Theoretically Provable Anonymous Network

About project

Important

The project is being actively developed, the implementation of some details may change over time. More information about the changes can be obtained from the CHANGELOG.md file.

The Hidden Lake is an anonymous network built on a micro-service architecture. At the heart of HL is the core - HLS (service), which generates anonymizing traffic and combines many other services (for example, HLF and HLM). Thus, Hidden Lake is not a whole and monolithic solution, but a composition of several combined services. The HL is a friend-to-friend (F2F) network, which means building trusted communications. Due to this approach, members of the HL network can avoid spam in their direction, as well as possible attacks if vulnerabilities are found in the code.

Coverage map

Releases

All cmd programs are compiled for {amd64, arm64} ARCH and {windows, linux, darwin} OS as pattern = appname_arch_os. In total, one application is compiled into six versions. The entire list of releases can be found here: github.com/number571/hidden-lake/releases.

Dependencies

1. Go library github.com/number571/go-peer (used by cmd/hls,cmd/hle)
2. Go library golang.org/x/net (used by cmd/hlm)
3. CSS/JS library getbootstrap.com (used by cmd/hlm,cmd/hlf)

Makefile

There are a number of dependencies that represent separate applications for providing additional information about the quality of the code. These applications are not entered into the project, but are loaded via the make install-deps command. The list of applications is as follows:

1. golangci-lint github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/golangci-lintv1.60.0
2. go-cover-treemap github.com/nikolaydubina/[email protected]

List of applications

Basic	Applied	Helpers
HL Service	HL Messenger	HL Traffic
HL Composite	HL Filesharer	HL Loader
HL Adapters	HL Remoter	HL Encryptor

How it works

The Hidden Lake anonymous network is based on the (queue-based) QB-problem, which can be described by the following list of actions:

1. Each message m is encrypted with the recipient's key k: c = Ek(m),
2. Message c is sent during period = T to all network participants,
3. The period T of one participant is independent of the periods T1, T2, ..., Tn of other participants,
4. If there is no message for the period T, then a false message v is sent to the network without a recipient (with a random key r): c = Er(v),
5. Each participant tries to decrypt the message they received from the network: m = Dk(c).

Figure 1. QB-network with three nodes {A,B,C}

More information about Hidden Lake in research paper: hidden_lake_anonymous_network.pdf

Build and run

Launching an anonymous network is primarily the launch of an anonymizing HLS service. There are two ways to run HLS: through source code, and through the release version.

1. Running from source code

$ go install github.com/number571/hidden-lake/cmd/hls@latest
$ hls

2. Running from release version

$ wget https://github.com/number571/hidden-lake/releases/latest/download/hls_amd64_linux
$ chmod +x hls_amd64_linux
$ ./hls_amd64_linux

Production

The HLS node is easily connected to the production environment. To do this, you just need to specify the network at startup. You can find them in the networks.yml file.

$ hls -network=oi4r9NW9Le7fKF9d

After such a launch, the hls.yml file will be created or overwritten (if it existed). The settings and connections fields will be substituted in it. When overwriting a file, only the above fields will be changed. The remaining fields of the friends, services, address, etc. type will not be overwritten.

Figure 2. Example of request to echo-service

Examples of running HL applications in a production environment: echo_service, anon_messenger, anon_filesharer.

Star History

License

Licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for the full license text.

⬆ back to top