Announcing Yggdrasil Network v0.3

12 December 2018 by Neil Alexander, Arceliar

It’s finally here

At the end of 2017, Yggdrasil’s first commit was uploaded to GitHub - a project to explore whether it was possible to build a decentralised, end-to-end encrypted and scalable compact routing scheme modelled around the concept of a global spanning tree. Many concept routing schemes that we have seen to date seem to have problems with scalability - after the network exceeds a certain size, they either fail to perform or they start to rely on centralised points in order to consolidate routing information. We want to figure out how to build something that would not be subject to these limitations, and to maintain decentralisation as far as possible, and the best way to test our ideas is to build that network. To our knowledge, this hasn’t quite been achieved before.

Throughout the course of 2018, Yggdrasil has gone from being a very early-stage project supporting only a single platform to a feature-strong and relatively stable project which now runs on many supported platforms. Although we currently still haven’t advanced from the “alpha” label, our network has grown to exceed 70 nodes across the world (and growing slowly but steadily), with a good portion of these users coming on-board and contributing their own services to the network and using the network for their own purposes. We’ve even had a small amount of publicity - Toronto Mesh have been exploring using Yggdrasil on their city-wide mesh net, and even presented some Yggdrasil fundamentals to the Norwegian Unix User Group (NUUG) back in October.

So far, we believe that Yggdrasil is well on track to delivering on its promises to build a fully end-to-end encrypted, self-arranging IPv6 network. We also believe that Yggdrasil should be scalable on paper; we have somewhat proven this in simulations, but the real proof will come in how the Yggdrasil Network scales up in the real world, on real hardware, across real links. Having users helping us to test brings us closer to our goal and enhances our understanding of how our software will behave on large-scale network graphs.

Version 0.3 has been quite some time coming - we released version 0.2.7 on the 13th October and we have been working since then on what will make it into this release. Even though it feels in some ways that version 0.3 is a relatively small evolutionary release, it’s actually by far our biggest release yet. We’ve included quite a large list of fixes, changes and even new features and over 2000 lines of code changed. We’ve taken a lot of feedback from our users about their use-cases and pain points, and we’ve collected topographical data from various contributor nodes to try and get a good view of what the network looks like. We’ve even experienced some rather large topology changes and enjoyed relatively good network stability throughout.

For much of the time that we were developing v0.3, we had thought that there would end up being protocol-breaking changes and that this would render v0.3 incompatible with nodes running previous versions. I am happy to announce that we have not needed to introduce breaking changes at this stage and currently the network has been running a mix of both older and newer developmental nodes without any particular issues.

Features

You can see the full list of modifications that have been made in our changelog.

Perhaps the largest user-visible change is the introduction of Crypto-Key Routing for traffic tunnelling, allowing you to effectively use Yggdrasil as a VPN for both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic between any two given points on the network. This tunnelled traffic enjoys the same benefits as regular Yggdrasil IPv6 traffic in that it is end-to-end encrypted and our many optimisations assist in preventing TCP-over-TCP anomalies that often arise in other solutions. I wrote an introductory blog post back at the beginning of November about CKR, which explains some more about how to configure it and how it works.

In the background, we’ve made a substantial change from using a Kademlia-based DHT to a Chord-based DHT. The Chord-based approach allows us to do lookups with O(1) (constant) state, and only depends on additional ( O(logn) ) state as a performance optimisation, which allows us to bootstrap more quickly after changes. We also believe that using Chord can help us to reduce some idle DHT chatter on the network in the future, which will save a little bandwidth, and may be helpful on battery-powered devices.

The spanning tree is now constructed a little differently. Previously, in a stable network, each node would select a new parent only if this reduced the length of the path to the root of the tree, measured by the number of other Yggdrasil nodes in the path. This has the virtue of simplicity, but it sometimes leads to poor performance when a node replaces a few low-latency/high-bandwidth local links with a comparatively high-latency/low-bandwidth link over the internet (or an anonymous overlay like Tor or I2P). Starting with this release, nodes will switch to a new parent if it provides a consistency lower latency path to the root, and its less eager to immediately switch again after having just changed parents. This should lead to lower latency in stable networks, and better reliability in unstable ones.

We’ve fixed a reasonable number of bugs and crashes, including in the DHT, switch and ICMPv6 code, and have made a number of additions to the admin socket in order to support new functionality and to make parameter naming more consistent throughout.

Upgrading

Our CI pipeline automatically produces builds for all supported platforms and these will become available on our Builds page. In addition, our S3 repository for Debian and RPM-based distributions will also be updated with the new package releases.

New macOS .pkg installers are now available as a part of the v0.3 release too, so installing and upgrading on macOS is now significantly easier than before. You can find these installers on the Builds page also.

On other platforms, simply download the latest binary for your platform and drop it into place. Remember to take a backup of your configuration and normalise it, which will add any new options for features in v0.3:

cp /path/to/yggdrasil.conf /var/backups/yggdrasil.conf yggdrasil -useconffile /var/backups/yggdrasil.conf -normaliseconf > /path/to/yggdrasil.conf

What’s next?

Our work is far from over. We still have a list of things that can potentially be rolled into future releases and we will be looking to see what we should prioritise for our next version.

As always, we’ll be hanging around in our Matrix/IRC channel too, so please feel free to join and chat to us:

#yggdrasil:matrix.org on Matrix

on Matrix chat.freenode.net channel #yggdrasil on IRC

A big thanks to our contributors, particularly those who have worked on creating packages for Yggdrasil and bringing it to their distributions of choice, and to all of the users who use Yggdrasil, contributing services and providing feedback to us on a regular basis!