Network to the Nottingham Green Party as part of a panel discussing Human Rights, Privacy and the Web. A fascinating evening, and one that hopefully goes on to influence their policy and activism.

SAFE API & Apps

The team is wrapping up the planning phase of the next safe_app_java milestone. Armed with the new project documentation that is in progress, @vigneshwara has wrapped his head around the code and will start the first sprint early next week. We have split the UI/UX enhancement milestone for the SafeAuthenticator mobile application into three sprints. The code from the first sprint has been merged into this branch and is currently under QA testing. The progress of the milestone can be tracked on the project board.

SAFE Client Libs

The SAFE Client Libs team has been attending calls with the frontend team to figure out how we can assist them in preparation for SAFE Fleming. While the rest of the backend team continues to work hard on the Fleming release, SCL will need to work to aid the frontend team in two ways. The first is by providing the building blocks for supporting the semantic web, including the ability to store RDF triples on the network as well as querying them with SPARQL. The goal is to eventually provide an API, or at least a preliminary design for it, so that the frontend can begin creating apps and demonstrations of how SAFE works with the semantic web.

We also attended the first Solid World meeting where we saw the work being done with Solid and how people are building applications with it in the real world. This will help us to understand the needs of Solid application developers when we begin designing the APIs. There are still interesting problems and unsolved questions in the Solid world, such as when to design your own ontology for a problem space and when to use an existing ontology, which may not support all the data you wish to represent but will make your data more portable.

The second thing we have started to think about is supporting a network where all data is immutable. One initial idea is to replace Mutable Data with Appendable Data , though this is yet to be decided on and the ultimate mechanism will be chosen for compatibility with the Network and its fundamentals, rather than an adherence to existing APIs. There are many questions to be decided with the move to immutable data, as it has implications even for things like encoding the latest version of a SAFE site in a URL. We will first need to gather requirements and only later will we begin thinking about designing an API, which we will likely design and test in parallel by migrating our current SAFE App examples away from Mutable Data (to e.g. Appendable Data ).

Routing

This week a large part of the Routing team is taking some well-deserved time off, so the pace of work will slow down a bit for a week or two.

That being said, the Routing team continues to split their efforts between the Fleming design work and improving Parsec.

On the Fleming front, we are still investigating the influence of section sizes and other parameters on Sybil attacks. We have some preliminary results that seem to indicate that the section size is the main factor affecting Sybil resistance. Networks with sections of similar sizes, but wildly different numbers of elders per section show similar levels of security in the simulations we are performing. The simulated networks were static, though (no nodes joining or leaving) - we are currently working on including factors such as network growth in our results.

On the Parsec side, there is ongoing effort to improve the performance of the code. We have a few open PRs that will give us significant improvements in this aspect.

Last but not least, drawing inspiration from the POA Network project and their implementation of the Honey Badger BFT algorithm, we have figured out a way of making Parsec truly asynchronous and have started to implement this solution.

Ever since we published Parsec, it had one point which made it hard to define the true synchrony assumption it requires, and that is the concrete coin. We had decided to use it instead of a proper threshold-cryptography-based common coin, because all common coin solutions known to us were complex and required a synchronous setup phase with a trusted dealer every time the set of members participating in the protocol changed. There were DKG (Distributed Key Generation) algorithms we were aware of, that eliminated at least the need for the trusted dealer, but other problems remained, such as computational cost.

@AndreasF, who currently works with both MaidSafe and the POA project, directed us towards an elegant solution to these problems that has been applied there. When the set of members participating in consensus changes, instead of running the DKG protocol normally, which would require the network to function synchronously for a while, the DKG protocol messages are being fed to the existing instance of the consensus protocol as transactions. The consensus protocol outputs them in a common order, which de facto works as if the messages were exchanged synchronously. This allows for the generation of the keys for the next set of members in a truly asynchronous fashion. These keys are then used to construct a proper threshold-crypto based common coin.

As mentioned before, the POA Network project implemented this for Honey Badger BFT. We are currently in the process of porting this solution to Parsec. Because they have already implemented all the primitives we need, the code complexity cost is vastly reduced for us. The scheme they developed uses Boneh-Lynn-Shacham signatures, which practically removes the overhead of crypto primitives compared to other existing schemes. The POA Network people have been the most helpful, already having made some improvements to their code to help us satisfy some requirements we had in Parsec.

This is an exciting time! When this work is completed, Parsec will at last be truly asynchronous, no strings attached. We will, of course, have to test this solution first and confirm that it’s behaving as expected, but once this is done, we will have made a big step forward.

Crust

With @povilasb being off to FOSDEM for two days, the pace had slowed down a little. Before diving into the roadmap, we wanted to finish the bootstrap cache implementation. We are still refining our thoughts on how Crust should handle that. Bootstrap cache is crucial for seamless network operation, especially restarts, so we want to get it right. Besides the fact that we hold contacts of up to 200 most active peers, Crust will also try to periodically validate if those peers are still alive and their encryption keys are still valid, etc.

We had looked into the study of how Skype managed restarts in the past and have retained much of that, as it had proved successful for them, including the 200 limit of most active peers. In order to not exhaust open socket limits we were wary of doing 200 parallel attempts, but following some early testing, limits on OSes are greater than 200 so we will continue with the implementation. We will also use our LRU Time cache as it will make sure the nodes at the top are the freshest and most probably the ones the upper layer (Routing in our case) contacted us directly with.