Iroh 1.0

What are the risks if any of running public relays? Is this similar in concept to running Tor Guard Nodes / Relays?

Lora is a must

FWIW I think for “new user” audiences you’re better off describing why we’d use this instead of IP, than why you haven’t gotten it everywhere yet: there’s a certain sort of “complaint I see the most from current users” myopia that sets in, at least for me, over the years. :)

If you don't mind, what are other low-effort but high signal forums other than HN, Perplexity and X for accurate news that skip the annoying part?

Iroh is QUIC. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel here, just combining existing IETF RFCs in a creative way.

Here is a concrete problem we solve. You have one device in your home WLAN behind a NAT. Your other device is in a 4g network, or behind another NAT at work.

In most cases we can give you a direct connection between the two devices very quickly via hole punching, so you get the highest possible bandwidth and the lowest possible latency.

This was not a solved problem until now.

I'm not affiliated with Iroh or even using it, but... "IP works just fine". What!? This is _not_ a solved problem

Establishing direct connections on the other hand is a much harder problem with the current internet infrastructure.

DNS isn't decentralised it's more federated. I believe Iroh has the option to use DHT here, last I looked at least.

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thank you!

As others have already mentioned, iroh the core library and protocol is fully open source. But to finance the development of it, we offer additional services to make it easier to deploy and run it, especially for larger or more specialized use caes.

tailscale syndrome.

"we want to be infrastructure for people, and a business towards professionals."

stuck between "we need cash to operate" and "we want to be a public good infrastructural system." , with the negative parts of a for-profit whisked away with "Well it's open source."

it's a business concept i'm okayish with as long as the "Well it's open source." caveat doesn't come with a total bespoke and unusable code base to figure out.

From the same pricing page, it's all additional services: observability, relay hosting, support engineers.

The equivalent for IP addresses to what they offer would be closer to running a BGP router or ISP, or generally contracting with network engineers for your data-center's networking.

If you want to run an ISP or AS, believe me it will cost you a decent chunk of money.

Maybe. It's offering "Customized hosting and monitoring for Iroh apps".

thank you!

thank you!

Their use of addressing by keys instead of by IPs seems to be the main differentiator. Also the support for custom transports (BLE, LoRa, Tor) which appears to be in progress and not yet fully implemented.

I love Tailscale, it's deployed on all my devices. But I might check this out for the transports part in particular.

My 5 second summary: Tailscale connects devices and Iroh connects applications.

Tailscale is built to be global to your device, while iroh is built to be embedded into each application. This allows application developers and users a much more fine grained and bespoke setup, than having a single global bridge.

Tailscale is OSS AFAIK. Not their backend of course, but if you use Headscale then I believe every part is OSS.

A difference between iroh and many p2p networks is that we try to use existing IETF standards (QUIC, TLS) as much as possible instead of reinventing the wheel. An iroh connection is just a QUIC connection, using TLS and TLS ALPNs for protocol negotiation.

If you look at an iroh connection using wireshark, it is just a QUIC connection. You can use all the existing tools, and a lot of things you learn when using iroh transfers to traditional QUIC connections and vice versa.

Most iroh contributors come out of the p2p world, and you could say that we had a bit of abstraction fatigue after working on regular P2P networks for some years.

We have also so far resisted the temptation to write a DHT, opting instead to use the biggest existing DHT, bittorrent mainline, for our p2p address lookup needs. Many traditional P2P networks come with their own implementation of a DHT for discovery.

Note that there are some "regular p2p networks" that use iroh under the hood, e.g. holochain https://blog.holochain.org/dev-pulse-154-holochain-0-6-1-is-... as well as various p2p chat apps.

https://blog.holochain.org/dev-pulse-154-holochain-0-6-1-is-...

Yes there is an Android SDK: https://docs.iroh.computer/languages/kotlin

Zenoh seems interesting but can you please give me some use case where both Iroh + zenoh can be combined to achieve something more trivially (ie. without hassle) or the use-cases of this combination. I'd be curious to know more about their combined use-cases!

Which I just finished updating to 1.0. But it is currently lacking in breadth of API, so if you start using it let us know what you are missing. In the meantime https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-ffi has the other language bindings with a more comprehensive API

I've been working on a mesh network for private AI models running remotely, controlled by mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.). The mesh is constructed like a piconet, a few devices controlled by a single individual, layered on top of the internet.

How does it support semi-connected devices, intermittent connection failures, etc?

Does this solve the problem of internet segmentation due to politcs?

For example: dns control, tls certification bans (just this month both let’s encrypt and globalsign started revoking Russian certificates), once google starts really complaining about https it gets ugly.

Russia aside, anyone else is closely watching (europe, brics, what have you)

how can i make it give me zen-inspired life advice?

This looks very interesting. I’m not sure I understand this, but it seems to me like it competes (or is in the same space as) both Tailscale and zeromq/nanomsg via the protocols? I think it would be nice to have a comparison page to make it easier to position it (I didn’t find one).

Not an expert but this is how I understand it. Yggdrasil is a P2P mesh network. You configure peers to join the network and your computer becomes a relay node for everyone else to use. It doesn't work behind a NAT without port forwarding.

Iroh is kinda just a connection protocol. If you get given a public key for another computer, you can establish a connection. Like you would an IP address. The magic is in being able to establish that connection regardless of where either device is, and keeping that connection alive through changing network conditions.

I would say it is not a replacement but an addition.

IP isn't going anywhere any time soon, but we add two capabilities on top. The ability to dial an endpoint by key, and the ability to get direct connections whenever possible.

That being said, if some other technology becomes popular that actually replaces the IP address paradigm, iroh is well positioned to make use of it. From the point of view of an iroh application developer nothing would change. You still dial by key, and iroh will just make sure under the hood to get you the best possible connection, IP or otherwise.

A little bit of both. Natively it relies on QUIC and leverages existing IP infrastructure, however it also works with custom transports just as fine so you can interact via bluetooth for example.

Your phone and laptop don't have stable IPs, let alone DNS entries pointing to them.

Thanks, we agree! We used to have bindings for while but the maintenance burden at that point was too high. Now that 1.0 guarantees everyone some stability and we feel confident in the library, we have enough room to properly support it.

Iroh is just a clever combination of existing standards such as QUIC with some draft RFCs and a tiny bit of clever custom logic added via TLS extensions.

So in theory a go implementation is possible using a go QUIC implementation that supports the multipath extension.

Our focus is the rust implementation, since it is very easy to use from compiled languages such as rust, C and C++ and to embed into languages such as js and python.

But there are some other projects that attempt to provide a native go implementation: https://github.com/tmc/go-iroh

Edit: since iroh is just a library, it is also possible to link iroh into a go program. Linking a go program from other native languages is a bit of a pain, but linking a C or rust library into a go program is relatively straightforward and high performance.

Would you use it if there was a go version?

There is nothing unfree about iroh. All core crates are published with the standard MIT and Apache2 licenses.

Iroh is a project that combines existing IETF standards in an interesting way. For example we use raw public keys in TLS for the key exchange https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7250 instead of coming up with our own key exchange scheme.

Our QUIC implementation noq is a standards compliant QUIC implementation that in addition to RFC9000 also implements the QUIC multipath draft RFC.

We try very hard not to invent new things unless absolutely necessary. In a few places we had to implement draft RFCs, QUIC multipath and QUIC NAT traversal. And there are some corners where we had to add our own extensions. But we try very hard to keep this to an absolute minimum.

Were interacting with IETF on a number of projects and so far it's been going well :)

By far not a complete list but a starting point https://github.com/n0-computer/awesome-iroh/

Also you can join our discord and there's #showcase https://iroh.computer/discord

See https://www.iroh.computer and "use cases" at the top of the page

Such is life when you choose to be introduced to something by a version update blogpost, instead of clicking in the top-left corner and reading the landing page.

As I see, it tries to explain.

But as someone who's not a network specialist, I fail to see how this is not a glorified P2P DNS.

Maybe this example helps:

https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh#rust-library

    const ALPN: &[u8] = b"iroh-example/echo/0";

    let endpoint = Endpoint::bind().await?;

    // Open a connection to the accepting endpoint
    let conn = endpoint.connect(addr, ALPN).await?;

    // Open a bidirectional QUIC stream
    let (mut send, mut recv) = conn.open_bi().await?;

    // Send some data to be echoed
    send.write_all(b"Hello, world!").await?;
    send.finish()?;

    // Receive the echo
    let response = recv.read_to_end(1000).await?;
    assert_eq!(&response, b"Hello, world!");

    // As the side receiving the last application data - say goodbye
    conn.close(0u32.into(), b"bye!");

    // Close the endpoint and all its connections
    endpoint.close().await;

This is true. But you could click the name in the top left. Or Docs.

IP addresses break, dial keys instead

Modular networking stack for direct, peer-to-peer connections between devices

iroh establishes direct connections whenever possible, falling back to relay servers if necessary. Get fast, efficient, reliable connections that are authenticated and encrypted end-to-end using QUIC.

If you are a rust developer, you can just take a look at the examples in the iroh repo itself or in our iroh-examples repo.

None of them require an API key.

https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh/tree/main/iroh/examples

https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-examples

We have an answer, but it isn't really clever. We do have both built in and pluggable address lookup services.

Our default enabled address lookup service is using DNS in a creative way, but we also have a service that is fully peer to peer and is using the mainline DHT, specifically the bep_0044 extension that allows you to store a tiny bit of arbitrary data for an Ed keypair that you control.

https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0044.html

https://pkarr.org

Some custom transports such as TOR hidden services have a discovery system built in. In these cases we can just use the existing discovery system.

See for example https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-tor-transport

The secret is that iroh still uses IPs under the hood :) But with QUIC, your connections aren't bound to your four-tuple, your connection can migrate from e.g. WiFi to Cellular with only a small blip/hiccup. And with QUIC multipath, you can have multiple four-tuples "active" at the same time. iroh uses e.g. a "real" IP path mainly, with a websocket-based HTTPS path via relay servers as the backup (e.g. in case UDP is blocked).

are we?